The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) promotes the Ecosystem Approach (EA). In this thesis it is analyzed how the EA approach could be applied to regional management of coastal areas in Sweden. The aim of this report is to compare management for preserving biodiversity on a landscape level in two regional coastal areas in Uppsala and Västra Götaland respectively. In Uppsala, one of the plans consists of a previous nature reserve and in Västra Götaland, a Regional landscape strategy has been established. The ecosystem approach is used as a theoretical framework in this thesis.

This thesis has been conducted at Volvo Bussar ABunder a period of ten weeks. Within the organizationVolvo, the work is conducted with leaders and teamson every level; from production to top management.They have three tasks, besides executing their dailywork, they are expected to actively work on improvingtheir individual work as well as themselves as persons.The two latter are future value adding activities for theorganization. When doing so, however, it has beennoticed that they often lose the grasp of their dailywork. The question that consequently arises is whythis happens. Is it because of lack of time or it isbecause the co-workers do not have the competenceand simply do not know how they are to execute thethree tasks? Or, is it because the motivation to executethe three tasks is not enough? With this in regard, thestatement of issues for this bachelor thesis were thefollowing: how can the conditions for leaders and theteam be improved, in order for them to execute thesethree tasks.To find out why the execution of these threeassigments did not always succeed, the decision wastaken to conduct a survey and interview study in reallife and at the plants.

This Master Thesis has been carried out in cooperation with Silva Sweden AB. A companywhich manufactures products like compasses, pedometers, headlamps, hiking poles and otherequipment for the out door life and navigation. The purpose of the project has been toassemble methods and models which support user involvement in Silva?s design process.Thus, to increase the number of products with purchasing power, enhance product quality aswell as increase foundation for new product ideas.The focus through out the project has been to assemble a pallet with methods for userinvolvement and from this select a few methods that will fit the company. The purpose of thepallet is to be accessible for the company during their work of change with the design processthat has been going on and will be in the future.

Humans attitudes towards different animals are very complex were culture, genetic, psychology and evolution are some of the factors that influence. The order of animals that can provoke the most intense and extreme attitudes, both positive and negative, are the carnivores. Wolves are a constant debate in Sweden and even though a big part of the population are neutral towards the wolf, a clear friction of the attitudes can be seen. Some factors that have been seen to influence the attitude are age, education and the size of the hometown. The aim of this study is to investigate whether outdoor activities, time spend in rural areas, and time spent in a weekend cottage, also correlate with attitude towards wolf.

Process standardization is a topic that has generated a lot of research and literature. At first, the focus was on production; today processes are used in all different kind of business areas.The aim of this study has been to analyze how processes can be applied on development businesses and how IT systems affect the result of the process. To accomplish this, we have asked questions such as what standardization is in a development process? Why are the processes standardized? What difficulties can appear with standardization? And how the IT-systems affect the result of the process?To answer these questions, we have preformed a case study on Saab. Saab is a well know Swedish company who are working with a project called the GMS-project, where they develop processes to cover the whole company´s business areas.The literature gives the reader an understanding of processes and standardization.

In this composition, a study of consignment inventory on basis of the factors which are important for implementation and application of consignment inventory are made. Logistics chain from subcontractor to end customer is becoming more complex when the volume of items constantly increases to satisfy the needs of the market. From that perspective, companies had large inventories but today it is a lot of different solutions to streamline inventory management. One way that recently becomes increasingly common is to let the subcontractor fill up the customers stock using different approaches such as VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory). A further step in the evolution can be to make use of consignment inventory where the vendor owns the stock of the customer.

A LED spectrometer has been constructed for qualitative spectrometry using certain wavelenghts. The LEDs and the photodiode are being controlled with a microcontroller that is connected to a computer to power the components and save data. The spectroanalysis made with the LED spectrometer were significantly different to a standard spectrometer, concluding that more analysis should be made until a final product is ready. Some areas of improvements are suggested. .

The purpose of this study is to find out the viability in performing final felling in stands with high timber volume or if it´s more profitable to leave these stands to the next owner. Will he or she pay more for the standing stock then the industry? The prices of forest-land have increased significantly over the last couple of years in Sweden and some properties seem to go higher than others. Is this because of higher standing stock volume or can a certain volume/hectare bring a higher price? Maybe a combination of both? This study is based on the the sale-statistics for 2012 from real-estate agency Areal.

Cycling is one of the most sustainable transport modes available and it is widely promoted inmany urban areas. The health benefits from cycling has shown to be substantial, includingdecreased risks of diseases related to overweight and enhancing brain capacity. However, inurban areas cyclists can temporaly be exposed to high levels of air pollution, resulting inhealth risks as opposed to health benefits.The objective of this thesis is to develop a rasterbased test model in GIS that estimates theinhaled dose of air pollution for cyclists based on relative particle concentration in differenttransportation micro-environments. The method used is a least-cost path approach,calculating three different routes; shortest, fastest and least dose for four different trips withinSödermalm, Stockholm.The results show that the inhaled particle dose can be greatly reduced, 39% - 58% for three ofthe routes, by choosing the least dose route. One of the most interesting findings is thesubstantial increase of dose when high levels of particles are combined with uphill cycling.The conclusion for the thesis is that a raster-GIS model can be very useful for estimating doseof different air pollution particles and chemicals along cycling routes.

According to FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) shall at least a mean of 10 trees per hectare including riparian zones and other areas with high biological values be left in final felling. In addition large clear areas should not be created and all retained trees with high environmental value shall be spared. To leave trees in final felling means a lower cutting volume and hence a lower income from the cutting, but it also means that the production in the next generation becomes less because of competition. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect retained trees have on the production in the new generation of forest, and to investigate if there is any way to lower this effect. The environmental care has also been estimated by the amount left in final felling.

Horse keeping is gaining an increasing interest in Sweden. During 2004 to 2010 the number of horses increased with 10 - 20 %, and was estimated to be 362 700 in 2010. Julmyra Horse Center (JHC), situated in Heby municipality, is a gated community for people sharing a large interest for horses and a vision of a sustainable horse management has been formulated. This study evaluates how the horse keeping of today at JHC, and how an expansion of the horse keeping may affect the risk of enhanced phosphorus load to the nearby lake system Vansjön ? Nordsjön.

Is there any truth in the saying ?no news is good news? or is there a reason to question whether media actually do reflect the world?s worst conflicts proportionally? The communication technologies have seen major developments in recent years, and more and more people choose to read their news on the Internet. With smartphones and other devices, one could imagine that there would be easier to cover more conflict areas than ever ? but is this what has happened?In this study we aimed to investigate how three chosen Swedish newspapers reflected five of the on-going conflicts of 2012 and how this can be explained with the theories; the CNN effect and Stealth Conflicts. We started out with studies of the two theories.

Biodiversity is essential for human well-being and it is defined as the genetic variation within species and the variety of species and ecosystems. Biodiversity provides several ecosystem services which are necessary for human beings but there are different threats towards the biodiversity. The biodiversity linked to the forest in Sweden are threatened, about 50 % of the red-listed species in Sweden are associated with forests. This is linked to the commercial exploitation of the boreal forest in Sweden which started 200 years ago. The forestry the last 50 years, with clear-cuts, have contributed to a fragmented forest landscape.

The aim of this study was to find relations between parents background and education ina wider sense and their children's success in school. The study also includes genusdifferentiations, the family profile and residential areas influence on children's ability anddetermination to study.The study confirmed earlier research that children's success in school is to some extentdependant on their parents education. At the same time it was shown that in most casesthe children reached higher level of education than their parents ? also when they werepoorly educated or had emigrated from a country with big cultural differences. It was alsoevident that children with at least one Swedish parent (and presumably Swedish as theirmother tongue) reached higher educational levels than other children.Children from single parent families often stopped their school carrier after the 9-yearcompulsory class while children of dual parent families more often continued to university.In general, girls were more affluent in school than the boys.

Swedish pre-school teachers are in the middle of a debate regarding a form of general school competence that today is criticized by mass media. The training and skill development that is used today is an important tool in the development of the organization as well as the people that work in them. This study aims to explain how this training actually is performed and the opinions of the pre-school teachers that actually finish the training. Previous research in this area has primarily been focused at the types of methods that exists from an executive standpoint. This study, instead, aims to shift that focus to the individual worker.