In Finland, population monitoring for both diurnal and nocturnal raptors has been almost entirely based on fieldwork carried out by voluntary raptor ringers. Responsible organisations include the ...Finnish Museum of Natural History, with economic support for administration from the Ministry of Environment, “Metsahallitus” (former National Board of Forestry) and WWF Finland. Since the early 1970s, numbers and productivity of four endangered species, the White-tailed Eagle Haliaeetus albicilla, Golden Eagle Aquila chrysaetos, Osprey Pandion haliaetus and Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus have been monitored by country-wide Comprehensive Surveys, with the aim of checking all known nest sites of these species every year. The Gyrfalcon F. rusticolus was included in this group in the late 1990s. Data for monitoring the populations of the other raptor species have been gathered by the Raptor Grid and Raptor Questionnaire projects. The Raptor Grid project produces annual population indices, which are calculated from the data collected from 10 × 10 km study plots (n = ca. 130/year) and quite well reflect the annual population fluctuations and longterm trends of seven common species of diurnal and six species of nocturnal raptors breeding in the southern part of Finland. For the rest of the species, which are either rare all over Finland or breed mostly in the north, outside the good coverage of the distribution of Raptor Grid study plots, conclusions on population changes are based on the total numbers of occupied territories and active nests reported annually by the Raptor Questionnaires
Names in Focus delves deep into the vast field of Finnish onomastics, covering place names, personal names, animal names, commercial names and names in literature. It provides the history and current ...trends in this area of research, and also supplements international terminology with the Finnish point of view on the subject. Brimming with examples and clear explanations, the book can be enjoyed by the most studious of researchers as well as the casual reader who has a genuine interest in the study of names.
Some 220,000 German soldiers were stationed and fought in northern Finland during World War II. These troops required huge amounts of supplies that were provided by supply encampments in several ...locations, including the towns of Oulu and Tornio. In this paper the authors consider how the memory of these German-built sites has shaped post-war urban heritage. They review and challenge the authorized history of the post-war urbanization of the northern towns.
The article discusses how a historical turning point, the Finnish war 1808–1809, has been described in a sample of Swedish and Finnish upper secondary school history textbooks. A chronological ...comparison is made in order to examine the changes over time. A question of interest is if there are national differences in the perspectives of the texts. The article presents a tentative typology based on the breadth and depth of the descriptions. In general, the descriptions of the Finnish war events have become shorter. However, the Finnish textbooks give more space to this event, while the Swedish textbooks, especially since the 1960s, only mention the war briefly. The description of this war exemplifies the shifting preferences in the choice of content, and the changing foci of historical knowledge in history textbooks. More generally, the changes in this topic can also be explained by the varying conceptions of national history and different historical cultures in these countries.
This paper puts forward a model for managing eutrophication that integrates the salient ecological and economic characteristics of a coastal area suffering from severe nutrient enrichment. The model ...links the development of phosphorus concentration over time to nutrient emissions from agriculture and habitation. It accounts for differences in agricultural and municipal abatement options and their costs, as well as the need to undertake irreversible investments to set up wastewater treatment facilities. Furthermore, it considers sediment release of phosphorus as a function of annual nutrient loads. The model is parameterized for a 30-km-wide area off the Finnish coast of the Gulf of Finland. The socially optimal policy, which minimizes the sum of monetary damage caused by eutrophication and the costs of nutrient abatement over time, is determined using a dynamic programming approach. The results suggest that considerable investments are warranted to bring wastewater treatment facilities up to date. Continued efforts to reduce agricultural nutrient loading are nevertheless also called for. The analysis provided is a first step toward an integrated analysis of eutrophication that accounts for complexities inherent in the problem, such as sediment release of phosphorus and irreversible investments in abatement technology. The results are sensitive in particular to ecological assumptions and parameterization, and further research is needed in these areas.
An experiment combining the use of two ecosystem models was conducted to search for effective protection strategies for the Gulf of Finland (Baltic Sea). Reference and scenario simulations were first ...run with a one-dimensional (1D) model for seven main basins of the entire Baltic Sea until steady state was achieved. The obtained basinwise distributions of inorganic nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), as well as sediment labile P, were then used to initiate 5-y simulations with a three-dimensional (3D) ecosystem model. The results suggest that relatively small local load reductions (the “Finland” scenario) would improve only the state of adjacent coastal waters significantly. This would be the case, even for runs covering several decades, which clearly exceed the residence times of nutrients in the Gulf of Finland. A significant decrease from a substantial loading source to the Gulf (the “St. Petersburg” scenario) would decrease cyanobacterial biomasses in the entire Gulf of Finland and also immediately outside it. A reduction in the current Polish nutrient loads would improve the situation in the whole Baltic Proper and cause an extensive decline in cyanobacterial biomasses in the Gulf of Finland, as well. However, it would take several decades until the improvement caused by reducing loads in the “Poland” scenario is seen, while in the “St. Petersburg” scenario the corresponding time lag would only be a few years. Our results suggest that the common water protection policy in the Baltic Sea region should have the largest nutrient sources as its primary target, regardless of their location and country.
"The Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517, and the adoption of Lutheranism was the decisive impetus for literary development in Finland. As the Reformation required the use of the ...vernacular in services and ecclesiastical ceremonies, new manuals and biblical translations were needed urgently. The first Finnish books were produced by Mikael Agricola. He was born an ordinary son of a farmer, but his dedication to his studies opened up the road to leading roles in the Finnish Church. He was able to bring a total of nine works in Finnish to print, which became the foundation of literary Finnish. The first chapter outlines the historical background necessary to understand the life’s work of Mikael Agricola. The second chapter describes Agricola’s life. Chapter three presents the Finnish works published by Agricola. The fourth chapter is a depiction of Agricola’s Finnish. Agricola carried out his life’s work as part of a network of influential connections, which is described in chapter five. The sixth chapter examines the importance of Agricola’s work, research on Agricola and Agricola’s role in contemporary Finnish culture. The book mainly focuses on language and cultural history, but in terms of Church history, it also provides a review on the progression and arrival of the Reformation to Finland. Finnish is a Uralic language but the source languages of Agricola’s translations – Latin, German, Swedish and Greek – were all Indo-European languages. Thus, the oldest Finnish texts were strongly influenced by foreign elements and structures. Some of those features were later eliminated whereas others became essential constituents of standard Finnish. To illustrate this development, the Finnish in Agricola’s works has systematically been compared with the standard contemporary language."
Research on the interplay between language structure and language use has shown that grammar is shaped, maintained, and modified by language use. In this view, then, grammar is not seen as existing ...apart from language use, but rather as a set of recurrent, grammaticized patterns of discourse. This book focuses on syntactic structuring in Finnish from the viewpoint of language use. The author sets out to study syntactic structures in their local contexts in order to discover the more global patterns and constraints on the use of these structures. The coding strategies point to the clause core as the locus of syntactic structuring: this is where syntactic relations emerge most clearly. It is shown that the key to understanding the coding of the core syntactic relations is the category of person. The clause core also shows strong intonational unity as it is most often presented in one intonation unit. Furthermore, analysis of spoken discourse shows the robustness of the category of noun phrase, both as a clausal constituent and as a free syntactic unit, the free NP.
"More than half a million Swedes – one in twenty – is of Finnish descent. This book explores Finnishness, multilingualism and identities of young people with Finnish background in Sweden. What does ...it mean to grow up in a Finnish family in Sweden? Who are ‘real Finns’ and what does it take to be(come) one? Is a shared minority language essential for the survival of the minority, or can a minority culture stay viable without it? What is Finnishness and who, in the end, can define ethnicity? How to make sense of, and how to present interviews that are rich with imitations of accents, jokes and laughter? Representations of Finnishness is Sweden is an ethnographic interview study in the domain of applied language studies. This book is aimed at readers interested in sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and the study of identities. Interviewees’ voices take a central position in this book and interview excerpts are used not only as illustrations, but also serve as starting points for discussing broader theoretical concepts. The author, Dr. Lotta Weckström, grew up bilingual – Finnish and Swedish – in Finland. She studied linguistics and migration studies in Germany and the Netherlands, and in this longitudinal study encompasses her expertise."
Finnish terminology work has existed in Sweden ever since a largenumber of Finns moved from Finland to Sweden in the 1960s and1970s. According to Swedish legislation, people belonging to a ...nationalminority are to be given the opportunity to learn, developand use the minority language. Therefore, there is a need for terminologyin the minority languages. The production of glossaries is animportant task for the Language Council of Sweden. Sweden-Finnishterminology has been created in a number of fields, for exampleeducation, employment, social welfare and healthcare. Glossariesare created based on the Finnish-speaking population’s need forFinnish terminology in Sweden. The Sweden-Finnish equivalentsare often loan translations, but sometimes they have to be createdin a different manner.