•Differences in terpene amounts in Pinus, Picea and Abies.•Stress stimuli can affect terpene synthesis and emission in plants.•Terpene concentration in conifers can vary depending on many ...factors.•Terpene profile can be different within species.
Plants produce a large variety of natural products. Terpenes seem to be the largest and the most important group of secondary metabolites in conifer trees. They protect the plant from invading pathogens and herbivores by representing constitutive or induced defense mechanisms. Moreover, antioxidant properties of some terpenes have also been shown, suggesting their role in overcoming oxidative stress provoked by internal and external stimuli. The abiotic and biotic stress factors such as drought, temperature fluctuations, air and soil pollution or pathogen attack rearrange the biosynthesis and emission of terpenes, however the response may depend on the stressor type and stress intensity. Although the general composition of terpenes is characteristic for each species, it has been shown that it can even differ between two individual trees. Reaching for the available literature data, the review is focused on systematizing the observed changes in terpene quantity and quality in the three most important forest-forming conifer genera of European temperate climate zone – pine (Pinus sp.), spruce (Picea sp.) and fir (Abies sp.). Moreover, in view of progressive climate change, the study emphasize a complex function of these interesting compounds in trees including interplant signaling in forest communities.
This study was conducted in Central Europe (Poland) in pine forests that were subjected to the process of resin harvesting in the 1970s. Forty trees were designated for the study, which had one or ...two resin blazes. The objectives of the experiment were to determine the effect of resin tapping on the changes in annual growth, wood density, and mechanical strength of wood in the damaged trees. Resin tapping affected the development dynamics, especially in trees with a single resin blaze. In addition, bark cutting affected wood density over the cross-section. However, no significant variation was found in terms of the mechanical properties of wood, which may support the theory of adaptive tree growth and optimization of tree’s structure to its functions.
Drawing on the resources created by the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from ...new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims.
Standardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the ...parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive chunks in historical legal discourse.
This experiment was conducted in the pine woods of central Europe at a research area established in 1951. The experimental area of 1.35 ha was set up in a 14-year-old pine tree stand, which was ...divided into lots, and the pruning procedure took place in different variants. Some lots constituted control lots without pruned trees. The trees were pruned in four variants, reducing the living tree crown by 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 of its length. The study’s main aim was to determine the influence of pruning forest trees on the tree tissue. Moreover, the study attempted to answer whether pruning was a significant procedure for wood valorisation, and if yes, then which variant was the optimal one for Scots pine growing on the European plain. The results indicated a significant impact of pruning young pine tree stands on the properties of wood tissue, which differed regarding the adopted pruning variant. Significant differences in the width of annual rings, the size of the particular areas of the annual rings (latewood or earlywood), and the wood density depending on the pruning variant were observed. Furthermore, the results indicated that pruning induced numerous processes, which optimised the physiological and mechanical functions of the tree trunks. The outcome of this optimisation was, among others, the diversification of the vascular and strengthening area of the annual ring as well as the wood density, which was a reaction to reducing a part of the assimilation apparatus. From the technical wood value viewpoint, the optimal pruning variant for pine was between 1/3 to 1/2 of the living crown.
Wood properties have an influence on the safety around the tree itself as well as on actual possibilities of using wood. The article focuses on the wood properties of the Norway spruce (Picea abies ...(L.) Karst.) in reference to the time since the tree has decayed. The study was conducted among mature tree stands of spruce in Białowieża Forest, where over the last 10 years there has been a weakening of spruce tree stands due to water deficiency which has contributed to the gradation of the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus). The study focused on spruce wood of living and healthy specimens as well as the wood of standing trees which has decayed between one and five years before the sample was collected. The findings indicate a gradual decrease in wood properties as time passed since the physiological decay of the tree. Significant differences in the decrease of mechanical wood properties have been observed in trees which had been decayed for 3 years and they should be considered life and health hazard for people and animals.
This volume proposes the term pattern-driven approach as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology, such as lexical bundles, ...POS-grams and semantic frames, and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.
Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written ...form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final , , and appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: x, xt and θ. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS, 2013), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.
In this paper we introduce the research plan for the preparation of a searchable electronic repository of the earliest extant legal oaths from medieval Poland drawing on the expertise in historical ...corpus-building developed for the history of English. The oaths survive in the overwhelmingly Latin land books from the period between 1386 and 1446 for six localities Greater Poland, in which the land courts operated: Poznań, Kościan, Pyzdry, Gniezno, Konin and Kalisz. A diplomatic edition of the oaths was published in five volumes by Polish historical linguists (Kowalewicz & Kuraszkiewicz 1959–1966). The edition is the only comprehensive resource of considerable scope (over 6300 oaths from the years 1386–1446) for the study of the earliest attestations of the Polish language beyond glosses. Recognising some limitations, but most of all its unparalleled coverage of the coexistence of Latin and the vernacular, the ROThA project embarks on transforming the edition into an open up-to-date digital resource. We thus aim to facilitate research into the history of Polish and Latin as well as of the legal system and the related social and linguistic issues of the period.
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