The forest floor is covered with tree canopy, and the forest canopy gap is a larger or smaller area of the floor that is not covered by the canopy of the dominant tree layer. The size of the gap ...affects tree species rejuvenation, as well as the vertical and horizontal structure of the forest. In the Pohorje area (Pahernik’s forest estate), which is characterized by forests where trees of different diameters and ages occur in small areas, we analyzed the possibilities of automatic gap detection based on data from the Laser Scanning of Slovenia (LSS) and the Cyclic Aerial Survey of Slovenia (CAS). We used Canopy Height Models (CHM) derived from both data sources. The overall detection accuracy even for the smallest gaps (smaller than 50 m2) was 94.4% based on the LSS data and 83.1% based on the CAS data. A larger number and area of gaps can be detected based on the LSS data, and the gaps derived from the LSS data are more disaggregated and elongated. The detection of gaps with CAS data and LSS data is more comparable with a minimum gap area of 100 m²; the accuracy of detecting such gaps is 85.4 and 94.4 % respectively. The results of the study show that in the absence of LSS data, the use of CAS data to detect forest canopy gaps on a large scale is useful when gaps with an area of more than 100 m² are detected.
INTEGRATION OF MIGRANTS IN SLOVENIA Klopcic, Vera
Innovative issues and approaches in social sciences,
5/2020, Volume:
13, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Open access
The paper discusses main characteristics of the contemporary situation concerning the integration of migrants in Slovenia, mainly after the emergence of the refugee crisis in 2015. The Global ...migration pact and relevant European legislation tackles it as a great humanitarian crisis. Majority of members of European Union, and Slovenia as well, have been faced with the dilemma of how much defense and security measures in their own country can be strengthened, and how to cope with the wave of migrants, while respecting accepted human rights standards. In Slovenia, in 2019 the comprehensive Government Strategy for migration was adopted and special Office for the Support and Integration of Migrants was established in 2018, to answer these challenges as comprehensively as possible. Policy measures towards regulation of status and integration of migrants in Slovenia are focused on implementation of rights of migrants who are already legally residing in Slovenia, aimed to provide necessary knowledge of Slovenian language and culture, needed for their integration.
Between 2001 and 2020, Slovenia lost 8,952 lives due to suicides, two thirds of them by hanging.
To analyze trends in suicide methods between 2001 and 2020 and to explore relationships between ...suicide methods and selected sociodemographic characteristic.
We focused on methods accounting for 95.7% of all suicides. We performed joinpoint regression to examine changes in suicide rates by respective methods and multivariate logistic regression analyses to study sociodemographics associated with specific suicide methods.
A gender-specific annual decrease in suicide rates was observed in all methods except for sharp objects and jumping or lying in front of a moving object. Age was statistically significant in the use of firearms and jumping or lying in front of a moving object, while gender was significant in all methods. Associations were found between education, marital status, region of residence, and various suicide methods.
The results are potentially culturally specific.
Certain sociodemographics seem to be associated with the selection of the method.
We report a case of human Dirofilaria repens infection in a woman in Slovenia who had concomitant pleural and subcutaneous manifestations of the infection. This case report illustrates the clinical ...course of a severe symptomatic parasitic infection that had multisystemic manifestations.
The effects of increasing agricultural land use on fluvial morphology have received much attention in fluvial research. However, in several regions in Europe, a reversing trend of decreasing ...agricultural activity and land abandonment, followed by reforestation, is observed. The response of fluvial morphology deserves attention because of its large impacts on landscape and riverine habitats. With the help of geomorphological mapping, multi-date aerial photography and a range of dating techniques, we reconstructed the evolution of the morphology of the riverbed and the floodplain of the Dragonja river in southwestern Slovenia. The results of this study show that the fluvial morphology in this Mediterranean catchment has changed considerably as a result of shifts in agricultural land use, in particular large-scale land abandonment in the second half of the 20th century. Until the first half of the 19th century, floodplain aggradation prevailed. Probably around 1870, a large erosion event occurred from which the floodplain did not fully recover. A terrace standing 2.5 m above the present floodplain was formed. Natural reforestation, due to depopulation since World War II, caused a reduction in discharge and sediment supply to the river. The decreased intensity and frequency of floods allowed invasion of the riverbed by vegetation, causing narrowing and incision of the riverbed. This resulted in the formation of a terrace, which now stands 1.5 m above the present-day river. This terrace is about 60 years old. However, the largest increase in forest area occurred since 1975, which intensified this process of riverbed narrowing and incision, creating a local terrace at 0.5 m at 0.5 m above the presently meandering river.
We report a case of Babesia crassa-like infection in an asplenic patient in Slovenia in 2014. We diagnosed the infection using microscopy, 18S rRNA sequencing, and serology and monitored parasitemia ...using digital PCR. With its increasing occurrence, babesiosis should be included in differential diagnoses for immunocompromised patients displaying fever.
Population ageing requires society to adjust by ensuring additional types of services and assistance for elderly people. These may be provided by either organized services and sources of informal ...social support. The latter are especially important since a lack of social support is associated with a lower level of psychological and physical well-being. During the Covid-19 pandemic, social support for the elderly has proven to be even more crucial, also due to physical distancing. Therefore, this study aims to identify and describe the various types of personal social support networks available to the elderly population during the pandemic. To this end, a survey of Slovenians older than 64 years was conducted from April 25 to May 4, 2020 on a probability web-panel-based sample (n = 605). The ego networks were clustered by a hierarchical clustering approach for symbolic data. Clustering was performed for different types of social support (socializing, instrumental support, emotional support) and different characteristics of the social support networks (i.e., type of relationship, number of contacts, geographical distance). The results show that most of the elderly population in Slovenia has a satisfactory social support network, while the share of those without any (accessible) source of social support is significant. The results are particularly valuable for sustainable care policy planning, crisis intervention planning as well as any future waves of the coronavirus.
In the article a virus transmission model is constructed on a simplified social network. The social network consists of more than 2 million nodes, each representing an inhabitant of Slovenia. The ...nodes are organised and interconnected according to the real household and elderly-care center distribution, while their connections outside these clusters are semi-randomly distributed and undirected. The virus spread model is coupled to the disease progression model. The ensemble approach with the perturbed transmission and disease parameters is used to quantify the ensemble spread, a proxy for the forecast uncertainty. The presented ongoing forecasts of COVID-19 epidemic in Slovenia are compared with the collected Slovenian data. Results show that at the end of the first epidemic wave, the infection was twice more likely to transmit within households/elderly care centers than outside them. We use an ensemble of simulations (N = 1000) and data assimilation approach to estimate the COVID-19 forecast uncertainty and to inversely obtain posterior distributions of model parameters. We found that in the uncontrolled epidemic, the intrinsic uncertainty mostly originates from the uncertainty of the virus biology, i.e. its reproduction number. In the controlled epidemic with low ratio of infected population, the randomness of the social network becomes the major source of forecast uncertainty, particularly for the short-range forecasts. Virus transmission models with accurate social network models are thus essential for improving epidemics forecasting.
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