The concept of green infrastructure has been recently taken up by the European Commission for ensuring the provision of ecosystem services (ESS). It aims at the supply of multiple ESS in a given landscape, however, the effects of a full suite of management options on multiple ESS and landscape multifunctionality have rarely been assessed. In this paper we use European floodplain landscapes as example to develop an expert based qualitative conceptual model for the assessment of impacts of landscape scale interventions on multifunctionality. European floodplain landscapes are particularly useful Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (
Seed spillage during handling and transportation promotes establishment and invasion of feral crops into adjacent semi-natural habitats. This is also the case for oilseed rape (OSR, Brassica napus), where seed spillage may lead to establishment of herbicide resistant OSR populations in countries without cultivation of genetically modified OSR. Using data from Austria-where cultivation and import of genetically modified OSR are banned-as a prime example, we demonstrate that ports, oil mills, switchyards, and border railway stations to countries with different electric current systems-where trains have to stop-are the sites of primary concern with respect to seed spillage. Based on the results of the Austrian case study we discuss common measures to limit crop seed spillage which include intensified controls at border railway stations and the mode of seed packing during transportation. We further recommend sufficient cleaning both of goods wagons and of loading areas of trucks and ships as well as an appropriate weed management.Keywords: oilseed rape, transport, seed spillage, feral crop, invasion, mitigation measures, risk assessment, AustriaSeeds of arable crops are regularly spilled during transport and handling activities. These incidents cause intense management efforts and additional costs (Yoshimura et al., 2006). Moreover, the origin and establishment of feral populations along transportation routes contribute to the uncertainty concerning containment of genetically modified (GM) crops outside fields and could therefore interfere with a successful weed management. Here, we focus on oilseed rape (OSR, Brassica napus), a frequently spilled crop (Von der Lippe and Kowarik, 2007) with GM lines already in use, to identify spillage hot-spots due to transportation and handling, allowing us to develop perspectives on common management approaches.Spillage of OSR seeds has intensively been studied worldwide (e.g., Schafer et al., 2011), which makes OSR a primary model system in this context. We chose Austria as study region because this small country is situated in the center of Europe rendering it a nodal point for traffic and international goods carriage.
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