Since the twelfth century, forest areas in the upper reaches of the low mountain ranges of central Europe provided an important source of wood and charcoal especially for mining and smelting as well as glass production. In this case study from a site in the upper Erzgebirge region (Ore Mountains), results from archeological, geophysical, pedo-sedimentological, geochemical, However, although glass production is generally assumed to have caused intensive deforestation, the impact on this site appears rather weak compared to the sixteenth century onwards, when charcoal production, probably associated with emerging mining activities in the region, became important.Local deforestation and soil erosion has been associated mainly with this later phase of charcoal production and may indicate that the human impact of glass production is sometimes overestimated.

In this paper, we study adaptive feedback compression of explicit multi-cell channel state information (CSI) for joint transmission coordinated multi-point (JT CoMP) in future mobile networks. The scheme comprises of three steps: First, the strongest cells are clustered using a network-defined threshold. Next, the strongest taps are selected using a threshold related to noise and out-of-cluster interference. Finally, adaptive quantization is applied so that the channel mean square error (MSE) remains sufficiently small. We show that the number of quantization bits grows linearly with the signal to noise ratio (SNR) in dB, as required by information theory. Results indicate that explicit CSI from all relevant cells around a terminal can be provided using few kbits per reporting interval in 20 MHz bandwidth. The scheme is implemented and tested in real time.

Knowledge of historic changes in vegetation, relief, and soil is key in understanding how the uplands in central Europe have changed during the last millennium, being an essential requirement for measures on forest conversion and nature conservation in that area. Evidence of forest‐clearing horizons from the medieval period could be systematically documented at four low‐ to mid‐altitudinal sites (360–640 meters above mean sea level) in the Harz (Harz Mountains), Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), and Českomoravská vrchovina (Bohemian‐Moravian Highlands). Subfossil trees with traces of human cutmarks and burning were recovered from buried wet‐organic soils (paleosols) within a context of mining and settlement archaeology, applying a multiproxy‐approach by using data from archaeology, paleobotany, geochronology, dendrochronology, and pedology. Tree stumps and trunks, as well as small‐scale wood remains represent an in situ record of local conifer stands (spruce, fir, and pine). Some deciduous tree taxa also occur. Dating of the tree remains yielded ages from the 10th/11th to the 13th/14th centuries A.D. After deforestation, the tree remains were buried by technogenic and alluvial–colluvial deposits. The reconstructed conifer‐dominated woodlands on wet soils mirror the local vegetation structure immediately before the medieval deforestation. As such wet sites are common in the uplands, conifers were significantly present in the natural vegetation even at mid and lower altitudes.

Intact soil food webs are pivotal to maintaining essential soil functions, such as carbon recycling, sequestering, and biomass production. Although the functional role of micro‐ (e.g., bacteria and fungi) and macrofauna (e.g., earthworms) is comparatively well established, the importance of the mesofauna community (e.g., abundance and diversity of Acari and Collembola) in maintaining soil functionality is less clear. We investigated this question in a six‐month field experiment in arable soil by actively manipulating mesofauna abundance and biodiversity through the application of two legacy insecticides (lindane and methamidophos) at sufficiently high doses to reduce mesofauna abundance (well above previously registered application rates; 2.5 and 7.5 kg a.s./ha for lindane, and 0.6 and 3 kg a.s./ha for methamidophos) and measure the impact on organic matter degradation. Our results demonstrate that both insecticides had reduced Collembola and Acari abundances by up to 80% over the study's six‐month duration. In addition, we observed less pronounced and more complex changes in mesofauna biodiversity over time. These included insecticide‐dependent temporal fluctuations (both reduction and increase) for different estimates (indices) of local (alpha)‐diversity over time and no lasting impact for most estimates after six months. Even at these exceptionally high field rates, Collembola and Acari diversity was observed to generally recover by six months. In contrast, considering organic matter breakdown, we found no evidence of a treatment‐related effect. These results suggest that organic matter breakdown in arable soils is likely driven by other trophic levels (e.g., microorganisms or earthworms) with only a limited influence of the mesofauna community. We discuss these findings with regard to their implications for our current understanding of soil food web function and future European soil risk assessments. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2022;18:1423–1433. © 2021 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

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