Climate change and its effects on grassland productivity vary across Europe. The Mediterranean and Nordic regions represent the opposite ends of a gradient of changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, with increasingly warmer and wetter winters in the north and increasingly warmer and drier summers in the south. Warming and elevated concentration of atmospheric CO2 may boost forage production in the Nordic region. Production in many Mediterranean areas is likely to become even more challenged by drought in the future, but elevated CO2 can to some extent alleviate drought limitation on photosynthesis and growth. In both regions, climate change will affect forage quality and lead to modifications of the annual productivity cycles, with an extended growing season in the Nordic region and a shift towards winter in the Mediterranean region. This will require adaptations in defoliation and fertilization strategies. The identity of species and mixtures with optimal performance is likelyto shift somewhat inresponse to altered climate and management systems. Itis argued that breeding of grassland species should aimto (i) improve plantstrategies to cope with relevant abiotic stresses and (ii) optimize growth and phenology to new seasonal variation, and that plant diversity at all levels is a good adaptation strategy

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Biodegradability and compostability of nanofibrillar cellulose-based (NFC) products including films, concentrated NFC and paper products containing NFC were evaluated under controlled composting conditions. All the NFC products tested were biodegradable according to the requirements set in European standard EN 13432. NFC even enhanced the rate of biodegradability of paper containing 1.5 % NFC as an additive. Disintegration during composting was evaluated using the modified pilot-scale composting test EN 14045. NFC films disintegrated completely in 3 weeks of composting, and NFC did not influence the degradability of paper products containing NFC. Ecotoxicity during biodegradation of NFC products in a compost environment was evaluated using a bioluminescence test with Vibrio fischeri. No acute toxicity was detected for any of the samples.

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Multi-species grasslands are reservoirs of biodiversity and provide multiple ecosystem services, including fodder production and carbon sequestration. The provision of these services depends on the control exerted on the biogeochemistry and plant diversity of the system by the interplay of biotic and abiotic factors, e.g., grazing or mowing intensity. Biogeochemical models incorporate a mechanistic view of the functioning of grasslands and provide a sound basis for studying the underlying processes. However, in these models, the simulation of biogeochemical cycles is generally not coupled to simulation of plant species dynamics, which leads to considerable uncertainty about the quality of predictions. Ecological models, on the other hand, do account for biodiversity with approaches adopted from plant demography, but without linking the dynamics of plant species to the biogeochemical processes occurring at the community level, and this hampers the models’ capacity to assess resilience against abiotic stresses such as drought and nutrient limitation. While setting out the state-of-the-art developments of biogeochemical and ecological modelling, we explore and highlight the role of plant diversity in the regulation of the ecosystem processes underlying the ecosystems services provided by multi-species grasslands. An extensive literature and model survey was carried out with an emphasis on technically advanced models reconciling biogeochemistry and biodiversity, which are readily applicable to managed grasslands in temperate latitudes. We propose a roadmap of promising developments in modelling.