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This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
The current debates on the demographic transformation have been characterised on the one hand by declining birth rates and on the other by increasing life expectancy. Such debates usually focus on the consequences for society, which are frequently described in dark terms. In this booklet, by contrast, you will find analyses and suggestions on how to improve the situation of children and parents to make it easier to realise the desire to have children.
The author’s recently published monograph on Alexander von Humboldt' describes the multiple images of this great cultural icon. The book is a metabiographical study that shows how from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day Humboldt has served as a nucleus of crystallisation for a variety of successive socio-political ideologies, each producing its own distinctive representation of him. The historiographical implications of this biographical diversity are profound and support current attempts to understand historical scholarship in terms of memory cultures.
The paper addresses the formation of striking patterns within originally near-homogenous tissue, the process prototypical for embryology, and represented in particularly puristic form by cut sections of hydra regenerating a complete animal with head and foot. Essential requirements are autocatalytic, self-enhancing activation, combined with inhibitory or depletion effects of wider range - “lateral inhibition”. Not only de-novo-pattern formation, but also well known, striking features of developmental regulation such as induction, inhibition, and proportion regulation can be explained on this basis. The theory provides a mathematical recipe for the construction of molecular models with criteria for the necessary non-linear interactions. It has since been widely applied to different developmental processes.
Together with their wives Otto and Richard Schomburgk arrived in Port Adelaide (South Australia) on August 16th 1849. The essay looks at how these two brothers, who had received their scientific training and promotion in the circle surrounding Alexander von Humboldt, reacted to the unfamiliar conditions in the young British colony. Some indication will be given as to the differences between the Schomburgk brothers treatment of the natural resources of the new colony and that of the English colonists of the time.
The computer has come to play a transformative role in the ways we model, store, process and study text. Nevertheless, we cannot yet claim to have realised the promises of the digital medium: the organisation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge through the exchange, reuse and enrichment of data sets. Despite the acclaimed interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, current digital research takes place in a closed environment and rarely surpasses the traditional boundaries of a field. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to continue questioning the models we use and whether they are actually suitable for our scholarly needs. There’s a risk that the affordances and limitations of a prevailing model may blind us to aspects it doesn’t support.
In her talk, Elli Bleeker discusses different technologies to model data with respect to their expressive power and their potential to address the needs of the scholarly community. Within this framework, she introduces a new data model for text, Text-As-Graph (TAG), and it’s reference implementation Alexandria, a text repository system. The TAG model allows researchers to store, query, and analyse text that is encoded from different perspectives. Alexandria thus stimulates new ways of looking at textual objects, facilitates the exchange of information across disciplines, and secures textual knowledge for future endeavours. From a philosophical perspective, the TAG model and the workflow of Alexandria raise compelling questions about our notions of textuality, and prompt us to reconsider how we can best model the variety of textual dimensions.
The creation of a representation official park of nationwide scale and importance is hedged about with a lot of difficulties. It is supposed to be a paragon of beauty and utility while also being an epoch’s monument remaining in place for long decades or centuries. The paper analyses the balance between the beauty and sustainability in the conception and the actual life of eight parks in the realm of Russian culture (Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Russian Federation). That said, one of them (House of Bezborodko) represents an unconsummated project, but one that is typical of its epoch.
The present study explores whether regional water resources can be used more efficiently by Brandenburg’s farming systems. A description of agriculture in Brandenburg today is followed by a systematic analysis of measures to raise the water efficiency. Brandenburg’s agricultural systems are divided into three sections: soil, plant production and livestock farming. Within these sections measures to increase water efficiency are listed and analysed with reference to five objective criteria for raising water use efficiency. In view of the complexity of farming systems in Brandenburg, general measures to raise water use efficiency could not be derived. Site-specific tillage practices and crop patterns adjusted to recent weather conditions may reflect the specific diversity of Brandenburg more efficiently.
The article provides historical background for Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition into Russia in 1829. It includes information on Humboldt’s works and publications in Russia over the course of his lifetime, as well as an explanation of the Russian scientific community’s response to those works. Humboldt’s ideas on the existence of an active volcano in Central Asia attracted the attention of two prominent Russian geographers, P.Semenov and P.Kropotkin, whose views on the nature of volcanism were quite different. P.Semenov personally met Humboldt in Berlin. P. Kropotkin made one of the most important geological discoveries of the 19th Century: he found the fresh volcanic cones near Lake Baikal. Soon after Humboldt’s Russian expedition, and partly as a result of it, an important mineral was found in the Ilmen mountains - samarskite, which later gave its name to the chemical element Samarium, developed in 1879. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Russian scientist V.Vernadskiy pointed out that samarskite was the first uranium-rich mineral found in Russia.
Alexander von Humboldt’s descriptions of volcanic mountains in his travel journals (Reise auf dem Río Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico) show both his reliance on and impatience with literary conventions and travel narratives. Using Goethe’s Italienische Reise and Bürger’s Münchhausen as points of comparison for literary treatments of the volcano ascent, Humboldt’s process of writing is examined. Humboldt shows the failure of the existing discourse and begins to experiment with narratives which fragment and recombine personal and historical modes of writing with, in this case, images from new technical inventions which visualize landscape according to fundamental scientific principles. While the inclusion of scientific prose is relevant, Humboldt’s link to modernity is based on experimental narrative techniques which draw upon changing sets of discourse practices to describe complex realities.
Over millennia human well-being has benefited from ecosystems, not only through tangible goods, but also through intangible assets known as cultural ecosystem services. Despite growing research over the last decade, cultural services assessment still remains arbitrary and is largely limited to marketable services such as tourism. Evident difficulties in standardizing definitions and measurements have challenged cultural services accounting in decision making processes. However, the imminent formation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services offers an opportunity to counterbalance this misrepresentation by establishing a scientific basis for consistently assessing cultural services. In that regard, the current review intends to facilitate discussion investigating the current state of cultural services accounting by offering an appraisal of existing evidence regarding cultural services indicator quality. The current review builds on scientifically recognized frameworks to develop a holistic understanding of how cultural services indicators are conceived within ecosystem services research. Among the measures found, benefit indicators were most frequently used for assessing inspirational, educational and recreational services. A broad variety of methods for accounting cultural services was found, mainly due to the varied aims of the studies. Most of the cultural services indicators were deficient concerning their clarity of definitions, purposes and understanding of the processes to be measured and referring only marginally to tradeoffs and bundles with other services. Only 17% performed multitemporal assessments and 23% used spatially explicit information. It seems that cultural services indicators quality could be greatly enhanced by investing more effort towards involving relevant stakeholders in conceptualization and communication phases, using participatory mapping tools to enhance visibility.
For decades, water resources have been used intensively for drinking water, industry, agriculture and energy production. This paper summarises the main anthropogenic influences on the water cycle in a Pleistocene landscape and associated geochemical reactions. The results allow the identification and description of the main hydraulic and geochemical processes that control water and solute fluxes in different hydrological compartments, in particular recharge and discharge regions. Under progressive climate change, this process-based knowledge should be used to adapt land and water management to minimise negative impacts on hydrological resources and stabilise the regional water balance in theBerlin-Brandenburg Pleistocene landscape. Based on these results, a risk assessment approach for validation of future management strategies under changing climate conditions is presented.
In Lower Lusatia, eastern Germany, the changing impacts of lignite coal mining and potential climate change have put the naturally low water yield conditions under pressure. Water resources balances describe the hydrological situation in the region and the need for action due to changing boundary conditions. Extended transfer of flood water from neighbouring catchments is considered inevitable for sustainable regional development and the establishment of a quantitatively and qualitatively selfregulated water system. Using the river basin management system WBalMo®, potential water transfer scenarios to compensate for water deficits resulting from regional and global change are analysed.
Numerous studies underline the importance of immaterial benefits provided by ecosystems and especially by cultural landscapes, which are shaped by intimate human–nature interactions. However, due to methodological challenges, cultural ecosystem services are rarely fully considered in ecosystem services assessments. This study performs a spatially explicit participatory mapping of the complete range of cultural ecosystem services and several disservices perceived by people living in a cultural landscape in Eastern Germany. The results stem from a combination of mapping exercises and structured interviews with 93 persons that were analyzed with statistical and GIS-based techniques. The results show that respondents relate diverse cultural services and multiple local-level sites to their individual well-being. Most importantly, aesthetic values, social relations and educational values were reported. Underlining the holistic nature of cultural ecosystem services, the results reveal bundles of services as well as particular patterns in the perception of these bundles for respondent groups with different socio-demographic backgrounds. Cultural services are not scattered randomly across a landscape, but rather follow specific patterns in terms of the intensity, richness and diversity of their provision. Resulting hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services provision are related to landscape features and land cover forms. We conclude that, despite remaining methodological challenges, cultural services mapping assessments should be pushed ahead as indispensable elements in the management and protection of cultural landscapes. Spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services that incorporates the differentiated perceptions of local populations provides a rich basis for the development of sustainable land management strategies. These could realign the agendas of biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage preservation, thereby fostering multifunctionality.
Berlin Text System 3.1 User Manual : Editorial Software of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae Project
(2018)
The Berlin Text System (BTS) Version 3.1 manual introduces a Java-based software designed for editing and annotating Ancient Egyptian texts. BTS integrates a CouchDB database and an Elastic search engine to support its main components: Text Editor, Lemma List, Thesaurus, and Abstract Text.
The Text Editor facilitates transliteration, translation, lemmatization, and annotations, allowing for detailed lexical and grammatical analysis. Hieroglyphic transcriptions can be entered via a specialized Hieroglyph Type Writer based on JSesh.
The Lemma List ist ready to contain pre-Coptic lemmata, divided into Hieroglyphic/Hieratic and Demotic scripts, providing comprehensive entries with passport data, transliterations, and translations.
The Thesaurus allows for metadata enrichment of texts with controlled vocabulary for consistent data management, supporting contextual analysis through structured metadata.
The manual covers BTS's user interface, including menu bar, toolbar, status bar, and workspace, divided into views for each main component. Features like Revision History for tracking and restoring versions, indexing, and search capabilities enhance user efficiency. BTS is a powerful tool for the study and preservation of Ancient Egyptian texts, integrating advanced database and search technologies with specialized textual analysis tools.
Physical principles underlying biological pattern formation are discussed. In particular, the combination of local self-enhancement and long-range (“lateral”) inhibition (Gierer and Meinhardt, 1972) accounts for de-novo pattern formation, and for striking features of developmental regulation such as induction, spacing and proportion regulation of centers of activation in tissues and cells. Part I explains physical principles of spatial organisation in biological development. Part II demonstrates in mathematical terms that and how short-range activation and long-range inhibition are conditions for the generation of spatial concentration patterns. The conditions can be expressed in terms of ranges, rates and orders of reactions. These conditions, in turn, can also be derived by analysis of dynamic instabilities by means of Fourier waves, showing the neither obvious nor trivial relation between the latter approach and the theory based primarily on autocatalysis and lateral inhibition.
Modern brain research related to consciousness has resulted in many interesting in- sights, for example into the neurobiological basis of attention and of language. In biological terms, human consciousness appears as a system’s feature of our brain, with neural processes strictly following the laws of physics. This does not necessarily imply, however, that there can be a general and comprehensive scientific theory of consciousness. Predictions of the extent to which such a theory may become possi- ble vary widely in the scientific community. There are reasons - not only practical but also epistemological - why the brain-mind relation may not be fully decodable by finite procedures. In particular, analogies with mathematical theorems of un- decidability suggest that self-referential features of consciousness, such as multiple self-representations like those involved in strategic thought, may not be fully resolv- able by brain analysis. Assuming such limitations exist, this implies that ob jective analysis cannot exhaust sub jective experience in principle. A person’s consciousness and will are accessible to external observation only within limits. In some respects, we do not even learn to know ourselves except by our actions. It thus appears that a scientific look at consciousness and the human mind, combining universal physi- calism with epistemological scepticism, is not inconsistent with certain concepts of sub jectivity that are current in the humanities, despite all the differences in the style and terminology of discourse.
Virtually all conventional text-based natural language processing techniques - from traditional information retrieval systems to full-fledged parsers - require reference to a fixed lexicon accessed by surface form, typically trained from or constructed for synchronic input text adhering strictly to contemporary orthographic conventions. Unconventional input such as historical text which violates these conventions therefore presents difficulties for any such system due to lexical variants present in the input but missing from the application lexicon. To facilitate the extension of synchronically-oriented natural language processing techniques to historical text while minimizing the need for specialized lexical resources, one may first attempt an automatic canonicalization of the input text. This paper provides an informal overview of the various canonicalization techniques currently employed by the Deutsches Textarchiv project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities to prepare a corpus of historical German text for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and integration into a robust online information retrieval system.
The potential of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses to sequester carbon offers a powerful tool for controlling the global climate regime, but practices capable of creating “collateral” benefits for landscape conservation have thus far been disregarded. This paper calls for greater integration of scattered trees into agricultural landscapes, hypothesizing that agroforestry practices effectively store carbon and deliver other important ecosystem services as well. Several agroforests from the Upper Lusatia area in Eastern Germany have been selected for analysis. They cover relatively large areas of land (8.2%), even within this intensively used agricultural landscape, and their extent increased from 1964-2008 by 19.4%. Practices of conserving or promoting the six agroforest classes are compared with a catalogue of essential properties for becoming effective “carbon offset projects”. Criteria from mandatory and voluntary carbon markets for carbon sequestration are then applied (additionality, baselines, permanence, and carbon leakage). The study concludes that steps towards realization of “carbon sequestration projects” should include collecting empirical evidence regarding the carbon sequestration potential of temperate agroforestry systems, developing localised demonstration projects, and upscaling these projects to participate in established carbon markets.
Dealing with the Consequences of Climate Change in Historic Parks and Gardens in the United Kingdom
(2019)
Given that long term climate change is recognised as having an ›impact upon all aspects of daily life, not least the survival of heritage assets‹ there is a need to consider all aspects of heritage in the United Kingdom (UK). In order to provide an international context for the German situation this paper looks specifically at adaptation measures that have developed within the main British conservation and horticultural organisations, Historic England, the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. It does this by providing some cultural context for the present policies. It then looks at how the climate is expected to change by the end of this century. It identifies the main challenges, and then reviews the responses by way of adaptation and mitigation.
Aside from the increasing, impressive evidence on chemical identification of graded molecules involved, it is the capability of axons for approaching the target position from different aspects in a two-dimensional field which is per se a strong indication for the involvement of gradients. Targeting requires, in the target field, counter-graded effects, either by antagonistic gradients, or by a single gradient in each dimension exerting attractive effects at low, reverting to inhibitory (repulsive) effects at high concentrations. A further requirement for mapping is the modulation of the counter-graded effects by components of the growth cone itself which depends on the origin of the corresponding axon.Transduction and processing of graded signals in the navigating growth cones are proposed to be strongly enhanced by intra-growth-cone pattern formation. The concept also encompasses regulatory and branching processes including the formation of the terminal arbors.
Early-career funding in German-African academic cooperation: achievements, challenges, perspectives
(2024)
This paper analyses experiences, challenges and potentials in German-African academic cooperation in the field of early-career funding considering the humanities and social sciences as well as natural sciences and medicine. It is based on a comprehensive overview of existing German funding formats and an exemplary survey of the experiences of African cooperation partners with these programmes. The authors propose the establishment of an interface between academic research, the practice of science funding, and African researchers. According to the authors, such a contact and information point would contribute to the improvement of German-African science cooperation and be an important element of Germany’s scientific diplomacy in the long term. This paper is the English translation of Denkanstoß 13 (2023): Early-Career-Förderung in der deutsch-afrikanischen Wissenschaftskooperation. Leistungen, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven. Berlin.
Ediarum is an editing environment designed and implemented by TELOTA at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW, Germany). It is based on two main components: an open-source XML native database (eXistDB) and a widely used commercial XML editor (Oxygen XML editor).
The aim of ediarum is to facilitate the task of encoding texts in TEI format, to store the resulting XML files in eXistDB and to enable collaboration and sharing amongst the members of a team. The central framework of this environment --known as ediarum.BASE.edit-- allows the editor to hide the XML tags and use a number of functions through a toolbar and a menu. In other words, the ediarum.BASE.edit's interface increases the usability of the XML editor and speeds up the encoding process and can be adapted to each project's needs. However, this framework is only available in German language. In other words, the code and the language interface are only accessible for and usable by German-speaking users.
While the original goal of TELOTA was to “bridge the gap” between the markup and the editor (Dumont and Fechner, 2015), the interface language creates a barrier for encoders who do not work in German and impedes potential collaborations with other institutions. In order to break this usability and accessibility barrier, in 2020 Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), a cooperation project between the BBAW and the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana (Cuba), engaged with an adaptation process involving the internationalization of the software (developing features and code that are independent of language or locale) and the localization in the Spanish locale (creating resource files containing translations). As a result of this process, the project has developed a localization of ediarum.BASE.edit called ediarum.PROHD.edit that can be downloaded on Github.
This paper aims to present ediarum.PROHD.edit and to reflect on the most important challenges encountered during the software localization. After reviewing what “localization” means in Translation Studies (Pym, 2016; Jiménez Crespo, 2016), I will discuss the process of internationalization of the software (mostly variables written in ediarum's default functions), the localization itself (the translation of terms and descriptions displayed in the interface) and some testing undertaken with the Cuban team of Proyecto Humboldt Digital.
Emergence, analysis and optimization of structures - Concepts and strategies across disciplines
(2007)
The study of structures is a common concern of all scientific disciplines. The motivation as well as the methods of analysis, however, differ considerably. In engineering, the generation of artifacts, of infrastructures or technological processes are of primary interest. Frequently, the analysis aims at an optimization of the structures and the structure generating processes. Quite different is the study and explanation of existing structures in biology and the social sciences. Here the question of optimality does not present itself in an unambiguous manner. Generally, it must be questioned whether biological and social structures, although developing in an evolutionary way, can be considered as leading towards an a-priori defineable goal of optimality. The complex scenario of qualitative and quantitative modeling, and the goal-oriented and statistical approaches to understanding the meliorisation efforts in the various fields of the sciences and humanities define the scope of this book. Its intention is to create trans-disciplinary insights into methods to fecundate the custom disciplinary approaches.
Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to postulate the possibility of explaining nature in theoretical terms and to initiate attempts at this. With the rise of monotheistic religions of revelation claiming supremacy over human reason and envisaging a new world to come, studies of the natural order of the transient world were widely considered undesirable. Later, in the Middle Ages, the desire for human understanding of nature in terms of reason was revived. This article is concerned with the fundamental reversal of attitudes, from “undesirable” to “desirable”, that eventually led into the foundations of modern science. One of the earliest, most ingenious and most interesting personalities involved was Eriugena, a theologian at the Court of Charles the Bald in the 9th century. Though understanding what we call nature is only one of the several aspects of his theological work, his line of thought implies a turn into a pro-scientific direction: the natural order is to be understood in abstract terms of ‘primordial causes’; understanding nature is considered to be the will of God; man encompasses the whole of creation in a physical as well as a mental sense. Basically similar ideas on the reconciliation of scientific rationality and monotheistic religions of revelation were conceived, independently and nearly simultaneously, by the Arab philosopher al-Kindi in Bagdad. Eriugena was more outspoken in his claim that reason is superior to authority. This claim is implicit in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa with his emphasis on human mental creativity as the image of God’s creativity; and it is the keynote of Galileo’s ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’ some 800 years later, the manifesto expressing basic attitudes of modern science. This article in English is based on the monography (in German): A. Gierer “Eriugena, al-Kindi, Nikolaus von Kues - Protagonisten einer wissenschaftsfreundlichen Wende im philosophischen und theologischen Denken”, Acta Historica Leopoldina 29 (1999), Barth Verlag in MVH Verlage Heidelberg, ISBN: 3-335-00652-6
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.