Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Abdrift von Pflanzenschutzmitteln (PSM), die auf Lebensmittelkulturen in angrenzenden Flächen, insbesondere in benachbarte Haus- und Kleingärten, gelangt. In einer Reihe von Windtunnelversuchen wurde die Abdrift von PSM aus Flächen- und Raumkulturen während der Applikation mit zwei verschiedenen Testsystemen nachgestellt. Das Testsystem Flächenkultur simuliert die Applikation auf Flächenkulturen, das Testsystem Raumkultur die auf Raumkulturen. Auf der Nicht-Zielfläche wurden die auf Grund von Abdrift entstandenen Rückstände des verwendeten Tracers Pyranin nach der Applikation entfernungsabhängig auf den Lebensmittelkulturen Kopfsalat, Erdbeeren und Tomaten gemessen. Durch die gleichzeitige Messung der Bodendeposition konnten die Messwerte mit Hilfe von Regressionsgleichungen (R² = 0,88 bis 0,97) in Bezug zu den Abdrifteckwerten (AEW) gebracht werden. Dadurch war es möglich, erste Abschätzungen der Höhe von Rückständen vorzunehmen, die über Abdrift von landwirtschaftlichen Flächen auf benachbarte Lebensmittelkulturen im Freiland gelangen können. Diese Abschätzung ist zunächst limitiert auf die drei Versuchspflanzen. Die Versuche zeigen, dass sich die meisten durch Abdrift entstehenden Rückstände auf Salatköpfen wieder finden, gefolgt von Erdbeeren und Tomaten. Neben dem experimentellen Teil wurden Analysen mit Geoinformationssystemen (GIS) durchgeführt, um die Nachbarschaftsverhältnisse zwischen landwirtschaftlich genutzten Flächen und Gartenflächen für ganz Deutschland und speziell für Rheinland-Pfalz (RLP) zu analysieren. Dazu wurden für die deutschlandweiten Berechnungen die Daten des amtlichen topographisch-kartographischen Informationssystems (ATKIS) und für die RLP-weiten Berechnungen die Daten des amtlichen Liegenschaftskatasterinformationssystem (ALKIS) verwendet. Beachtet werden muss, dass auf Grund der Datenbeschaffenheit eine Abgrenzung der Gartenflächen zu Wohnflächen nicht möglich ist. Deutschlandweit liegen etwa 1,1 % aller potentiellen Gartenflächen innerhalb eines 5 m Pufferbereichs um Raumkulturen bzw. innerhalb eines 2 m Pufferbereichs um Flächenkulturen. Für RLP sind es 0,75 %. Mit Hilfe eines Landbedeckungsdatensatzes der Fa. RLP AgroScience GmbH und den ALKIS-Daten konnte jedoch die exakte Gartenfläche für RLP auf 47.437 ha bestimmt werden. Basierend auf dieser Datengrundlage liegen 1,2 % der Gartenfläche von RLP innerhalb der genannten Pufferbereiche. Des Weiteren ergaben Berechnungen, dass 3 % der Gärten in RLP direkt angrenzend zu landwirtschaftlich genutzten Flächen liegen. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden nicht nur Gärten betrachtet, die an landwirtschaftliche Flächen grenzen, sondern auch Nachbarschaftsverhältnisse zwischen ökologisch und konventionell bewirtschafteten Flächen untersucht. Diese Berechnungen erfolgten mit den Daten des Integrierten Verwaltungs- und Kontrollsystems (InVeKoS). Insgesamt grenzen in RLP 47,1 % aller ökologisch bewirtschafteten Flächen unmittelbar an konventionell bewirtschaftete Flächen an.

In dieser Arbeit werden die schottischen Liedbearbeitungen Ludwig van Beethovens auf ihre möglichen gälischen Vorläufer untersucht und in ihrem historischen Kontext aus einer gälischen Perspektive betrachtet. Ihre Liedbiographien werden um Vorläufer ergänzt und vervollständigt, die vom dem schottischen Auftraggeber Beethovens, George Thomson teilweise vorsätzlich unterschlagen wurden. Gründe hierfür sind in der politischen und kulturellen Unterdrückung der gälischen Sprachgemeinschaft Schottlands zu finden. Handelt es sich wirklich um anonyme Volkslieder, oder auch um Kompositionen bekannter Musiker aus der gälischen Kultur? Welche Veränderungen erfuhren sie im Zuge der Anonymisierung und der Degradierung zur Volksmusik, sowie der anschließenden Neuausrichtung in der schottischen Nationalmusik? Zu 12 der schottischen Lieder Beethovens sind ausführliche Liedbiographien mit allen gälischen Liedtexten, deutscher Übersetzung und den historischen Hintergründen der gälischen Vorläufer und ihrer Notierungen entstanden.

Studies in recent years have demonstrate adolescents and young adults to have a deficient data protection competence, however children and adolescents between the ages of ten and 13 were mostly not focus of these studies. Therefore, the guiding question of the work is how data protection competence is developed in children and adolescents at a young age in order to be able to infer suitable, educational concepts for this age group. At the beginning of the work, a data protection competence model is derived from a media competence model, which serves as the basis for the further field investigation. A survey was carried out at general secondary schools in Rhineland-Palatinate, which shows that the respondents still have sufficiently developed Risk Assessment Competence, but were insufficiently developed in terms of knowledge, Selection and Usage Competence and the Implementation Competence. Recommendations for actions are given in the last part of the work – containing learning goal descriptions to be possibly implemented in an educational framework – in order to address this issue.

Dieses Dokument umfasst den dritten Zwischenbericht zum Projekt GeKOS – Gemeinsam entdecken Kinder ihren Ort mit Studierenden, der im Oktober 2019 an die Schöpflin-Stiftung übergeben wurde. Das Projekt GeKOS wird vom Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Weiterbildung und Kultur des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz im Rahmen der Programmbudgets Hochschulpakt III sowie von der Schöpflin-Stiftung mit Sitz in Lörrach von 2016 bis 2020 finanziell gefördert. Zudem gewährte das rheinland-pfälzische Ministerium für Integration, Familie, Kinder, Jugend und Frauen im Jahr 2015 eine Anschubfinanzierung.

Erste Ordnung zur Änderung der Promotionsordnung des Fachbereiches 1: Bildungswissenschaften der Universität Koblenz–Landau Siebte Satzung zur Änderung der Satzung der Universität Koblenz-Landau über das Auswahlverfahren in zulassungsbeschränkten Studiengängen

Despite widespread plans of big companies like Amazon and Google to develop unmanned delivery drones, scholarly research in this field is scarce, especially in the information systems field. From technical and legal perspectives, drone delivery in last-mile scenarios is in a quite mature state. However, estimates of user acceptance are varying between high skepticism and exaggerated optimism. This research follows a mixed method approach consisting both qualitative and quantitative research, to identify and test determinants of consumer delivery drone service adoption. The qualitative part rests on ten interviews among average consumers, who use delivery services on a regular basis. Insights gained from the qualitative part were used to develop an online survey and to assess the influence of associated risks on adoption intentions. The quantitative results show that especially financial and physical risks impede drone delivery service adoption. Delivery companies who are currently thinking about providing a delivery drone service may find these results useful when evaluating usage behaviors in the future market for delivery drones.

The technological progress is highly responsible for how people live their everyday life. Technical innovations provide new opportunities to re-design all areas of life and because of that the society has to adjust to these changes permanently. These days, due to the fact that there is a changeover from analog into digital processes, this circumstance is highly relevant. However, it is not always clear whether a technological innovation just entails chances or involves risks, too. The research field of technology assessment pursues the goal to examine the influence of technological innovations on the society. For this purpose, unpredictable consequences of a technology need to be anticipated in advance to provide the opportunity of earlier reactions. The core of this thesis a discussion about a project based approach of technology assessment. Additionally, it is being investigated whether and how systems theory approaches can be used to improve predictions in the research area of technology assessment. Therefore, the question of how reliable forecasts are in this kind of context will be answered. Moreover, there is an investigation if an added-value can be created through performing system thinking. As a methodical approach a literature review has been performed. Furthermore, experts were questioned in an interview and by e-mail to gain an insight in the practical work of technology assessment. Based on the elaborated project structure, for each part of the project was examined if significant results can be maintained through the sophisticated use of principles of the systems theory. The analysis of this paper has shown that the results of a technology assessment may have more reliable forecast value in comparison to an investigation without proper consideration of system thinking. Especially, the understanding of a system during the phase of conception of a project can be crucial for the positive outcome for the results of technology assessment. This master thesis represents the theoretical point of view regarding topics technology assessment and systems theory. An application test for the validation of the results in the practical work of technology assessment is recommended.

Railway safety is a topic which gains the public attention only if major railway accidents happen. This is because railway is considered as a safe mode of travel by the public. However, to ensure the safety of the railway system railway companies as well as universities conduct a broad spectrum of research. An overview of this research has not yet been provided in the scholarly literature. Therefore, this thesis follows two objectives. First an overview and ranking of railway safety research universities should be provided. Second, based on these universities, it should be identified which are the most relevant and influential research topics. The ranking is based on the research method “literature review” which forms the methodical basis for this thesis. To evaluate the universities based on a measurable and objective criterion, the number of citations of the researchers from each university is gathered. As a result, the University of Leuven for the civil engineering, Milan Politechnico for mechanical enginering and the University of Loughborough for electrical engineering are identified as the leading university in their field of railway safety research. The top universities for each discipline are distributed all over Europe, North America and Asia. However, a clear focus on the US and British universities is observed. For identification of the most relevant and influential topics the keywords from the publications which are considered in the ranking procedure are analyzed. Focus areas among these keywords are revealed by calculating the count of each keyword. High-speed trains as well as maintenance are recognized as the highly relevant topics in both civil and mechanical engineering. Furthermore, the topic of railway dynamics for mechanical engineering and noise and vibration for civil engineering are identified as the leading topics in the respective discipline. Achieving both research goals required exploratory approaches. Therefore, this thesis leaves open space for future research to deepen the individual topics which are approached in each section. A validation of the results through experts interviews as well as a deepening of the analysis through increasing the number of analyzed universities as well as applying statistical methods is recommended.

This thesis aims to find models to calculate damages to persons in the context of railway accidents. These models were tested for their applicability for a railway accident database. The reviewed models for injured casualties were identified by a research of literature. Their applicability for the accident database was tested with the aid of average values and sample values. The analysis of fatalities was executed via the combination of collected values of two literature researches. These values were compared to the values of the database. It was stated that there is a calculation for seriously injured, which may serve more exact values than the calculation of the database, especially when there is more detailed data about the casualties. The calculation of slightly injured couldn't be realized by just beholding the pure damages to persons, because it's only a small part of the costs the responsible company has to pay. For the calculation of fatalities appeared problems with the methodology of the most studies.

This thesis deals with the approach, the structure and the variety of methods in the field of technology forecasting. Furthermore insights into the environment of Railways Diagnostics and Monitoring Technologies (RDMT), their technology management and industryspecific requirements for technology forecasting (especially in the area SMEs) are given. Combining those a recommendation for practical use of research results in companies of this size and industry is developed. In order to initiate the previously mentioned research elements a literature research was operated in the field of innovation management and the railway environment. In addition, an interview with an expert of a medium-sized technology manufacturer of RDMT industry was performed. The most important finding was that a single method cannot fulfill the requirements on its own, thus a combination of methods and organizational forms is necessary to achieve an effective technology forecasting.

„La liaison est un phénomène complexe dont la phénoménologie est encore aujourd’hui sujette à recherches et à débats. Dans la littérature classique, orthoépique ou descriptive, comme dans les recherches les plus actuelles, la liaison est considérée comme un phénomène multi-paramétrique et tous les niveaux linguistiques sont convoqués : phonologie, prosodie et syllabation, morphologie, syntaxe, lexique et sémantique, diachronie, orthographe et différentiation des styles [...] toutes les dimensions de la variation externe : variation dans le temps, dans l’espace géographique et dans l’espace social, variation dans l’espace stylistique des genres de discours“ (Eychenne/Laks 2017:1). Dieses Zitat beschreibt die Liaison als ein sehr komplexes, von vielen Parametern beeinflusstes Phänomen. Wie gehen Lernende 1 mit einem solchen Phänomen um? Welche Liaison realisie-ren sie wie häufig? Welche Fehler treten auf? Welche Gründe gibt es für diese Fehler? Welche Auswirkungen hat ein längerer Auslandsaufenthalt des Lernenden in einem französischsprachi-gen Land auf die Produktion von Liaisons? Gibt es Unterschiede zwischen dem Erwerb der Liaison bei Kindern mit Französisch als Erstsprache (L1) und Lernenden des Französischen als Fremdsprache (L2)? Auf all diese Fragen möchte ich im Laufe der vorliegenden Arbeit eingehen. Nach dem Zusam-mentragen einiger grundlegender Fakten über die Liaison soll daher ein Korpus mit französi-schen Sprachaufnahmen von deutschen Studierenden ausgewertet werden. Die Ergebnisse wer-den im Anschluss präsentiert und zunächst mit Resultaten von Kindern mit Französisch als L1 sowie anschließend mit Ergebnissen anderer Studien über Französischlernende verglichen.

Lastkraftwagen werden weltweit in verschiedenen Konfigurationen für den Transport von Gütern und für Spezialanwendungen genutzt. Das sichere Navigieren solcher Großfahrzeuge stellt eine herausfordernde Aufgabe für den Fahrer und unter Umständen für automatische Steuerungssysteme, z. B. im semi-autonomen oder autonomen Betrieb, dar. Insbesondere in kinematisch schwierigen Situationen, auf unebenem Untergrund oder bei engen Platzverhältnissen steigt die Komplexität des sicheren Steuerns. Umso verwunderlicher ist es, dass unterstützende Systeme, welche die speziellen Belange von LKW und insbesondere LKW-Gespannen adressieren, im Vergleich zum Angebot auf dem PKW-Markt nur in rudimentärem Maß angeboten werden. Das Gefahrenpotential, dass von Großfahrzeugen ausgeht, wird zunehmend in der aktuellen Tagespolitik diskutiert. Unter anderem wird die verpflichtende Einführung von Fahrerassistenzsystemen gefordert. In dieser Arbeit werden zwei Themen behandelt, die sich mit den speziellen Anforderungen von Nutzfahrzeugen befassen. Im ersten Themenblock wird die Erfassung der Artikulation in einem LKW-Anhänger-Gespann mit Drehschemelanhänger bearbeitet. Dabei wird ein neuartiges Verfahren vorgestellt, das auf an der Universität Koblenz-Landau geleisteten Vorarbeiten aufbaut. Es ermöglicht die Erfassung von Knickwinkeln in mehreren Dimensionen und ist daher auch für den Einsatz auf unebenem Grund, wie beispielsweise in Baustellen- oder Agrarszenarien geeignet. Das Verfahren nutzt dabei eine Kamera und ein künstliches Muster, um den Gespannzustand zu ermitteln. Im zweiten Bereich wird die Umfeldvisualisierung durch eine Vogelperspektivenansicht thematisiert. Herkömmliche Systeme weisen systembedingte Verzerrungen auf, die unnatürlich wirkende Ansichten zur Folge haben. Diesem Problem wird durch die Entwicklung einer neuen Herangehensweise begegnet: Mit den Tiefendaten von Stereokameras wird eine Umgebungsmodellierung realisiert, die im nächsten Schritt perspektivisch korrekt mit Kamerabildern fusioniert wird. Mittels einer speziell für diesen Fall erweiterten Stereo-Hinderniserkennung wird zudem eine zusätzliche Umfeldüberwachung ermöglicht. Die beiden in dieser Dissertation vorgestellten Verfahren beinhalten grundlegende Arbeiten, die für die Entwicklung maßgeschneiderter Assistenzsysteme für LKW angewandt werden können.

Die Biopolyester Cutin und Suberin stellen hydrophobe Grenzbarrieren dar, die sich im Laufe der Evolution der Landpflanzen entwickelt haben. Cutin bildet den Hauptbestandteil der Cuticula, die den Pflanzen Schutz vor unkontrollierter Transpiration bietet. Die Einlagerung von Suberin in die Zellwände definierter Zellen des Wurzelgewebes ermöglicht eine kontrollierte Aufnahme von Wasser und Nährstoffen. Zu den wichtigsten monomeren Bestandteilen dieser biologischen Polyester gehören langkettige α,ω-Dicarbonsäuren und ω-Hydroxycarbonsäuren. Bisher wurde der mikrobielle Abbau der Makromoleküle unzureichend erforscht. Zur Entschlüsselung der Zersetzung ist es notwendig, den Kreislauf der monomeren Bestandteile im Boden zu betrachten. Hierzu eignen sich vor allem Experimente mit positionsspezifisch ¹³C -markierten α,ω-Dicarbonsäuren und ω-Hydroxycarbonsäuren, die in der vorliegenden Arbeit erstmals synthetisch zugänglich gemacht wurden. Die Synthesen umfassten Dicarbonsäuren der geradzahligen Kettenlängen C12 bis C30, deren Carboxygruppen ¹³C -markiert sind. Ebenfalls wurde die Synthese von ω-Hydroxycarbonsäuren der Kettenlängen C14, C18, C22 und C30 mit ¹³C-Markierung an der Carboxygruppe realisiert. Weitere Zielverbindungen waren ω-Hydroxycarbonsäuren der Kettenlängen C14, C15, C18, C22 und C30, deren terminales hydroxyliertes Kohlenstoffatom mit ¹³C markiert ist. Im Rahmen der durchgeführten Arbeit gelang es, alle 19 Zielcarbonsäuren erfolgreich in hohen Ausbeuten und Reinheiten darzustellen. Die Synthese der isotopenmarkierten Verbindungen erforderte die Entwicklung spezieller auf die jeweiligen Zielsubstanzen individuell angepasster Syntheserouten, die den Einbau des Kohlenstoffisotops ¹³C ermöglichten. Für alle Zielverbindungen erfolgte die Einführung des ¹³C durch die Verwendung von ¹³C -markiertem Kaliumcyanid (99 at%). Wegen der hohen Kosten des ¹³C -markierten Ausgangsstoffes wurden alle Reaktionen zunächst unter der Verwendung analoger unmarkierter Edukte optimiert. Der letzte Teil der Arbeit bestand in der Ausführung eines Inkubationsexperimentes mit den ¹³C -markierten α,ω-Dicarbonsäuren der Kettenlängen C12, C18, C22 und C30. Mittels Phospholipidfettsäure-Analyse konnte gezeigt werden, dass die ¹³C -Dicarbonsäuren zu unterschiedlichen Anteilen von verschiedenen Mikroorganismengruppen zum Aufbau von Phospholipidfettsäuren verwendet wurden. Außerdem konnte durch die Anreicherung des CO2 mit dem Isotop ¹³C nachgewiesen werden, dass die ¹³C -markierten Fettsäuren von den Mikroorganismen zur Energiegewinnung abgebaut wurden. Für zukünftige Arbeiten wäre es interessant, Ausschnitte der Cutin- und Suberinstruktur nachzubilden. Durch die Veresterung der ¹³C -markierten α,ω-Dicarbonsäuren und der ¹³C -markierten ω-Hydroxycarbonsäuren untereinander oder mit Alkoholen könnten Dimere und Oligomere hergestellt werden.

In dieser Arbeit wird die Konzeption, Implementierung und Evaluierung einer Augmented Reality-App beschrieben. Diese wurde mit dem Ziel entwickelt, Objekte im realen Raum mit virtuellen Hilfsmitteln auszumessen, sodass diese Anwendung einen Holzgliedermaßstab ersetzen kann. Hinzu kommt die praktische Speicherung der Messwerte. Angefertigt wurde die App mit der Unity Engine und programmiert in C#. Schwerpunkte dieser Arbeit sind die Benutzerfreundlichkeit der App, sowie die Eignung von AR Foundation für das Ausmessungstool. Die Anwendung wird auf die genannten Kriterien im Rahmen eines Nutzertests in einer abschließenden Evaluation bewertet. Als Ergebnis ließ sich festhalten, dass sich die AR-App noch im Prototyp-Stadium befindet, aber im Allgemeinen schon als benutzerfreundlich gilt. Kleinere Änderungen sollen und müssen noch vorgenommen werden, um auch den Umgang mit dem AR-Tool zu vereinfachen.

Bio-medical data comes in various shapes and with different representations. Domain experts use such data for analysis or diagnosis, during research or clinical applications. As the opportunities to obtain or to simulate bio-medical data become more complex and productive, the experts face the problem of data overflow. Providing a reduced, uncluttered representation of data, that maintains the data’s features of interest falls into the area of Data Abstraction. Via abstraction, undesired features are filtered out to give space - concerning the cognitive and visual load of the viewer - to more interesting features, which are therefore accentuated. To address this challenge, the dissertation at hand will investigate methods that deal with Data Abstraction in the fields of liver vasculature, molecular and cardiac visualization. Advanced visualization techniques will be applied for this purpose. This usually requires some pre-processing of the data, which will also be covered by this work. Data Abstraction itself can be implemented in various ways. The morphology of a surface may be maintained, while abstracting its visual cues. Alternatively, the morphology may be changed to a more comprehensive and tangible representation. Further, spatial or temporal dimensions of a complex data set may be projected to a lower space in order to facilitate processing of the data. This thesis will tackle these challenges and therefore provide an overview of Data Abstraction in the bio-medical field, and associated challenges, opportunities and solutions.

The analysis of three-dimensional and complex motion sequences of human gait and therefore the most important question of kenesiology ”why are we falling?” is the essence of this paper. The gerontology and its science of movement is currently limited to simple and one-dimensional methods and models. An extensive literature research shows the latest state of research of the three common methods to determine the stability of human gait. To assess the margin of stability, local stability and orbital stability it is shown, how those methods are applicable to evaluate the subject’s ability to recover from any disturbences of the subject’s gait. Based on this assessment and the method’s advantages and disadvantages a new method will be derived that allows spatial analysis of dynamic instability of linear and non-linear human gait. A motion capture system and the timed up and go test serve as a basis for this new method and will be explained. A numerical approximation to optimise the number of markers within a marker-set of a motion capture analysis and its maximum correlation with the full-body-marker-set will be given. This simplification is very helpful for further clinical or scientific research. To validate the new method a trial with subjects will be shown and discussed. New appreciable variables and snapshots of specific situations during the gait offer new and different interpretations of the human gait. The new method is the most applicable and appropriate assessment of human gait and the individual development of the human gait while aging, as well as to detect and prevent falling and associated injuries. Especially directional change of a non-linear gait become assessable with the new method.

The increase in plastic particles (< 5 mm) in the environment is a global problem, which is in direct correlation to the increasing production quantity and variety. Through direct input (primary) or through the degradation of macroplastics (secondary), particles enter the environmental compartments water and/or soil via conventional material transportation paths. The research and development work on the sustainable removal of microplastic particles (inert organic chemical stressors, IOCS) from wastewater is based on the construction of polymer inclusion compounds. IOCS describe a group of organic chemical molecules, which demonstrate a high level of persistence upon entry in the ecosystem and whose degradation is limited. Following the principle of Cloud Point Technology, a novel separation technique has been developed which induces particle growth in microplastics and allows easier separation from the water by volume increase according to the state of the art. The concept for the sustainable removal of microplastics from Herbort and Schuhen is based on a three-step synthesis. This concept was further optimized as part of the research and adapted to the criteria of resource efficiency and profitability. The fundamental research is premised on the hypothesis that van der Waals forces with short ranges and localized hydrophobic interactions between precursors and/or material and the IOCS to be connected can induce a fixation through the formation of an inclusion compound with particle growth. Through the addition of silicon-based ecotoxicologically irrelevant coagulation and inclusion units, it is possible to initiate molecular self-organization with the hydrophobic stressors in an aggregation process induced through water. It results in adhesive particle growth around the polymer particles and between particles. Subsequently, the polymer extract can be separated from aquatic media through simple and cost-effective filtration processes (e.g. sand trap, grease trap), due to the 10,000 times larger volume microplastic agglomerates.

In der Computergrafik stellte die Berechnung von Reflexionen lange ein Problem dar. Doch mit der ständigen Weiterentwicklung der Hardware und Vorstellung neuer Verfahren ist eine realitätsnahe, echtzeitfähige(durchschnittlich 60 FPS) Berechnung von Reflexionen möglich. In der folgenden Ausarbeitung werden verschiedene Reflexionsverfahren vorgestellt. Alle mathematischen und physikalischen Grundlagen werden gegeben, um die Algorithmen nachvollziehen zu können. Da eine Reflexion immer das Abtasten eines reflektierten Vektors bedeutet, werden zwei verschiedene Abtastungsverfahren für blickabhängige Reflexionen vorgestellt und anschließend implementiert. Zuletzt werden die Verfahren auf Basis von Qualität und Performance gegenübergestellt.

The European landscape is dominated by intensive agriculture which leads to widespread impact on the environment. The frequent use of agricultural pesticides is one of the major causes of an ongoing decline in flower-visiting insects (FVIs). The conservation of this ecologically diverse assemblage of mobile, flying insect species is required by international and European policy. To counteract the decrease in species numbers and their abundances, FVIs need to be protected from anthropogenic stressors. European pesticide risk assessment was devised to prevent unacceptable adverse consequences of pesticide use on FVIs. However, there is an ongoing discussion by scientists and policy-makers if the current risk assessment actually provides adequate protection for FVI species. The first main objective of this thesis was to investigate pesticide impact on FVI species. The scientific literature was reviewed to identify groups of FVIs, summarize their ecology, and determine their habitat. This was followed by a synthesis of studies about the exposure of FVIs in their habitat and subsequent effects. In addition, the acute sensitivity of one FVI group, bee species, to pesticides was studied in laboratory experiments. The second main objective was to evaluate the European risk assessment for possible deficits and propose improvements to the current framework. Regulatory documents were screened to assess the adequacy of the guidance in place in light of the scientific evidence. The suitability of the honey bee Apis mellifera as the currently only regulatory surrogate species for FVIs was discussed in detail. The available scientific data show that there are far more groups of FVIs than the usually mentioned bees and butterflies. FVIs include many groups of ecologically different species that live in the entire agricultural landscape. Their habitats in crops and adjacent semi-natural areas can be contaminated by pesticides through multiple pathways. Environmentally realistic exposure of these habitats can lead to severe effects on FVI population parameters. The laboratory studies of acute sensitivity in bee species showed that pesticide effects on FVIs can vary greatly between species and pesticides. The follow-up critical evaluation of the European FVI risk assessment revealed major shortcomings in exposure and effect assessment. The honey bee proved to be a sufficient surrogate for bee species in lower tier risk assessment. Additional test species may be chosen for higher tier risk assessment to account for ecological differences. This thesis shows that the ecology of FVIs should generally be considered to a greater extent to improve the regulatory process. Data-driven computational approaches could be used as alternative methods to incorporate ecological trait data in spatio-temporal scenarios. Many open questions need to be answered by further research to better understand FVI species and promote necessary changes to risk assessment. In general, other FVI groups than bees need to be investigated. Furthermore, comprehensive data on FVI groups and their ecology need to be collected. Contamination of FVI habitat needs to be linked to exposure of FVI individuals and ecologically complex effects on FVI populations should receive increased attention. In the long term, European FVI risk assessment would benefit from shifting its general principles towards more scientifically informed regulatory decisions. This would require a paradigm shift from arbitrary assumptions and unnecessarily complicated schemes to a substantiated holistic framework.

Since the invention of U-net architecture in 2015, convolutional networks based on its encoder-decoder approach significantly improved results in image analysis challenges. It has been proven that such architectures can also be successfully applied in different domains by winning numerous championships in recent years. Also, the transfer learning technique created an opportunity to push state-of-the-art benchmarks to a higher level. Using this approach is beneficial for the medical domain, as collecting datasets is generally a difficult and expensive process. In this thesis, we address the task of semantic segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions and release experimental results that have practical value for medical imaging. First, we evaluate the performance of four neural network architectures on the dataset of the cervical spine MRI scans. Second, we use transfer learning from models trained on the Imagenet dataset and compare it to randomly initialized networks. Third, we evaluate models trained on the bias field corrected and raw MRI data. All code to reproduce results is publicly available online.

The distributed setting of RDF stores in the cloud poses many challenges. One such challenge is how the data placement on the compute nodes can be optimized to improve the query performance. To address this challenge, several evaluations in the literature have investigated the effects of existing data placement strategies on the query performance. A common drawback in theses evaluations is that it is unclear whether the observed behaviors were caused by the data placement strategies (if different RDF stores were evaluated as a whole) or reflect the behavior in distributed RDF stores (if cloud processing frameworks like Hadoop MapReduce are used for the evaluation). To overcome these limitations, this thesis develops a novel benchmarking methodology for data placement strategies that uses a data-placement-strategy-independent distributed RDF store to analyze the effect of the data placement strategies on query performance. With this evaluation methodology the frequently used data placement strategies have been evaluated. This evaluation challenged the commonly held belief that data placement strategies that emphasize local computation, such as minimal edge-cut cover, lead to faster query executions. The results indicate that queries with a high workload may be executed faster on hash-based data placement strategies than on, e.g., minimal edge-cut covers. The analysis of the additional measurements indicates that vertical parallelization (i.e., a well-distributed workload) may be more important than horizontal containment (i.e., minimal data transport) for efficient query processing. Moreover, to find a data placement strategy with a high vertical parallelization, the thesis tests the hypothesis that collocating small connected triple sets on the same compute node while balancing the amount of triples stored on the different compute nodes leads to a high vertical parallelization. Specifically, the thesis proposes two such data placement strategies. The first strategy called overpartitioned minimal edge-cut cover was found in the literature and the second strategy is the newly developed molecule hash cover. The evaluation revealed a balanced query workload and a high horizontal containment, which lead to a high vertical parallelization. As a result these strategies showed a better query performance than the frequently used data placement strategies.

Constituent parsing attempts to extract syntactic structure from a sentence. These parsing systems are helpful in many NLP applications such as grammar checking, question answering, and information extraction. This thesis work is about implementing a constituent parser for German language using neural networks. Over the past, recurrent neural networks have been used in building a parser and also many NLP applications. In this, self-attention neural network modules are used intensively to understand sentences effectively. With multilayered self-attention networks, constituent parsing achieves 93.68% F1 score. This is improved even further by using both character and word embeddings as a representation of the input. An F1 score of 94.10% was the best achieved by constituent parser using only the dataset provided. With the help of external datasets such as German Wikipedia, pre-trained ELMo models are used along with self-attention networks achieving 95.87% F1 score.

Water uptake, respiration and exudation are some of the biological functions fulfilled by plant roots. They drive plant growth and alter the biogeochemical parameters of soil in the vicinity of roots, the rhizosphere. As a result, soil processes such as water fluxes, carbon and nitrogen exchanges or microbial activity are enhanced in the rhizosphere in comparison to the bulk soil. In particularly, the exudation of mucilage as a gel-like substance by plant roots seems to be a strategy for plants to overcome drought stress by increasing soil water content and soil unsaturated hydraulic conductivity at negative water potentials. Although the variations of soil properties due to mucilage are increasingly understood, a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms in the pore space leading to such variations is lacking. The aim of this work was to elucidate the gel properties of mucilage in the pore space, i.e. interparticulate mucilage, in order to link changes of the physico-chemical properties in the rhizosphere to mucilage. The fulfilment of this goal was confronted to the three following challenges: The lack of methods for in situ detection of mucilage in soil; The lack of knowledge concerning the properties of interparticulate mucilage; The unknown relationship between the composition and the properties of model substances and root mucilage produced by various species. These challenges are addressed in several chapters. In a first instance, a literature review picked information from various scientific fields about methods enabling the characterization of gels and gel phases in soil. The variation of soil properties resulting from biohydrogel swelling in soil was named the gel effect. The combined study of water entrapment of gels and gel phases in soil and soil structural properties in terms of mechanical stability or visual structures proved promising to disentangle the gel effect in soil. The acquired methodical knowledge was used in the next experiments to detect and characterize the properties of interparticulate gel. 1H NMR relaxometry allows the non-invasive measure of water mobility in porous media. A conceptual model based on the equations describing the relaxation of water protons in porous media was developed to integrate the several gel effects into the NMR parameters and quantify the influence of mucilage on proton relaxation. Rheometry was additionally used to assess mucilage viscosity and soil microstructural stability and ESEM images to visualize the network of interparticulate gel. Combination of the results enabled to identify three main interparticulate gel properties: The spider-web effect restricts the elongation of the polymer chains due to the grip of the polymer network to the surface of soil particles. The polymer network effect illustrates the organization of the polymer network in the pore space according to the environment. The microviscosity effect describes the increased viscosity of interparticulate gel in contrast to free gel. The impact of these properties on soil water mobility and microstructural stability were investigated. Consequences on soil hydraulic and soil mechanical properties found in the literature are further discussed. The influence of the chemical properties of polymers on gel formation mechanism and gel properties was also investigated. For this, model substances with various uronic acid content, degree of esterification and amount of calcium were tested and their amount of high molecular weight substances was measured. The substances investigated included pectic polysaccharides and chia seed mucilage as model polymers and wheat and maize root mucilage. Polygalacturonic acid and low-methoxy pectin proved as non-suitable model polymers for seed and root mucilage as ionic interactions with calcium control their properties. Mucilage properties rather seem to be governed by weak electrostatic interactions between the entangled polymer chains. The amount of high molecular weight material varies considerably depending on mucilage´s origin and seems to be a straight factor for mucilage’s gel effect in soil. Additionally to the chemical characterization of the high molecular weight compounds, determination of their molecular weight and of their conformation in several mucilages types is needed to draw composition-property profiles. The variations measured between the various mucilages also highlight the necessity to study how the specific properties of the various mucilages fulfill the needs of the plant from which they are exuded. Finally, the integration of molecular interactions in gel and interparticulate gel properties to explain the physical properties of the rhizosphere was discussed. This approach offers numerous perspectives to clarify for example how water content or hydraulic conductivity in the rhizosphere vary according to the properties of the exuded mucilage. The hypothesis that the gel effect is general for all soil-born exudates showing gel properties was considered. As a result, a classification of soil-born gel phases including roots, seeds, bacteria, hyphae and earthworm’s exuded gel-like material according to their common gel physico-chemical properties is recommended for future research. An outcome could be that the physico-chemical properties of such gels are linked with the extent of the gel effect, with their impact on soil properties and with the functions of the gels in soil.