Agris

Unprocessed glass waste is commonly disposed of in landfills, posing a significant environmental threat worldwide due to its non-biodegradable nature and long decomposition period. The volume of this waste continues to increase annually, driven by increasing consumption of electronic and household devices, as well as the growing popularity and end-of-life disposal of solar panels and other glass products. Therefore, to promote the development of the circular economy and the principles of sustainability, it is necessary to address the problem of reusing this waste. This review article examines the chemical and physical properties of various types of glass waste, including window glass, bottles, solar panels, and glass recovered from discarded electronic and household appliances. It was determined that the most promising and applicable reuse, which does not require high energy consumption, could be in the manufacture of concrete, which is the most developed construction material worldwide. Glass waste can be incorporated into concrete in three different particle sizes according to their function: (a) cement-sized particles, used as a partial binder replacement; (b) sand-sized particles, replacing fine aggregate; and (c) coarse aggregate-sized particles, substituting natural coarse aggregate either partially or fully. The article analyses the impact of glass waste on the properties of concrete or binder, presents controversial results, and provides recommendations for future research. In addition, the advantages and challenges of incorporating glass waste in ceramics and asphalt concrete are highlighted.

This study raises the question of revising the usual ideas about the renovation of post-Soviet housing. The new urban movements that have become popular in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely, the concept of the “15-minute city” are taking into account. The purpose of this publication is to identify possible methodological and theoretical shifts in research approaches in dealing with the transformation of post-Soviet residential areas in connection with the active introduction of new concepts of chrono-urbanism, such as the “15-minute city”. In order to achieve the goal, a systematic logical and analytical approaches were used to identify the concept of a 15-minute city that is relevant today as one of those that can be used for the renovation and revitalisation of post-Soviet residential areas. The study uses a comparative method, includes a study of literary and documentary sources. The method of information systematisation was also used to summarise the research results. As a site for field research, the Novi Budynky housing estate in Kharkiv was chosen, on the example of which a historical study was carried out. It was analyzed how this housing estate corresponded to contemporary ideas about normal socio-cultural and living conditions, its new functional content, and also analyzed the possible whether (from the point of view of the formed morphology and the established service system) to introduce the concept of “15-minute city”. The first steps that can be taken to get closer to the implementation of this concept were formulated, and practical and methodological problems of its implementation into the reality of post-Soviet cities, in the form in which it was theoretically developed, were identified.

The primary problem of land use changes from the 19th to the 21st century lies in human-driven landscape transformations that impact ecosystems, biodiversity, and sustainable management. The study examines changes in land use in Juodaičiai eldership (Jurbarkas district) during the 19th–21st centuries. GIS technologies and digitized 19th-21st century maps were used to identify changes in land use. The study utilized military-topographic maps of the Russian Empire (1860–1915), interwar Lithuanian topographic maps (1933–1940), Soviet topographic maps (1988), the Lithuanian georeferenced spatial data set, LIDAR data (2009–2010), and orthophoto maps, analyzed using ArcGIS Pro software. The study used 3D terrain models and GIS technologies to analyze land-use changes. It found that from the 19th to 20th century, agricultural land expanded by 39.8%, mainly at the cost of forests, which decreased by 42.4%. During the Soviet era, forest areas increased by 12.7%, while urbanized areas shrank. In the early 21st century, forest and agricultural land remained stable, but intensive logging, affecting 23.6% of current forest areas, continues. This study reveals that while the land use in Juodaičiai eldership has undergone significant shifts over two centuries, the persistent tension between human activity and environmental sustainability remains the defining challenge for future landscape management.

Trophallaxis, a fundamental social behavior observed among honeybees, involves the redistribution of food and chemical signals. The automation of its detection under field-realistic conditions poses a significant challenge due to the presence of crowding, occlusions, and brief, fine-scale motions. In this study, we propose a markerless, deep learning-based approach that injects short- and mid-range temporal features into single-frame You Only Look Once (YOLO) detectors via temporal-to-RGB encodings. A new dataset for trophallaxis detection, captured under diverse illumination and density conditions, has been released. On an NVIDIA RTX 4080 graphics processing unit (GPU), temporal-to-RGB inputs consistently outperformed RGB-only baselines across YOLO families. The YOLOv8m model improved from 84.7% mean average precision (mAP50) with RGB inputs to 91.9% with stacked-grayscale encoding and to 95.5% with temporally encoded motion and averaging over a 1 s window (TEMA-1s). Similar improvements were observed for larger models, with best mAP50 values approaching 94–95%. On an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin embedded platform, TensorRT-optimized YOLO models sustained real-time throughput, reaching 30 frames per second (fps) for small and 23–25 fps for medium models with temporal-to-RGB inputs. The results showed that the TEMA-1s encoded YOLOv8m model has achieved the highest mAP50 of 95.5% with real-time inference on both workstation and edge hardware. These findings indicate that temporal-to-RGB encodings provide an accurate and computationally efficient solution for markerless trophallaxis detection in field-realistic conditions. This approach can be further extended to multi-behavior recognition or integration of additional sensing modalities in precision beekeeping.

The need for electricity and its extraction without stimulating climate warming processes are currently more relevant than ever. Using wind energy to generate electricity is one of the most promising methods. When designing wind energy parks, it is necessary to choose a suitable place for their installation. This study examined the suitability of plots for the construction of these structures in the areas of abandoned land in non-urbanized and non-urbanized areas. In the course of the research, various limitations were examined, the territory was analyzed using geoinformation systems. Modeling of the selected territory has been carried out, areas suitable for the installation of wind energy plants have been identified. It was established that the total area of land that can be used for the installation of wind energy plants is small and the criterion of abandoned land is not the indicator on the basis of which it can be stated that the territory is suitable for the construction of wind energy plants.

The aim of the study is to analyse changes in agricultural land using recent data and to assess changes in ecological stability in Jurbarkas district. The study was carried out in the period 2010-2023. Land use area and ecological stability coefficients were calculated for the entire period, sequentially for each year. The area of tree and shrub varied considerably over the study period, ranging from 20.7 % to 60.8 %, that is, from one-fifth of the area of other land to three-thirds. The areas of wetlands, unused, and damaged land are decreasing during the study time. The urbanised areas were mainly concentrated in the areas with low ecological stability. The situation with ecological stability is not good in all the studied territories.

The article analyses the relationship between educational and digital competences in the development of digital study tools and digitisation of the content of study subjects. A quantitative study was conducted, that is, a survey of lecturers who have participated in educational and content digitisation training courses and developed digital study tools. Simple quantitative analysis was used to process the data. The results of the survey showed that the development and use of digital tools require not only learning the different tools for digitisation, but also knowing what didactic purposes they can be used for and what learning goals they can be used to achieve. Thus, digitising the content of the subject begins with the selection of appropriate tools that serve specific didactic goals. The findings underscore the imperative to improve educational competence through the digitisation of study subject content.

The research focuses on the professional profile of architects by analyzing their identity and creative principles. The aim is to explore the professional community of Lithuanian architects who are currently shaping the built environment, to identify their heterogeneity in terms of professional generations. The problem of the research is shaped by the current controversies in the field of architecture concerning the changing status, activities, and responsibilities of the architect. The relevance of the study lies in several aspects: the lack of in-depth sociological research on the professional community of Lithuanian architects; the attempt to verify and clarify the results of the semi-structured interview study Lithuanian Architects on Architecture, and the reflection on the global architectural situation and the new agenda for architectural design towards a high quality built environment. The study adopted a mixed methods research design. This involved the collection, analysis, and interpretation of both quantitative and qualitative data. This methodology is chosen because the research requires a complex and multifaceted approach to the phenomenon of architecture and the problems of architectural practice. It also allowed a larger group of research participants to be reached (450 respondents). The questionnaire contains 13 questions, each is structured in a multiple-choice format, with one option being an open-ended question. The questions are grouped under several themes: 1) the nature and fields of architectural practice and the concept of architecture; 2) the scope of practice and the allocation of professional time; 3) self-determination and professional loyalty; and 4) creative principles. Descriptive statistical methods were used to process the survey data. Content analysis and, to some extent, thematic analysis were used to analyze quantitative data from open-ended questions. The study highlights that the professional generations of architects analyzed follow the general trend of architecture, refuting the hypothesis that the approach of each generation is significantly different. However, it has been observed that the representatives of each generation show a particular attitude in a specific area, which indicates the dynamics of an attitude or predicts a change in the architectural community as a whole. The youngest generation of architects is an indicator of change. It is characterized by seeing a great diversity of aspects in architecture and architectural practice.

Web page segmentation is one of the most influential factors for the automated integration of web page content with other systems. Existing solutions are focused on segmentation but do not provide a more detailed description of the segment including its range (minimum and maximum HTML code bounds, covering the segment content) and variants (the same segments with different content). Therefore the paper proposes a novel solution designed to find all web page content blocks and detail them for further usage. It applies text similarity and document object model (DOM) tree analysis methods to indicate the maximum and minimum ranges of each identified HTML block. In addition, it indicates its relation to other blocks, including hierarchical as well as sibling blocks. The evaluation of the method reveals its ability to identify more content blocks in comparison to human labeling (in manual labeling only 24% of blocks were labeled). By using the proposed method, manual labeling effort could be reduced by at least 70%. Better performance was observed in comparison to other analyzed web page segmentation methods, and better recall was achieved due to focus on processing every block present on a page, and providing a more detailed web page division into content block data by presenting block boundary range and block variation data.

Cereal straw is a biomaterial with great potential: about 144 million tons of biomass are grown annually in Europe. For any use of straw (fertilizer, biofuel, etc.), efficient chopping technology, i.e., the reliable and efficient operation of mobile or stationary choppers, is the key factor for further success. Since most of the straw is chopped at harvest time, the subject of the study is the wear of the combine’s chopping knives. Six blades of different materials and designs were tested under realistic conditions during wheat and rapeseed harvesting on 180 ha. The influence of hardness, composition, cutting edge angle, and position in the chopper on knife wear was analyzed. The study showed that the blades with the highest cutting edge hardness (568 ± 11 HV) and the lowest cutting edge angle (20.9°) had the lowest wear. The highest hardness of the induction hardened knives was due to the 0.42% carbon content of the steel. The study confirmed that wear was inversely proportional to the hardness of the cutting edge (the harder the cutting edge, the lower the wear) and directly proportional to the angle of the cutting edge (the higher the angle, the greater the wear). The SEM study showed that part of the tooth surface of the blades was covered by permanent deposits of the material to be shredded. This wear was not caused by the interaction between straw and blade but by microabrasive particles that contaminated the straw.