The existence of a favorable natural environment, the variety of the relief and the soil, the richness of the hydrographic network, correlated with the extension of the pastures and hay fields have favored the development of vast pastoral landscapes, in the Carpathian Mountains. The rural resident must be aware that the traditional family farm (micro-farm) is an element of the landscape, part of the cultural heritage. He can use it efficiently, in order to obtain sources of income from the capitalization of dairy products and meat (coming from the family surplus), from the practice of agritourism etc. Pastoral practice must adapt to the new “timesˮ socio -economic and political, and become from a millennial occupation, an agricultural phenomenon (the trade, transhumance, the bath and the haircut of the sheep etc.). In our opinion, it is alarming that these traditional pastoral landscapes created, developed and preserved over the centuries and the millennia are now, in the last years, rapidly disappearing or being transformed.

The study aims to find out the first genuses of lacustrine (non-marine) diatoms from the Miocene period of western Anatolia, Turkey. Therefore, samples are collected from three different diatomite strata in the ooze unit (diatomite and chalk togetherness) in the sedimentary sequence in the Seydiler region (Afyonkarahisar, Turkey), and the lacustrine diatom faunas of the samples were determined using FEI Nova Nano 650 Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectrometer (SEM-EDX).This study area covers the Seydiler region, which is one of the deposit areas in one of the lakes that remained from Paleo-Tethys in the Miocene period of the Western Anatolia. In the study, Ellerbeckia, Eunotia, Gomphonema, Halamphora, Pinnularia, and Staurosira were found to be the major diatom faunas in the Seydiler ooze deposit. All three genuses of the Staurosira genus namely, Staurosira construens, Staurosirella pinnata3, and Staurosirella pinnata6, were entirely imaged and named in this floristic result.As can be seen, these preliminary genuses form the benthic freshwater diatom fauna, which symbolizes the shallow paleo-lacustrine environment and cold climate conditions.

This study presents relationships between results of laboratory measurements and data collected from well logging (including outcomes of a comprehensive interpretation) from three boreholes in the Baltic Basin (North Poland) drilling the Silurian and Ordovician formations. Laboratory experiments examined about 70 samples of mudstone lithology to obtain total and effective porosity; bulk, grain, and material density; total organic carbon; physical permeability; total pore area and pore distribution; and mineral components. Some rock samples were further studied using mercury injection porosimetry, helium porosimetry, dual liquid porosimetry, NMR, N2 adsorption/desorption, rock-eval pyrolysis, and XRD to obtain coherent petrophysical information from heterogeneous claystone / mudstone and their organic matter. Natural radioactivity, bulk density, total porosity, volume of kerogen, and other quantities were determined from continuous curves obtained from well logging with prior depth matching, used to account for the different vertical resolution of logs and point data from the laboratory. The goal was complete characterization of the shale gas formation in various aspects to support the thesis that the Silurian and Ordovician Polish shale gas formations encompass great diversity.