Expansion of rubber mono-cropping and its implications for the resilience of ecosystems in the face of climate change in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia

Farmers in montane mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA) have long practiced shifting cultivation with plots of land cultivated temporarily and then allowed to revert to secondary forest for a fallow period. In recent years, shifting cultivation has given way to more intensified forms of mono-cropped agriculture, including cultivated crops, orchards and, of increasing importance, rubber tree plantations. Today, more than one million hectares have been converted to rubber plantations. By 2050, the area under rubber trees in MMSEA is predicted to increase fourfold (Fox et al. 2012). This massive conversion of primary or secondary forests to rubber mono-cropping could threaten the resilience of both ecosystems and livelihoods. Despite environmental concerns and market fluctuations, both local farmers and outside entrepreneurs are likely to continue expanding rubber plantations because of their high economic returns. We argue that more diversified agroforestry systems that provide an optimal balance between economic returns and environmental sustainability are needed to improve the long-term outlook for the region in the face of climate change. (Résumé d'auteur

Absolute Quantification of Uric Acid in Human Urine Using Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering with the Standard Addition Method.

High levels of uric acid in urine and serum can be indicative of hypertension and the pregnancy related condition, preeclampsia. We have developed a simple, cost-effective, portable surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) approach for the routine analysis of uric acid at clinically relevant levels in urine patient samples. This approach, combined with the standard addition method (SAM), allows for the absolute quantification of uric acid directly in a complex matrix such as that from human urine. Results are highly comparable and in very good agreement with HPLC results, with an average <9% difference in predictions between the two analytical approaches across all samples analyzed, with SERS demonstrating a 60-fold reduction in acquisition time compared with HPLC. For the first time, clinical prepreeclampsia patient samples have been used for quantitative uric acid detection using a simple, rapid colloidal SERS approach without the need for complex data analysis

Soil and water conservation in Kenya: Report of a Workshop held at the Univeristy of Naibori 21- 23 September, 1977

A Workshop on Soil and Water Conservation was held at the University of Nairobi from 2l to 23 September 1977, sponsored by the Land and Farm Management Division of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Departments of Agricultural Engineering of the University and Egerton College. The objectives of this workshop were:- 1. To bring together research workers, teachers, extension officers and others who are concerned with problems of soil and water conservation, 2. To exchange technical information and discuss problems in assessing needs and in planning, implementing and evaluating conservation systems, and 3. To identify priorities for research and to seek ways to increase the effectiveness and relevance of teaching. In keeping with these objectives, a number of papers were presented at the workshop and are included in full in this report. Topics covered include, among others, experiments with various cropping systems and tillage methods to determine which patterns of land use minimise soil loss methods for reclaiming swampy or badly eroding land, studies of small experimental catchment areas, the physical and social problems involved in carrying out conservation programmes in semi-arid areas, and the Ministry of Agriculture's plans for a major soil and water conservation programme. In addition to these discussions, field trips were conducted to Machakos and Murang'a which are described in this report, and a list of recommendations was drafted which is also included

Carbon monoxide in the solar atmosphere I. Numerical method and two-dimensional models

The radiation hydrodynamic code CO5BOLD has been supplemented with the time-dependent treatment of chemical reaction networks. Advection of particle densities due to the hydrodynamic flow field is also included. The radiative transfer is treated frequency-independently, i.e. grey, so far. The upgraded code has been applied to two-dimensional simulations of carbon monoxide (CO) in the non-magnetic solar photosphere and low chromosphere. For this purpose a reaction network has been constructed, taking into account the reactions which are most important for the formation and dissociation of CO under the physical conditions of the solar atmosphere. The network has been strongly reduced to 27 reactions, involving the chemical species H, H2, C, O, CO, CH, OH, and a representative metal. The resulting CO number density is highest in the cool regions of the reversed granulation pattern at mid-photospheric heights and decreases strongly above. There, the CO abundance stays close to a value of 8.3 on the usual logarithmic abundance scale with [H]=12 but is reduced in hot shock waves which are a ubiquitous phenomenon of the model atmosphere. For comparison, the corresponding equilibrium densities have been calculated, based on the reaction network but also under assumption of instantaneous chemical equilibrium by applying the Rybicki & Hummer (RH) code by Uitenbroek (2001). Owing to the short chemical timescales, the assumption holds for a large fraction of the atmosphere, in particular the photosphere. In contrast, the CO number density deviates strongly from the corresponding equilibrium value in the vicinity of chromospheric shock waves. Simulations with altered reaction network clearly show that the formation channel via hydroxide (OH) is the most important one under the conditions of the solar atmosphere.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, final version will contain online materia

Nutrition planning and policy for African countries: summary report of a seminar held 2-19 June, 1976

This paper is the summary report of a seminar which was held at the Institute for Development Studies from 2 to 19 June 1976, The seminar was sponsored by USAID through a contract to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Participants were government officers and employees of nongovernment agencies from ten English-speaking African countries whose responsibilities are clearly related to nutrition planning and policy making. The report includes short summaries of the sessions conducted by the seminar staff members. Some of these sessions were devoted to the salient nutritional problems of Africa and their complex causes, to sociocultural factors that influence the condition and its alleviation, and to the basic economic considerations relating to the cause and control of malnutrition and food shortages. However, much more time was devoted to planning and policy relating to nutrition. The participants formed working groups and prepared short reports on nutrition planning for Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, on nutrition activities and goals in Kenya, on increased wheat consumption and the trend toward bottle feeding in West Africa, and on nutrition actitivities in the Sudan. The working group reports are also included in this paper

Researching the use of force: The background to the international project

This article provides the background to an international project on use of force by the police that was carried out in eight countries. Force is often considered to be the defining characteristic of policing and much research has been conducted on the determinants, prevalence and control of the use of force, particularly in the United States. However, little work has looked at police officers’ own views on the use of force, in particular the way in which they justify it. Using a hypothetical encounter developed for this project, researchers in each country conducted focus groups with police officers in which they were encouraged to talk about the use of force. The results show interesting similarities and differences across countries and demonstrate the value of using this kind of research focus and methodology

Modeling resilience and sustainability in ancient agricultural systems

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past