Smart Toolkit for evaluating information products and services

The Toolkit focuses on the evaluation of information products and services from a learning perspective within the context of agricultural information projects. It is directed at internal evaluation rather than external evaluation. An internal evaluation aids organisational learning and represents a real change away from the traditional evaluation, which has tended to be funding agency-driven and -controlled, because of the need for accountability and compliance. The Toolkit will help you to understand how and why things go wrong or right, so as to gain an insight on how to do things better in the information project. The Toolkit thus encourages learning and self-evaluation.The Toolkit focuses on the evaluation of information products and services from a learning perspective within the context of agricultural information projects. It is directed at internal evaluation rather than external evaluation

Modeling the Total Allowable Area for Coastal Reclamation : a case study of Xiamen, China

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ocean & Coastal Management 76 (2013):38-44, doi:10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2013.02.015.This paper presents an analytical framework to estimate the Total Allowable Area for Coastal Reclamation (TAACR) to provide scientific support for the implementation of a coastal reclamation restriction mechanism. The logic of the framework is to maximize the net benefits of coastal reclamation subject to a set of constraints. Various benefits and costs, including the ecological and environmental costs of coastal reclamation, are systematically quantified in the framework. Model simulations are developed using data from Tongan Bay of Xiamen. The results suggest that the TAACR in Tongan Bay is 5.67 km2, and the area of the Bay should be maintained at least at 87.52 km2.The study was funded by the National Oceanic Public Welfare Projects (No. 201105006) and the Fujian Natural Science Foundation (No. 2010J01360