Environmental Dynamics in Animal Waste Reclamation in the Scaling up of Livestock in Thailand

Thailand has seen a scaling up of pig production in numbers and structure. Nonetheless, in-house separation and agricultural reclamation of pig solid waste are common practice. Waste reclamation is not taking place under small-scale farming and its environmental dynamics cannot be simply understood as a direct projection to larger scales. Scaling up has transformed the environmental significance of waste reclamation, including waste transfer from livestock to agriculture farmers. Waste transfer benefits pig farmers by trade and removal of waste by agriculture and aquaculture farmers and is key to the environmental dynamics of pig production. However, waste reclamation is not clearly defined as a management option in environmental frameworks. Waste management is mainly addressed as in-farm wastewater with limited attention to agro-environmental values of present practices. To recognise present practices in agro-environmental policies this thesis suggests a descriptive strategy focused on the transfer of waste. Such strategy would avoid command-and-control norms, avoid conflicting with an environmental culture centered in biogas technology and support knowledge transfer in agriculture. A focus on waste transfer from animal farms to agriculture [and aquaculture] plots is interpreted as off-site waste management. Off-site waste management calls for the inclusion of geographical variables beyond animal farms. This leads to an extended area of environmental influence (EAEI). Resulting environmental dynamics allows an interpretation of environment beyond resource in classical agricultural geography to a connotation where environment is also significant to agriculture and livestock because of the impacts from production. The recognition of reclamation practices and, consequently, of the integral environmental dynamics, and hence the connotation of environment, would contribute to connect livestock with agriculture through environmental geography. Intensive livestock is then defined as distribution and not location. Formalisation of reclamation practices entails the acknowledgment of agro-ecological cycles in livestock

An Investigation of Assessment and Modelling the Water Quality of Rivers Based on Artificial Neural Networks- An Initiative towards the River Ganga

Currently many type of research work is going on for assessing and modelling the water quality of rivers in India and especially in Abroad. There has been a lot of attention towards the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for solving scienti?c research, environmental and engineering computing based problems which are highly complex and non-linear in nature only because of their capability to be used for an extensive range of applications like classification, prediction and clustering. It is being increasingly used for prediction and forecasting in various areas like climate, rainfall and water quality. In this paper, we have presented an investigation of existing research work that has been done for assessing and modelling the water quality of various rivers using the technique of artificial neural networks. It was found that the ANN approach turned out to be an efficient approach for water quality modelling and forecasting. All these review work really stirred new researchers to work in this field by introducing new data set, parameters and an optimal approach based on ANNs. We shall take forth this work as an initiative towards the water quality (WQ) modelling of the river Ganga as our future work

トシカ ト トシ ケイタイ カクダイ ニオケル テイシュウニュウ キョジュウチ ノ クウカン コウゾウ ト ジリツ テキ ソシキ システム

博士（工学）佐賀大

Irrigationalism – the politics and ideology of irrigation development in the Nam Songkhram Basin, Northeast Thailand

ABSTRACT The principal drivers of modern irrigation development in tropical Asia are widely understood to be political economy related factors such as demographics, changing diets, international food prices, globalization, urbanization, national food and energy policies, and increasingly, climate change. Such standard drivers of change tend to dominate mainstream water resources development discourse, embedded in instrumental and functional modes of thought and practice. Contrary to the dominant tendency in professional irrigation literature to rely on engineering or managerialist paradigms to conceptualize the field of water resources development, this thesis takes as its starting point an inherent recognition of the political and ideological nature of irrigation development, seen as an organizational tool for state control of people, society and water. This study is concerned with understanding the exercise of power and authority in societal irrigation development, through the analysis of a complex, cross-scalar, multi-actor case study in the context of Thailand, conceived of as an exemplar of a modern hydraulic society. Examining a single river basin case study (the Nam Songkhram) in Thailand’s marginal Northeast and based on a mixed methods, inter-disciplinary approach, the empirical evidence suggests that a number of powerful actor groups in society, including hydraulic bureaucracies, the military, the private sector, national politicians and the monarchy, form alliances or “strategic groups” that compete to control the process of irrigation development at multiple scales and draw upon a range of material practices and discursive processes to further their individual and collective interests. The research contends that irrigation development is justified by socially constructed narrative framings located within the cultural and historical milieu of Thailand, understood to form part of a resilient and rather static nationalist-linked ideology (termed irrigationalism), employed in the reproduction and outward expansion of state power from the Bangkok-centric core to the periphery

Aquatic Insects

Insects have successfully inhabited all freshwater habitats on Earth and are often the most diverse and abundant species in streams and ponds. With a disproportionally high species richness compared to the area covered by freshwaters, aquatic insects represent a hotspot of diversity. They play crucial roles in aquatic food webs as primary consumers, detritivores, and predators, but they also represent an important food resource for aquatic and terrestrial predators. Many aquatic insect orders, such as mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, include taxa that are highly sensitive to habitat alterations, reflecting the health of the overall aquatic ecosystem. This feature is exploited by many scientists and practitioners around the world for water and environment quality monitoring. Despite their importance in term of diversity, ecosystem services and bioindication, many aquatic insect species are critically endangered, mainly due to anthropogenic pressures on freshwaters and climate change. Although the research efforts on aquatic insects tremendously increased during the 21st century, much is still left undiscovered. This Special Issue addresses existing knowledge gaps and increases our understanding of taxonomic diversity and phylogeny, distribution patterns, and community ecology of aquatic insects through 15 new studies that cover most of the aquatic insect orders over a wide geographic range. In a context of rapid global biodiversity loss, accelerating the acquisition of both fundamental and applied knowledge is crucial

Epizoological Tools for Acute Hepatopancreatic Necrosis Disease (AHPND) in Thai Shrimp Farming

Acute hepatopancreatic necrosis disease (AHPND) is an emerging bacterial infection in shrimp that has been widespread across the major world shrimp producing countries since 2009. AHPND epizootics have resulted in a huge loss of global shrimp production, similar to that caused by white spot disease in the 1990’s. The epizootiological understanding of the spread of AHPND is still in its early stages, however, and most of the currently published research findings are based on experimental studies that may struggle to capture the potential for disease transmission at the country scale. The main aim of this research, therefore, is to develop epizootiological tools to study AHPND transmission between shrimp farming sites. Some tools used in this research have already been applied to shrimp epizoology, but others are used here for the first time to evaluate the spread of shrimp diseases. According to an epizootiological survey of AHPND in Thailand (Chapter 3), the first case of AHPND in the country was in eastern shrimp farms in January 2012. The disease was then transmitted to the south in December 2012. The results obtained from interviews, undertaken with 143 sample farms were stratified by three farm-scales (large, medium and small) and two locations (east and south). Both the southern location and large-scale farming were associated with a delay in AHPND onset compared with the eastern location and small- and medium-scale farming. The 24 risk factors (mostly related to farming management practices) for AHPND were investigated in a cross-sectional study (Chapter 3). This allowed the development of an AHPND decision tree for defining cases (diseased farms) and controls (non-diseased farms) because at the time of the study AHPND was a disease of unknown etiology. Results of univariate and unconditional logistic regression models indicated that two farming management practices related to the onset of AHPND. First, the absence of pond harrowing before shrimp stocking increased the risk of AHPND occurrence with an odds ratio () of 3.9 (95 % CI 1.3–12.6; P‑value = 0.01), whereas earthen ponds decreased the risk of AHPND with an of 0.25 (95 % CI 0.06–0.8; P‑value = 0.02). These findings imply that good farming management practices, such as pond-bottom harrowing, which are a common practice of shrimp farming in earthen ponds, may contribute to overcoming AHPND infection at farm level. For the purposes of disease surveillance and control, the structure of the live shrimp movement network within Thailand (LSMN) was modelled, which demonstrated the high potential for site-to-site disease spread (Chapter 4). Real network data was recorded over a 13-month period from March 2013 to March 2014 by the Thailand Department of Fisheries. After data validation, c. 74 400 repeated connections between 13 801 shrimp farming sites were retained. 77 % of the total connections were inter-province movements; the remaining connections were intra-province movements (23 %). The results demonstrated that the LSMN had properties that both aided and hindered disease spread (Chapter 4). For hindering transmission, the correlation between and degrees was weakly positive, i.e. it suggests that sites with a high risk of catching disease posed a low risk for transmitting the disease (assuming solely network spread), and the LSMN showed disassortative mixing, i.e. a low preference for connections joining sites with high degree linked to connections with high degree. However, there were low values for mean shortest path length and clustering. The latter characteristics tend to be associated with the potential for disease epidemics. Moreover, the LSMN displayed the power-law in both and degree distributions with the exponents 2.87 and 2.17, respectively. The presence of power-law distributions indicates that most sites in the LSMN have a small number of connections, while a few sites have large numbers of connections. These findings not only contribute to a better understanding of disease spread between sites, therefore, but also reveal the importance of targeted disease surveillance and control, due to the detection of scale-free properties in the LSMN. Chapter 5, therefore, examined the effectiveness of targeted disease surveillance and control in respect to reducing the potential size of epizootics in the LSMN. The study untilised network approaches to identify high-risk connections, whose removal from the network could reduce epizootics. Five disease-control algorithms were developed for the comparison: four of these algorithms were based on centrality measures to represent targeted approaches, with a non-targeted approach as a control. With the targeted approaches, technically admissible centrality measures were considered: the betweenness (the number of shortest paths that go through connections in a network), connection weight (the frequency of repeated connections between a site pair), eigenvector (considering the degree centralities of all neighbouring sites connected to a specified site), and subnet-crossing (prioritising connections that links two different subnetworks). The results showed that the estimated epizootic sizes were smaller when an optimal targeted approach was applied, compared with the random targeting of high-risk connections. This optimal targeted approach can be used to prioritise targets in the context of establishing disease surveillance and control programmes. With complex modes of disease transmission (i.e. long-distance transmission like via live shrimp movement, and local transmission), an compartmental, individual-based epizootic model was constructed for AHPND (Chapter 6). The modelling uncovered the seasonality of AHPND epizootics in Thailand, which were found likely to occur between April and August (during the hot and rainy seasons of Thailand). Based on two movement types, intra-province movements were a small proportion of connections, and they alone could cause a small AHPND epizootic. The main pathway for AHPND spread is therefore long-distance transmission and regulators need to increase the efficacy of testing for diseases in farmed shrimp before movements and improve the conduct of routine monitoring for diseases. The implementation of these biosecurity practices was modelled by changing the values of the long-distance transmission rate. The model demonstrated that high levels of biosecurity on live shrimp movements (1) led to a decrease in the potential size of epizootics in Thai shrimp farming. Moreover, the potential size of epizootics was also decreased when AHPND spread was modelled with a decreased value for the local transmission rate. Hence, not only did the model predict AHPND epizootic dynamics stochastically, but it also assessed biosecurity enhancement, allowing the design of effective prevention programmes. In brief, this thesis develops tools for the systematic epizootiological study of AHPND transmission in Thai shrimp farming and demonstrates that: (1) at farm level, current Thai shrimp farming should enhance biosecurity systems even in larger businesses, (2) at country level, targeted disease control strategies are required to establish disease surveillance and control measures. Although the epizootiological tools used here mainly evaluate the spread of AHPND in shrimp farming sites, they could be adapted to other infectious diseases or other farming sectors, such as the current spread of tilapia lake virus in Nile tilapia farms

Inspiring Waste Reduction in Bang Mod

Plastic is ubiquitous, and its use is propagating a range of negative consequences. Overuse of plastic within the Phutthabucha Temple market in Bang Mod, Bangkok is harming their canal, a central community resource. Based on the needs of the community, we presented low-cost and convenient options to motivate and equip the community to reduce their plastic use. We designed a multi-phase campaign called “Let’s Reduce for Bang Mod” to inspire action through posters, social media, and an incentive program. We also suggested providing reusable bags through a bag share program and eliminating the need for takeaway bags by including an eating area in the market. The provided solutions can be spread to markets throughout Thailand to positively impact the environment and human health

Factors influencing the capacity of communities to respond to coastal erosion in the upper Gulf of Thailand

Local communities must have a capacity to ameliorate coastal erosion impacts. Since coastal erosion operates over long time frames, understanding this capacity, or the abilities of communities to respond to the impacts and recover to maintain community functions, requires analysis of the past and the present. This study explores factors which influence the capacity of communities to respond to coastal erosion and conversely how exposure to coastal erosion itself affects community capacity. Mixed methods research was used to investigate the views of respondents in seven coastal villages in the upper Gulf of Thailand, three from an area that has experienced low erosion, and four from an area that has experienced high erosion. A questionnaire survey was administered 358 respondents to investigate socio-demographic characteristics, opinions about livelihoods in communities and experiences of losing and responding to coastal erosion. Thirty five key informants for semi-structured interviews were selected from villagers who responded to the questionnaire and volunteered as well as officials, scientists and NGOs. Descriptive analyses were applied to examine differences in socio-demography, opinion about livelihood and coastal erosion experience variables between the two areas, and factor analysis was used to investigate the importance of factors that affect and could build community capacity to respond to coastal erosion. The physical characteristics of the high erosion area were significantly different to those of the low erosion area. The former was closer to the Chao Praya Delta River, had many shrimp ponds across villages and residents applied materials which were too fragile to prevent coastal erosion. The low erosion area was far from delta rivers, was surrounded by shrimp ponds and hard structures were applied to protect the coastal area. For socio-demographic characteristics of villagers, residents in the high erosion area had less employment, lower education, lower income and lower levels of land ownership than residents in the low erosion area. Residents in the high erosion area reported more experiences of property loss from coastal erosion in the past 30 years than residents in the low erosion area as would be expected. Across the two erosion areas rock placements were applied as a common method to protect the coast in the past, while embedding thin bamboo stems offshore was also used in the high erosion area. The government and other networks had promoted a combination of methods to protect coastal areas by embedding thick bamboo stems offshore and planting mangrove trees in intertidal areas. This combination of methods was yielding positive results. Residents impacted by coastal erosion migrated landwards from eroded area and those residents lost connection with their neighbours, lacked opportunities for generating their own income or obtaining employment, and spent their savings in mobilising and rebuilding houses. Some residents who felt insecure from erosion sold their land to external landholders and then they moved to live in more secure areas away from their villages, taking their financial resources with them, thereby effectively removing their financial resources from the original communities. The external landholders held increasingly large areas in these villages. Local communities thereby suffered from a lack of finance and power and diminished rights to build infrastructure for coastal erosion prevention and improvement of their quality of life. Five main factors were found from multivariate factor analysis. Firstly, villagers having control over their own land (and therefore control over their destiny) provided more opportunities to build structures to prevent coastal erosion in their own communities. Secondly, higher levels of leadership were central to mobilising resources to address coastal erosion problems provided the leaders had the necessary attributes to deal with this challenge. Thirdly, coastal community resilience was necessary for communities to address existing changes, whereas communities needed to maintain their functions to be ready to respond to unpredictable impacts of coastal erosion and other events without diminishing their potential. Fourthly, enhanced levels of sense of community were important to gain collaboration from residents to cope with coastal erosion. Lastly, a positive household socioeconomic element was necessary for residents to have sufficient resources for building natural hazard protection appropriately. These five issues could be highlighted to coastal communities to improving capacities to respond to coastal erosion effectively, whereas local authorities and other organisations with high capability could facilitate and support the communities to build capacities through those issues