Annual Report: 2013

I submit herewith the annual reports from the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, for the period ending December 31, 2013. This is done in accordance with an act of Congress, approved March 2, 1887, entitled, “An act to establish agricultural experiment stations, in connection with the agricultural college established in the several states under the provisions of an act approved July 2, 1862, and under the acts supplementary thereto,” and also of the act of the Alaska Territorial Legislature, approved March 12, 1935, accepting the provisions of the act of Congress. The research reports are organized according to our strategic plan and by broad subject, focusing on geography, high-latitude agriculture, forest sciences, and the interaction of humans and the environment. Research conducted by our graduate and undergraduate students plays an important role in these grants and the impact they make on Alaska.Financial Statement -- Funding & Grants -- Students -- Research at SNRAS & AFES -- Publications -- Facult

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

THE LOOPER CO-CREATION METHODOLOGY: ENHANCING URBAN TRANSFORMATION THROUGH PARTICIPATORY SENSING AND URBAN LIVING LABS IN LEARNING LOOPS

My research aims to test how the participatory co-creation methodology can help to solve different urban issues, and wants to show some practicalities to organisers about how to set up a Urban Living Lab to involve stakeholders in a co-creation process. This research involved both the study of the state of the art, but also some practical work to experience which are the positive results and found criticalities. The study of the state of the art gave me a more complete comprehension of the situation in which my research is framed, and it included: the Scandinavian \u2018cooperative design\u2019 in the \u201860s; De Carlo participatory design of the Terni project; the concept of \u2018Participatory design\u2019 in the USA during the \u201870s; Siza and the SAAL process in the \u201870s; the \u2018User-centred design\u2019 concept by Donald Dorman in the \u201880s; the idea of \u2018Participatory budgeting\u2019 in Portugal from the 2000 on. The methodology has been that of \u2018practice-led\u2019. In my work, I applied the co-creation methodology in different urban environments to: check which practices can be considered good or bad; cross data collected from the state of the art and the field research; compare collected data. The research I have done focused on an European Research Project, funded under the JPI Urban Europe, called LOOPER (Learning Loops in the Public Realm) which applies the learning loop to the co-design process. A comparison background case was used as well: the planning of the City of Sports in San Don\ue0 di Piave (Italy). This research has the ambition of creating a new way of decision-making which brings together all stakeholders, including policymakers, that iteratively learn how to address urban challenges. This then results in an implemented co-design process since stakeholders in the end are called to evaluate what they have done. Future implementations of my research would allow the creation of a complete set of guidelines that can be used to solve different urban issues, by triggering the co-creation methodology applied within Urban Living Labs

Crowdsourcing as a participative tool in a landscape conservation initiative at the urbanrural buffer zone: a case study of the Waipu District in Taichung, Taiwan

The built environment in rural settlements located in urban-rural buffer zones increasingly shows urban elements and character in response to the global impact of rapid urbanization. Due to its cultural and agricultural value, preserving natural resources and rural landscape features becomes a pressing contemporary issue. This study focuses on exploring consensus from different stakeholders concerning natural landscape preservation in the rural settlement of Waipu District surrounding the Taichung core metropolitan area. Both desakota mapping with remote sensing data and road curvature were applied to explore the relationship between desakota expansion and road network development. Based on the concepts of crowdsourcing and Google street view (Naik et al., 2014), we also designed an “i-Scoring” platform to elicit participation and collaboration of multiple stakeholders and non-stakeholders. “i-Scoring” collected perceptions of the Waipu landscape, facilitating the evaluation of its attractiveness, ecological value and vulnerability using quantitative benchmarks. The results imply that winding agricultural road networks may play a role in identifying and disrupting emerging illegal industries in Waipu. Agriculture in nature facilitates the development of ecological conservation efforts such as tours. With a total of 1210 clicks, we derived “hot spot” maps using quantitative benchmarks to show areas of high attractiveness, ecological value and vulnerability. Identified hot spot areas are both primary conservation targets and potential areas for ecological tours. This study also allowed us to introduce to stakeholders the Satoyama Initiative (Takeuchi, 2010), whose aim is to help develop socio-ecological production landscapes based on a prosperous agricultural environment

Learning Environment Design and Use

Amid burgeoning international interest in the built environment of education, this SI examines the research, policy, and practice that lies behind the global trends in architecture and pedagogy. It contributes to the developing interdisciplinary understanding of the processes and products of school design at all stages, from ‘visioning’ and brief, through habitation and use, to post-occupancy evaluation. The intention is to build knowledge relating to successful design, educational affordances and outcomes, change management, and the alignment of physical resources with teaching and learning needs. The papers explore the multiprofessional landscape of educational spaces as they are planned, built, and used. Reflecting the diversity of the area, the SI features empirical work using a range of methodologies, transdisciplinary work and novel theoretical framings. It includes co-authored papers whose authorship bridges academic disciplines, research and practice, or research and policy. The over-arching aim was to capture the diversity of research related to learning environments

Climate change and disaster impact reduction

Based on papers presented at the 'UK - South Asia Young Scientists and Practitioners Seminar on Climate Change and Disaster Impact Reduction' held at Kathmandu, Nepal on 5-6 June, 2008

Evaluating the Impact of Nature-Based Solutions: Appendix of Methods

The Handbook aims to provide decision-makers with a comprehensive NBS impact assessment framework, and a robust set of indicators and methodologies to assess impacts of nature-based solutions across 12 societal challenge areas: Climate Resilience; Water Management; Natural and Climate Hazards; Green Space Management; Biodiversity; Air Quality; Place Regeneration; Knowledge and Social Capacity Building for Sustainable Urban Transformation; Participatory Planning and Governance; Social Justice and Social Cohesion; Health and Well-being; New Economic Opportunities and Green Jobs. Indicators have been developed collaboratively by representatives of 17 individual EU-funded NBS projects and collaborating institutions such as the EEA and JRC, as part of the European Taskforce for NBS Impact Assessment, with the four-fold objective of: serving as a reference for relevant EU policies and activities; orient urban practitioners in developing robust impact evaluation frameworks for nature-based solutions at different scales; expand upon the pioneering work of the EKLIPSE framework by providing a comprehensive set of indicators and methodologies; and build the European evidence base regarding NBS impacts. They reflect the state of the art in current scientific research on impacts of nature-based solutions and valid and standardized methods of assessment, as well as the state of play in urban implementation of evaluation frameworks