Wildlife Population Monitoring

Wildlife management is about finding the balance between conservation of endangered species and mitigating the impacts of overabundant wildlife on humans and the environment. This book deals with the monitoring of fauna, related diseases, and interactions with humans. It is intended to assist and support the professional worker in wildlife management

Profiling and Grouping Space-time Activity Patterns of Urban Individuals

No abstract

Constraints oriented approaches in advancing spatial data infrastructure: case of Southern African Customs Union

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) concept has made in-roads in a number of economies across the world, but Africa, on average is reported as lagging behind in implementation. This status has been confirmed through a number of continental SDI Assessments done in Africa. Africa SDI Assessments average its development as slow, which is problematic considering the fourth industrial revolution where; technology, communication, information and connectivity are the main enablers of political and socio-economic development. The problem of slow SDI development in Africa has acted as a catalyst for this study, with the five Southern African Customs Union (SACU) countries forming the scope for the investigations. This study focussed on investigating SACU countries SDIs and the associated sub-region with the aim of fostering on-going improvement. To do that, the prevailing SDI assessments in Africa were reviewed and utilised to propose a seven stepped constraint-oriented methodological approach as a means for guiding SDI development and progression within SACU. Management theories being; Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Due Diligence (DD) were utilised alongside the well-known SDI assessments of State of play (SoP) and Readiness Index (RI) to propose SDI On-Going Improvement Framework (SDIOGIF). This framework as suggested, has been enhanced using study data collected through documents, websites, workshops, interviews and questionnaires relating to SDIs within the SACU countries. Results from these instruments are revealing fundamental disparities in SDI implementations among study case countries, especially SDI aspects relating to legal frameworks and organisational setups. Some countries possess SDI legal frameworks and others don’t. In addition, these countries are found to base SDIs on varying institutional sectors such as; Surveying and Mapping (Geoinformation), Statistics, Environmental and Information Technology Agencies. Studying these countries’ SDIs, helped in establishing context-based constraints in their advancement. Through inductive reasoning, these constraints are aggregated as; macro-environment, organisation, legal, marketing, financial, management, informational and technology. They are designed into SDIOGIF, to guide country specific SDI improvements and their comparative analysis performed as a pre-cursor to establishing the proposed SACU Regional SDI which is currently non-existent

Indigenous Resilience and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the context of Climate Change

Indigenous peoples, in Taiwan and worldwide, need to come up with various ways to cope with and adapt to rapid environmental change. This edited book, which is a follow-up to a conference entitled “Climate Change, Indigenous Resilience and Local Knowledge Systems: Cross-time and Cross-boundary Perspectives” organized by the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, presents 16 papers which explore the various dimensions of Indigenous resilience to climate change and disasters in Taiwan and other regions in the world. This book explores the interrelated themes of climate change and Indigenous knowledge-based responses, and Indigenous (community) resilience with specific reference to Typhoon Morakot and beyond. The goals of this book are to discuss the international experience with Indigenous resilience; to review Indigenous knowledge for adaptation to climate change and disasters; and to generate a conversation among scholars, Indigenous peoples, and policy-makers to move the agenda forward. This book focusses on Indigenous resilience, the ways in which cultural factors such as knowledge and learning, along with the broader political ecology, determine how local and Indigenous people understand, deal with, and adapt to environmental change

What People Leave Behind

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others

Sustainable Agriculture for Climate Change Adaptation

© 2020 by the authors. This is an open access work distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.As we lie firmly entrenched within what many have termed the Anthropocene, the time of humans, human influence on the functioning of the planet has never been greater or in greater need of mitigation. Climate change, the accelerated warming of the planet’s surface attributed to human activities, is now at the forefront of global politics. The 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP21) Paris Agreement saw a landmark agreement reached between countries belonging to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The agreement seeks to arrest climate change and maintain the global temperature rise below a 2 ◦C increase compared to pre-industrial levels, and to devise means and ways to adapt to its effects. The agriculture sector not only contributes to climate change but, as a land-based industry, is also greatly affected by climate change. This publication is a collection of carefully selected papers addressing multiple climate related issues from across the five continents, providing a truly global perspective