Challenges of Organic Arable Farming - 6th module: Recovery and final synthesis

This module summarizes the online course "Challenges of Organic Arable Farming". This module is targeting students, farmers, advisors. The module is based on a PowerPoint presentation containing a theoretical background and supported by related specific tools (practice abstracts, leaflets, guidelines, data calculation tools, videos, books, reports, web pages) taken from the OK-Net Arable Knowledge platform (www.organic-farmknowledge.org). All modules Challenges of Organic Arable Farming 1st module: Strategies to enhance soil fertility and assessment of soil fertility and quality (https://orgprints.org/35291/) Challenges of Organic Arable Farming 2nd module: Fertilization strategies to enhance nutrient availability in organic arable crops (https://orgprints.org/35292) Challenges of Organic Arable Farming 3rd module: Monitoring, preventive and curative measures for pest and disease management (https://orgprints.org/35293/) Challenges of Organic Arable Farming 4th module: Technical tools, strategies and machineries to tackle weeds in organic arable farming (https://orgprints.org/35294/) Challenges of Organic Arable Farming 5th module: Crops specific problems and potential solutions in cereals, legumes, fruits and vegetables (https://orgprints.org/35295/

D 4.2: Facilitated and self-learning courses

The Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari CIHEAM-Bari produced this report as a part of the Organic Knowledge Network Arable (OK-Net Arable) project, Work Package 4. CIHEAM-Bari has developed two facilitated courses and a self-learning one according to the international E-Learning standards to promote the use of end-user material beyond the farmer innovation groups and the knowledge platform of the project. This report provides a description of these courses. Facilitated courses were developed using Leaning Management System (LMS) on the CIHEAM-Bari e-learning platform and were addressed to 70 participants from 26 countries (77% European countries and 23% non EU Mediterranean countries). Participants represented different institutions and profiles, such as ministries of agriculture, Universities, associations, certification bodies, farmers, private companies, research centres, extension services etc. The self-learning course is delivered on the project knowledge platform to be followed indefinitely by users even after the end of the project

Model Coupling for Environmental Flows, with Applications in Hydrology and Coastal Hydrodynamics.

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of “model coupling” methods and issues in the area of environmental hydrodynamics, particularly coastal hydrodynamics and surface/subsurface hydrology. To this end, we will examine specific coupled phenomena in order to illustrate coupling hypotheses and methods, and to gain new insights from analyses of modelling results in comparison with experiments. Although this is to some extent a review of recent works, nevertheless, some of the methods and results discussed here were not published before, and some of the analyses are new. Moreover, this study is part of a more general framework concerning various types of environmental interactions, such as: interactions between soil water flow (above the water table) and groundwater flow (below the water table); interactions between surface and subsurface waters in fluvial environments (streams, floodplains); interactions between coastal flow processes and porous structures (e.g. sea‑driven oscillations and waves through sand beach or a porous dike); feedback effects of flow systems on the geo‑environmental media. This paper starts with a general review of conceptual coupling approaches, after which we present specific modelling and coupling methods for dealing with hydrological flows with surface water / groundwater interactions, and with coastal flows involving the propagation of seawater oscillations through a porous beach (vertically and horizontally). The following topics are treated. (1) Coupled stream‑aquifer plane flow in an alluvial river valley (quasi‑steady seasonal flow regime), assuming aquifer/stream continuity, and using in situ piezometric measurements for comparisons. (2) Water table oscillations induced by sea waves, and propagating through the beach in the cross‑shore direction: this phenomenon is studied numerically and experimentally using a wave canal with an inclined beach equipped with capacitive micro‑piezometers. (3) Tidally driven vertical oscillations of water flow and capillary pressure in a partially saturated / unsaturated sand beach column, studied numerically and experimentally via a “tide machine” contraption (described in some detail): the goal is to apprehend the role of capillary effects, and forcing frequency, on the hydraulic response of a beach column forced by tides from below. At the time of this writing, some of the results from the tide machine are being reinterpreted (ongoing work). We also point out a recent study of vertical flow in the beach, which focuses on the effect of intermittent waves in the swash zone, rather than tidal oscillations

Oral Health and Quality of Life: A Clinic-Based Sample

Attachment loss due to periodontal diseases is associated with functional limitations as well as physical pain and psychological discomfort, which may lead to a reduced quality of life. This manuscript is intended to answer the question, if periodontal status has an effect on oral health related quality of life. Survey data were collected in an U.S. dental school clinical setting from n=97 adults (54% females, average age 51 years) in a cross- sectional study. Quality of life related to oral health was assessed with the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-49). Additional measures using the DMFT index, periodontal status, dental anxiety, as well as health literacy scores (dental and medical health literacy) were recorded and statistically analyzed. Descriptive statistics, including ANOVA and the t-test for comparison of scores within the cohort and Spearman’s correlation coefficient as well as a logistic regression model were used for further data analysis.44% of the subjects were identified as periodontitis cases (PC). These periodontitis cases demonstrated significantly lower OHIP-49 scores (66.93 ± 30.72) than subjects without signs of periodontal diseases (NP) (32.40 ± 19.27, p\u3c0.05). There was also a significant difference between NP patients and patients with Gingivitis (66.24 ± 46.12, p\u3c0.05). In an attempt to incorporate the new periodontal staging classification and distinguish between stages of disease, it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between Stage 3 (severe) Periodontitis and Health (p = 0.003). Pearson correlations were completed and positive relationships were found with OHIP and DMFT (0.206, p\u3c0.05), Modified Dental Anxiety (MDAS) (0.310, p\u3c0.05), and Periodontal Risk Self- Assessment (PRSA) (0.237, p\u3c0.05).Periodontal diseases may negatively impact the oral health-related quality of life. Patients suffering from periodontitis also showed more missing teeth, which might have an effect on function. In addition to missing teeth, poorer overall quality of life is correlated with the patient’s perceived assessment of self-risk as well as dental anxiety

Leptonic Decays of Heavy Quarks on the Lattice

The status of lattice calculations of heavy-light decay constants and of the $B$ parameter $B_B$ is reviewed. After describing the lattice approach to heavy quark systems, the main results are discussed, with special emphasis on the systematic errors in present lattice calculations. A detailed analysis of the continuum limit for decay constants is performed. The implications of lattice results on studies of CP violation in the Standard Model are discussed.Comment: Invited review to be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, 63 pages, LaTeX, ijmpa1.sty (included), 8 postscript figure

Remote Sensing Studies of Urban Canopies: 3D Radiative Transfer Modeling

Need for better understanding and more accurate estimation of radiative fluxes in urban environments, specifically urban surface albedo and exitance, motivates development of new remote sensing and three‐dimensional (3D) radiative transfer (RT) modeling methods. The discrete anisotropic radiative transfer (DART) model, one of the most comprehensive physically based 3D models simulating Earth/atmosphere radiation interactions, was used in combination with satellite data (e.g., Landsat‐8 observations) to better parameterize the radiative budget components of cities, such as Basel in Switzerland. After presenting DART and its recent RT modeling functions, we present a methodological concept for estimating urban fluxes using any satellite image data

The effect of proteinases (keratinases) in the pathogenesis of dermatophyte infection using Scanning Electron Microscope

Objective: To study the inter-relationship between the stratum corneum of host and the fungal microorganisms using scanning electron microscopy for a complete understanding of the host parasite relationship. Setting: The patients attended the outpatients of Department of Dermatology, King Abdul Aziz Hospital Makkah. The isolation & identification was carried out at the Department of Mycology University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, U.K. Material and Methods: Skin surface biopsies were obtained from two patients suffering from tinea cruris infection. One patient was infected with Trichophyton rubrum and the other with Epidermophyton floccosum strains. Results: The scanning electron microphotographs obtained from two patients showed a large number of villi in the infected area. The fungal hyphae were seen to be placed intercellularly as well seem to be transversing through the corneocytes in many places. Conclusion: From the results observed in this study it could be suggested that the secretion of proteinases from the fungal hyphae together with the mechanical force of the invading organisms in vivo might be playing part in the invasion of the organisms

An Efficient Method for Quantifying the Aggregate Flexibility of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Populations

Plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are widely recognized as being highly flexible electric loads that can be pooled and controlled via aggregators to provide low-cost energy and ancillary services to wholesale electricity markets. To participate in these markets, an EV aggregator must encode the aggregate flexibility of the population of EVs under their command as a single polytope that is compliant with existing market rules. To this end, we investigate the problem of characterizing the aggregate flexibility set of a heterogeneous population of EVs whose individual flexibility sets are given as convex polytopes in half-space representation. As the exact computation of the aggregate flexibility set -- the Minkowski sum of the individual flexibility sets -- is known to be intractable, we study the problems of computing maximum-volume inner approximations and minimum-volume outer approximations to the aggregate flexibility set by optimizing over affine transformations of a given convex polytope in half-space representation. We show how to conservatively approximate the pair of maximum-volume and minimum-volume set containment problems as linear programs that scale polynomially with the number and dimension of the individual flexibility sets. The class of approximations methods provided in this paper generalizes existing methods from the literature. We illustrate the improvement in approximation accuracy achievable by our methods with numerical experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

A Distributionally Robust Approach to Regret Optimal Control using the Wasserstein Distance

This paper proposes a distributionally robust approach to regret optimal control of discrete-time linear dynamical systems with quadratic costs subject to stochastic additive disturbance on the state process. The underlying probability distribution of the disturbance process is unknown, but assumed to lie in a given ball of distributions defined in terms of the type-2 Wasserstein distance. In this framework, strictly causal linear disturbance feedback controllers are designed to minimize the worst-case expected regret. The regret incurred by a controller is defined as the difference between the cost it incurs in response to a realization of the disturbance process and the cost incurred by the optimal noncausal controller which has perfect knowledge of the disturbance process realization at the outset. Building on a well-established duality theory for optimal transport problems, we show how to equivalently reformulate this minimax regret optimal control problem as a tractable semidefinite program. The equivalent dual reformulation also allows us to characterize a worst-case distribution achieving the worst-case expected regret in relation to the distribution at the center of the Wasserstein ball.Comment: 6 page

Modélisation des écoulements en milieu poreux hétérogènes 2D / 3D, avec couplages surface / souterrain et densitaires

Dans ce travail, on considère la modélisation des écoulements dans des hydro-systèmes comprenant des sols et des aquifères géologiquement complexes et hétérogènes. On considèrera par exemple le cas d’un aquifère côtier soumis à l’intrusion saline, avec couplage densitaire (eau douce / eau salée), phénomène auquel peuvent se greffer d’autres couplages (écoulements à saturation variable, couplages surface / souterrain). On choisit une approche ayant les caractéristiques suivantes : - le modèle est spatialement distribué afin de représenter l’hétérogénéité du milieu ; - le modèle est fortement couplé afin d’appréhender les écoulements dans leur complexité physique. On utilise dans ce but un modèle fortement intégré, à une seule équation générique de type EDP, basée sur une loi de Darcy généralisée permettant de décrire différents "régimes" d’écoulements la co-existant dans un même domaine, tout en conservant robustesse et efficacité. Le travail est divisé en trois parties : dans une première partie on élabore un nouveau modèle numérique 3D, pour la modélisation des écoulements en milieux poreux à densité variable dans l’hypothèse d’une interface abrupte. Ce nouveau modèle est basé sur des relations ‘effectives’ non linéaires de saturation et de perméabilité, dans une équation d’écoulement de type Richards modifiée. La seconde partie correspond à l’élaboration et l’implémentation d’un modèle verticalement intégré d’intrusion saline en aquifère côtier, permettant d’étudier l’effet de l’hétérogénéité stochastique de l’aquifère. Le modèle, basé sur l’hypothèse ‘interface abrupte’, est implémenté comme un module ‘2D’ dans le code volumes finis BigFlow2D/3D. Le nouveau module 2D est utilisé pour analyser la variabilité de l’interface eau douce / eau salée par simulations stochastiques de type Monte Carlo à échantillonnage spatial (réalisation unique). Ces résultats sont comparés à nouvelle théorie, où l’interface aléatoire auto-corrélée est analysée par transformation de variable, combinée à une méthode de perturbation et à une représentation spectrale (Fourier / Wiener-Khinchine). Dans la troisième et dernière partie, on présente un modèle de couplage fortement "intégré" pour la modélisation des écoulements de surface et souterrain en hypothèses d’écoulement plan, verticalement hydrostatique. On s‘intéresse au cas d’une vallée fluviale avec cours d’eau, plaine d’inondation, et nappe d’accompagnement. L’écoulement en surface est modélisé par l’équation d’onde diffusante et l’écoulement souterrain par l’équation de Dupuit-Boussinesq. Ce modèle couplé est appliqué à la vallée fluviale de la Garonne dans la région de Toulouse - Moissac (France). Cette application a nécessité l’élaboration d’une méthode d’interpolation géostatistique adaptée à l’élaboration d’un Modèle Intégré Numérique de Terrain (‘MINT’), de façon à inclure le fond de la rivière au MNT topographique en haute résolution. Enfin, au-delà de cette application particulière, le modèle d’écoulement couplé surface / souterrain est généralisé au cas d’un couplage densitaire eau douce / eau salée, lorsque la nappe est sujette à l’intrusion saline au voisinage d’une embouchure ou d’un estuaire. ABSTRACT : In this work, we consider water flow modeling in hydro-systems that include geologically complex and heterogeneous soils and aquifers, e.g., a coastal aquifer undergoing seawater intrusion, with density coupling (freshwater / saltwater), along with other coupled phenomena (variable saturation, surface / subsurface coupling). The selected approach has the following characteristics: - the model is spatially distributed in order to represent the heterogeneity of the medium ; - the model is strongly coupled in order to apprehend the physical complexity of flow systems. We use for this purpose a strongly integrated model, governed by a single generic equation (PDE) based on generalized Darcy law, to describe different flow ‘regimes’ co-existing in the same domain, while conserving robustness and efficiency. The work is divided into three parts: in the first part, we develop a new 3D numerical model for variable density flow in porous media under the sharp interface approximation. This new model is based on non-linear ‘effective’ saturation and conductivity relations, in a modified Richards flow equation. The second part corresponds to the development and implementation of a vertically integrated saltwater intrusion model, to study the effect of stochastic heterogeneity in a coastal aquifer. The model, based on the sharp interface hypothesis, is implemented as a 2D module in the finite volumes code BigFlow 2D/3D. The new module is used for analyzing the variability of the salt / fresh interface through Monte Carlo simulations with spatial sampling (single realization). These results are compared to a new theory where the random field interface is analyzed via a transformation combined to a perturbation method and a spectral representation (Fourier / Wiener-Khinchine). In the third and last part, we present a strongly integrated model to simulate coupled surface / subsurface plane flows, such as a river valley with stream, floodplain, and free surface aquifer. Surface flow is modeled via the diffusive wave equation, and subsurface flow is modeled using the Dupuit-Boussinesq equation. This coupled model is applied to the Garonne river valley in the Toulouse-Moissac region (France). This application has required the elaboration of a geostatistical interpolation technique that produces an Integrated Digital Elevation Model (‘IDEM’). The IDEM incorporates a high resolution representation of river channels into the topographic DEM. Finally, beyond this specific application, the coupled surface / subsurface model is generalized to the case of salt / fresh density coupling, where the aquifer is subject to saltwater intrusion near a river mouth or an estuar