An Evaluation of Conservation Reserve Lands in Relation to Pheasant Production and Survival

The ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) is one of the most important upland game species over much of the nation. It is also one of the most difficult to effectively manage for the increasing hunter population. The high value of agricultural lands renders habitat improvement programs by state agencies a financial impossibility except on an extremely localized basis. Therefore, the primary pheasant management tool largely remains hunting season manipulation. The federal government through various agricultural programs may have an influence upon pheasant habitat. Public Law 540 entitled Agricultural Act of 1956, more commonly referred to as the Soil Bank Act (Congress, 84th, 2d Session 1956, 1957), seemed quite promising in this respect. This act provided for two programs, the Acreage Reserve and the Conservation Reserve. The first was a short term program and of negligible value for pheasants. The second was of longer duration and is the one under which remaining Soil Bank lands are included. Under the Conservation Reserve, cropland was taken out of production and a sound conservation practice established in an attempt to balance the total production and demand of surplus crops. Farmers signed contracts for periods of three to ten years. The federal government then shared the cost of establishing conservation practices and made annual payments for maintaining them during the contract periods. The Conservation Reserve program has not been extended since 1960. Consequently, all remaining contracts will have expired by the end of 1971. Relatively little Conservation Reserve land has been put into G practices specifically designed for wildlife. These include such things as wildlife food and cover plantings, development or restoration of shallow water areas, and construction of ponds and wildlife watering facilities. Instead, the bulk of wildlife benefits will have to be derived from the A-2 practice, the establishment of permanent vegetative cover, since this is the one most widely employed. Any appraisal of the Conservation Reserve then is, in actuality, an evaluation of habitat provided by the A-2 practice

Operational performance of the machine protection systems of the Large Hadron Collider during Run 2 and lessons learnt for the LIU/HL-LHC era

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has successfully completed its second operational run in December 2018. To allow for the completion of the diverse physics program at 6.5 TeV, the machine has been routinely operating with stored beam energies up to 300 MJ per beam during high intensity proton runs as well as being frequently reconfigured to allow for special physics runs and important machine development studies. No major damage has incurred to the accelerator equipment throughout the run thanks to the excellent performance of the various machine protection systems. However, a number of important observations and new failure scenarios have been identified, which have been studied experimentally as well as through detailed simulations. In this contribution we provide an overview of the operational performance of the machine protection systems throughout Run 2 as well as the important lessons learnt that will impact consolidation actions and future designs of the machine protection systems for the LIU/HL-LHC era

Pharmaceutical firms and the construction of drug markets: from branding to scientific marketing. Introduction

International audienc

Performance of the CERN Injector Complex and Transmission Studies into the LHC during the Second Proton-Lead Run

The LHC performance during the proton-lead run in 2016 fully relied on a permanent monitoring and systematic improvement of the beam quality in all the injectors. The beam production and characteristics are explained in this paper, together with the improvements realized during the run from the source up to the flat top of the LHC. Transmission studies from one accelerator to the next as well as beam quality evolution studies during the cycle at each accelerator, have been carried out and are summarized in this paper. In 2016, the LHC had to deliver the beams to the experiments at two different energies, 4 Z TeV and 6.5 Z TeV. The properties of the beams at these two energies are also presente