Conservation and “land grabbing” in rangelands: Part of the problem or part of the solution?

Large-scale land acquisitions have increased in scale and pace due to changes in commodity markets, agricultural investment strategies, land prices, and a range of other policy and market forces. The areas most affected are the global “commons” – lands that local people traditionally use collectively — including much of the world’s forests, wetlands, and rangelands. In some cases land acquisition occurs with environmental objectives in sight – including the setting aside of land as protected areas for biodiversity conservation. On the other hand, current trends and patterns of commercial land acquisition present a major and growing threat not just to local livelihoods and human rights, but also to conservation objectives. There is a potential opportunity here for greater collaboration between conservation interests, and local communities’ land rights interests with their supporters amongst human rights and social justice movements. This Issue Paper documents experiences from the rangelands of Mongolia, Kenya, India, Ethiopia, and other countries, which were presented at a Conference on Conservation and Land Grabbing held in London in 2013

Transverse and Longitudinal Profile Measurements at the KARA Booster Synchrotron

In the booster synchrotron of the Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA), the beam is injected from the microtron at 53 MeV and ramped up to 500 MeV. Though the injected beam current from the microtron to the booster seems good, the injection efficiency into the booster is currently low due to various effects. Consequently, an upgrade of the whole beam diagnostics system is taking place in the booster, in order to improve the injection efficiency through understanding the loss mechanisms and the behavior of bunches. Among these diagnostics tools are beam loss monitors, a transverse profile monitor and a longitudinal profile monitor. In this paper, we will describe the setups used for bunch profile measurements in both transverse and longitudinal planes and report on first data analysis results