Market Research and the Land Grant/USDA Communicator

The word marketing evokes a variety of meanings. Sales, advertising, and publicity are just a few terms used synonymously. However, marketing, in the contemporary sense, is much more. It is a total systems approach to an organization\u27s relationship with its constitutents, whether they be customers or the taxpaying public

Tennessee Extension Broadcasting: Developing a Public Information Tool During Radio\u27s Golden Years

Public information sits in a delicate balance. On Ihe one hand, in a free and open democracy, the government must inform people of its activities. On Ihe other, any information activities of its agencies are open to charges of partisan propaganda

Staff Training Needs For Dealing with Developing Communication Technologies

Communication specialists within the USDA/land-grant educational system must be more than media producers. They must be educators, not necessarily of the general public, but of the personnel of the system for which they work. To be successful educators, they must know their subject, how to teach it, and what their students need to learn. For the communication specialist, a major challenge is to understand and train clients (subject matter specialists, field agents and administrators) for the Information Age. The study reported here suggests one way to gauge and evaluate needs for training in developing communication technologies by scrutinizing one client group. All of the nation\u27s Extension clothing specialists were asked how they were using traditional and innovative media in their educational programs (Anderson & Browning, 1986). In the process, they prioritized their information technology training needs

The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country’s international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics which allows to productively conceptualize the connection between a state’s transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and non-compliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth and justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia’s limited politics of accountability towards the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics

Mapping Large-Area Landscape Suitability for Honey Bees to Assess the Influence of Land-Use Change on Sustainability of National Pollination Services

<div><p>Pollination is a critical ecosystem service affected by various drivers of land-use change, such as policies and programs aimed at land resources, market values for crop commodities, local land-management decisions, and shifts in climate. The United States is the world's most active market for pollination services by honey bees, and the Northern Great Plains provide the majority of bee colonies used to meet the Nation's annual pollination needs. Legislation requiring increased production of biofuel crops, increasing commodity prices for crops of little nutritional value for bees in the Northern Great Plains, and reductions in government programs aimed at promoting land conservation are converging to alter the regional landscape in ways that challenge beekeepers to provide adequate numbers of hives for national pollination services. We developed a spatially explicit model that identifies sites with the potential to support large apiaries based on local-scale land-cover requirements for honey bees. We produced maps of potential apiary locations for North Dakota, a leading producer of honey, based on land-cover maps representing (1) an annual time series compiled from existing operational products and (2) a realistic scenario of land change. We found that existing land-cover products lack sufficient local accuracy to monitor actual changes in landscape suitability for honey bees, but our model proved informative for evaluating effects on suitability under scenarios of land change. The scenario we implemented was aligned with current drivers of land-use change in the Northern Great Plains and highlighted the importance of conservation lands in landscapes intensively and extensively managed for crops.</p></div

Results from a scenario of land-use change (note: 1 dot = 1 apiary location).

<p>A scenario influenced by high commodity prices and incentives to expand production of biofuel crops resulted in a loss of local landscapes suitable for apiaries. The distribution of all grassland centroids meeting criteria to support large apiaries in 2002 (A), prior to land-change incentives, is more extensive than in 2010 (B), subsequent to incentives. The same is true for the distribution of CRP centroids that met the apiary criteria in 2002 (C) versus 2010 (D).</p

Landscape criteria used to identify potential locations for apiaries that would ensure sources of pollen and nectar throughout the growing season in the Northern Great Plains.

a<p>Occurrence of deciduous trees and shrubs in the Northern Great Plains generally is limited to windbreaks, fence lines, riparian corridors, and landscaping around houses.</p>b<p>Land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. Of particular interest for honey bees are grasslands rich in leguminous species because they offer long-flowering land cover with good sources of pollen and nectar.</p>c<p>The first cutting of alfalfa for hay typically is done prior to blooming, but flowers are present following re-growth between subsequent cuttings.</p>d<p>Acres (ac) are the unit of measure for the property system in the United States and are provided here because they relate to multiples of standard crop field sizes.</p>e<p>Bees collect water for evaporative cooling in the hive, so our criteria recognize this landscape requirement in addition to sources of pollen and nectar.</p

Predicted versus registered apiary locations (note: 1 dot = 1 apiary location).

<p>The cropland data we used had the highest mapping accuracies for the three crops of interest in 2002 (metadata on accuracy for all years is available through <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0099268#pone.0099268-US14" target="_blank">[82]</a>). The distribution of sites we predicted to support large apiaries in 2002 (A) shares general similarities with apiaries registered for 2002 (B). Distribution of registered sites has grown more dense over time, as shown by a map of sites registered for 2010 (C). Hand-delineated areas of particular agreement (1, 2, and 3) and disagreement (4 and 5) of point distribution patterns between predicted and registered apiaries in 2002 (D), as described in the <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0099268#s4" target="_blank">Discussion</a>.</p

Geospatial processing schematic for compiling annual land-cover maps.

<p>We extracted land-cover components needed to meet criteria shown in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0099268#pone-0099268-t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a> and saved them as separate gridded layers at 10-m cell resolution to retain needed spatial detail. We then summarized the proportion of area per hectare for each land-cover type (except wetlands, for which we recorded only presence/absence) and saved results as separate gridded layers at 100-m cell resolution to reduce the dimensions of the data layers. We used a moving filter of 57×57 cells to tally land-cover elements over an area comparable with the forage zone for honey bees, and queried the tallies for grassland locations we previously had identified as potential sites for placing apiaries. Figure abbreviations: NASS – National Agricultural Statistics Service, CRP – Conservation Reserve Program, NDGAP – North Dakota GAP Analysis Program, NWI – National Wetlands Inventory.</p

Approach we used versus future algorithm modification for identifying potential grassland sites for placing apiaries.

<p>We identified centroids (grassland locations for potential apiary sites) based on criteria for minimum extent of grassland acreage and proximity to roads (A). Density of potential site locations would increase if, instead of using grassland centroids, we applied the spatial framework of the U.S. Public Land Survey System used for registering apiary locations (B). We could maintain our same criteria for grassland extent and road access, but could have multiple apiaries within a large grassland patch, a situation that often occurs in the actual landscape. Figure abbreviations: CRP – Conservation Reserve Program, NDGAP – North Dakota GAP Analysis Program, PLSS – Public Land Survey System.</p