Assessing design options for a Nutrient Trading System using an integrated model

Water quality in many New Zealand waterways is currently declining leading to lakes and rivers being closed for contact recreation such as swimming and potentially threatening our clean, green image. Much of this decline is associated with an increase in the nutrient loss from agriculture in the surrounding catchment. Nutrient trading systems are being considered in a number of catchments across the county to restrict the nutrient loss entering the waterways and thus improve the water quality. Such a system is currently being implemented in Lake Taupo and Environment Bay of Plenty is exploring actively the use of such a system to manage nutrient loss in the Lake Rotorua catchment. Yet the design of such systems is challenging. In a collaborative effort between Motu, NIWA and GNS-Science, we are developing a spatial, stochastic, dynamic simulation model, N-TRADER to simulate the effect of different aspects of nutrient trading policy for the Lake Rotorua catchment. This model combines the economics of land use and management decision making, the functioning of temporal nutrient allowance markets and a model of nutrient flows and lags and is based on the best available empirical information on the geophysical and economic conditions for this catchment. This paper will discuss the design of N-TRADER and some of the nutrient trading system design questions that we plan to explore with the model including what is the impact of different nutrient caps and what is the impact of higher transaction costs.Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Water Quality Management in Lake Rotorua: A comparison of Regulatory Approaches using the NManager Model

The life satisfaction approach has recently emerged as a new technique in the suite of options available to non-market valuation practitioners. This paper examines the influence of ecosystem diversity on the life satisfaction of residents of South East Queensland, Australia. It is found that, on average, a respondent is willing-to-pay approximately AUD$20,000 in household income per annum to obtain a one-unit improvement in ecosystem diversity. This result indicates that the life satisfaction effects of improvements in ecosystem diversity are substantial, and greater than the welfare effects implied by studies using more conventional non-market valuation techniques.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Does Complex Hydrology Require Complex Water Quality Policy? NManager Simulations for Lake Rotorua

This paper examines six different approaches to nutrient management, and simulates the economic costs and environmental impacts associated with them using NManager, a partial equilibrium simulation model developed by Motu and NIWA, the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research. We focus on Lake Rotorua in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand, where the regional council is concerned with the decline in the lake's water quality and has set a goal to restore the lake to its condition during the 1960s. Reaching this goal will require significant reductions in the amount of nutrients discharged into the lake, especially from non-point sources such as farm land. Managing water quality is made difficult by the presence of groundwater lags in the catchment: nutrients that leach from the soil arrive at the lake over multiple years. The mitigation schemes we consider are land retirement, requiring best practice, explicit nitrogen limits on landowners, a simple nutrient trading scheme, and two more complex trading schemes that account for groundwater lags. We demonstrate that best practice alone is not sufficient to meet the environmental target for Lake Rotorua. Under an export trading scheme, the distribution of mitigation across the catchment is more cost effective than its distribution under explicit limits on landowners or land retirement. However, the more complex trading schemes do not result in sufficient, or sufficiently certain, gains in cost effectiveness over the simple trading scheme to justify the increase in complexity involved in their implementation.groundwater, Lake Rotorua, model, nutrients, nutrient trading, water quality, non-point source pollution

Investigation of the transfer of septum microbial contamination by hypodermic needles

The likelihood of the transfer of microbial contamination from the surface of a vial septum into the vial liquid, by penetration of a hypodermic syringe needle, has been investigated. Experimental work was carried out with vials containing sterile microbial growth media and the use of needles of three different diameters. Three different concentrations of microbes on the surface of the vial septum (10, 100, and 1000) were used. Microbial contamination that was transferred into the growth media was determined by incubation of the vials following penetration of the septum by the needles.Contamination was detected in 87% of all the vials tested, and was generally found to increase as the concentration of septum challenge organisms and needle diameter increased

Fragile X Mental Retardation 1 and Filamin A Interact Genetically in Drosophila Long-Term Memory

The last decade has witnessed the identification of single-gene defects associated with an impressive number of mental retardation syndromes. Fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of mental retardation for instance, results from disruption of the FMR1 gene. Similarly, Periventricular Nodular Heterotopia, which includes cerebral malformation, epilepsy and cognitive disabilities, derives from disruption of the Filamin A gene. While it remains unclear whether defects in common molecular pathways may underlie the cognitive dysfunction of these various syndromes, defects in cytoskeletal structure nonetheless appear to be common to several mental retardation syndromes. FMR1 is known to interact with Rac, profilin, PAK and Ras, which are associated with dendritic spine defects. In Drosophila, disruptions of the dFmr1 gene impair long-term memory (LTM), and the Filamin A homolog (cheerio) was identified in a behavioral screen for LTM mutants. Thus, we investigated the possible interaction between cheerio and dFmr1 during LTM formation in Drosophila. We show that LTM specifically is defective in dFmr1/cheerio double heterozygotes, while it is normal in single heterozygotes for either dFmr1 or cheerio. In dFmr1 mutants, Filamin (Cheerio) levels are lower than normal after spaced training. These observations support the notion that decreased actin cross-linking may underlie the persistence of long and thin dendritic spines in Fragile X patients and animal models. More generally, our results represent the first demonstration of a genetic interaction between mental retardation genes in an in vivo model system of memory formation

In vitro investigation of a terbinafine impregnated subcutaneous implant for veterinary use

A terbinafine impregnated subcutaneous implant was evaluated to determine if drug was released into isotonic saline over the course of 6 months at two different temperatures, 37°C and 4°C. These temperatures were chosen to simulate the nonhibernating (37°C) and hibernating body (4°C) temperatures of little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus). Insectivorous bats of North America, including little brown bats, have been devastated by white nose syndrome, a fungal infection caused by Geomyces destructans. No treatments exist for bats infected with G. destructans. Implants were placed into isotonic saline; samples were collected once per week and analyzed with HPLC to determine terbinafine concentrations. The mean amount of terbinafine released weekly across the 28 weeks was approximately 1.7 μg at 4°C and 4.3 μg at 37°C. Although significant differences in the amount released did occur at some time points, these differences were not consistently greater or less at either of the temperatures. This study showed that terbinafine was released from an impregnated implant over the course of 6 months at concentrations ranging from 0.02 to 0.06 μg/mL depending on temperature, which may be appropriate for little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) infected with Geomyces destructans, the etiologic agent of white nose syndrome

T.I.M.S: TaqMan Information Management System, tools to organize data flow in a genotyping laboratory

BACKGROUND: Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) genotyping is a major activity in biomedical research. The Taqman technology is one of the most commonly used approaches. It produces large amounts of data that are difficult to process by hand. Laboratories not equipped with a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) need tools to organize the data flow. RESULTS: We propose a package of Visual Basic programs focused on sample management and on the parsing of input and output TaqMan files. The code is written in Visual Basic, embedded in the Microsoft Office package, and it allows anyone to have access to those tools, without any programming skills and with basic computer requirements. CONCLUSION: We have created useful tools focused on management of TaqMan genotyping data, a critical issue in genotyping laboratories whithout a more sophisticated and expensive system, such as a LIMS

The international consequences of the EU referendum — LSE Ideas Podcast

Brexit – Britain at the Crossroads: European Consequences, Geopolitical Risks? LSE IDEAS Strategic Breakfast Series, is a private discussion event held at LSE IDEAS exclusively for executive MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy Alumni with leading practitioners and academics. This strategic breakfast assessed the international consequences of the forthcoming referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union

Young People's Views of Government, Peaceful Coexistence, and Diversity in Five Latin American Countries

This open access report presents findings from the five Latin American countries that participated in the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). ICCS 2016 investigated the ways in which a range of countries are preparing their young people to undertake their roles as citizens during the second decade of the 21st century. The study also responded to new challenges in civic and citizenship education, and its findings allow robust comparisons of lower-secondary students’ attitudes to and perceptions of a wide range of aspects related to civics and citizenship. The results presented in this report come mainly from data collected via a regional Latin American student questionnaire. The findings provide insights into Latin American lower-secondary students’ thoughts on government practices (e.g., corruption and authoritarian government), their attitudes toward peaceful coexistence (e.g., use of violence, disobedience to the law, empathy), and their perceptions of diversity in society (e.g., tolerance of and discrimination against minorities and homosexuals). Four of the five participating Latin American countries also participated in the previous cycle of this study (ICCS 2009), making it possible to explore changes in young people’s civic-related perceptions and attitudes between 2009 and 2016. Data from the international part of the study (test and questionnaire) were used to review the extent to which region-specific perceptions relate to other factors such as students’ level of civic knowledge and students’ socioeconomic and educational contexts