Bionomics of the alder sawfly, Fenusa dohrnii (Tischbein)

Imperial Users onl

Integrating research and teaching in higher education: Conceptual issues

Integrating new knowledge created through research with teaching has become an important area that needs prompt attention with the growing emphasis on student learning activities, quality assurance procedures and research funding mechanisms within the UK higher education system. The link between research and teaching is not automatic. Thus, it needs to be created in higher education departments in order to achieve a productive relationship and manage research activities of university staff with teaching duties. The research study, on which this paper is based on, aims to develop principles in relation to transferring research knowledge into teaching through a literature review and case studies. The paper reports conceptual issues related to such a transfer process based on the literature findings

MODELLING AGRO·FORESTRY SYSTEMS FOR IMPROVED ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE: A COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

Despite promising ecological features of various agro-Iorestry systems, adoption or thesesystems by farmers is not always encouraging. This is not surprising. as fanners areoperating in a highly competitive commercial environment. where priority is given toeconomic goals rather than environmental goals. One solution is to develop AF modelswith species combinations that generate economic returns comparable to competingenterprises. simultaneously with environmental benefits.The main objective of the current study is to investigate species combinations withimproved economic performance. Here two AF practices in Sri Lanka, namely, coconutinter cropping and avenue cropping based on Gliricidia were considered. lnformationgathered both from primary and secondary sources were used in the study. A number ofpotential crops were categorized according to their income generating and resourceutilisation patterns. Among them, there are perennials, semi perennials as well as seasonalcrops. Two AF models were developed using Linear Programming technique. Modelsproposed jak, banana, pepper and coffee as the inter cropping combination which gives thehighest economic performance under coconut based systems. In case of avenue croppingwith Gliricidia, number of legumes and cereals along with banana was selected as theoptimum combination. The economic performance of the developed models were assessedby cost-benefit analysis and their implications on a selected set of economic parametershave been discussed.The whole exercise shows that, species combination of a system is an important aspectwhich determines the economic performance of the system. It further suggests that speciescombination can be manipulated to generate models with desired economic characteristics.Therefore, challenge ahead is to design models with species combinations that find ahalance between economic and environmental objectives.

Quantifying and Controlling Prethermal Nonergodicity in Interacting Floquet Matter

The use of periodic driving for synthesizing many-body quantum states depends crucially on the existence of a prethermal regime, which exhibits drive-tunable properties while forestalling the effects of heating. This dependence motivates the search for direct experimental probes of the underlying localized nonergodic nature of the wave function in this metastable regime. We report experiments on a many-body Floquet system consisting of atoms in an optical lattice subjected to ultrastrong sign-changing amplitude modulation. Using a double-quench protocol, we measure an inverse participation ratio quantifying the degree of prethermal localization as a function of tunable drive parameters and interactions. We obtain a complete prethermal map of the drive-dependent properties of Floquet matter spanning four square decades of parameter space. Following the full time evolution, we observe sequential formation of two prethermal plateaux, interaction-driven ergodicity, and strongly frequency-dependent dynamics of long-time thermalization. The quantitative characterization of the prethermal Floquet matter realized in these experiments, along with the demonstration of control of its properties by variation of drive parameters and interactions, opens a new frontier for probing far-from-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics and new possibilities for dynamical quantum engineering

CHANGING LAND USES AND RAPID DECLINE OF FOREST COVER THE ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

Sri Lanka provides a classic example for rapid tropical deforestation. Just over a period of;1 century. its forest cover has been reduced to a quarter of what it used to he.Consequences of this degradation process have been discussed widely. However, littleattention was directed to identify the causes and nature of this process in detailed manner.Therefore this paper attempts to identify and discuss some of the important causal factorsresponsible for decline of the forest cover in the country. The main objective of thisexercise is to derive useful policy implications that arc important for sustainablemanagement of forest resources .A wide variety of factors could be identified as causal factors of this trend. Broadly, theyGill be catcgoriscd as physical and socio-economic factors. The paper direct its attentionmainly towards socio-economic factors associated with agricultural development efforts ofthe country.The history of deforestation was traced in relation to the historical evolution of policiesresponsible for expansion of agricultural land uses in the country. Emergence ofcompeting uses for forestlands and other economic activities were reviewed comparatively,giving attention to development priorities of different time periods. Simultaneously, itdraws from variety of sources on demographic and socio-economic development of thecountry too. The factors that arc important in national and local scales also werediscussed.Rased on the above exercise. some policy implications were derived. They arc discussed inthe context of priorities of the forest policy identified by the Forestry Sector master Plan(1995). Some rccomrncnd.uions also were made based on the findings of the study.