Comparing the cost-effectiveness of water conservation policies in a depleting aquifer: a dynamic analysis of the Kansas High Plains

This research analyzes two groundwater conservation policies in the Kansas High Plains located within the Ogallala aquifer: 1) cost-share assistance to increase irrigation efficiency; and 2) incentive payments to convert irrigated crop production to dryland crop production. To compare the cost-effectiveness of these two policies, a dynamic model simulated a representative irrigator’s optimal technology choice, crop selection, and irrigation water use over time. The results suggest that the overall water-saving effectiveness can be improved when different policy tools are considered under different conditions. High prevailing crop prices greatly reduce irrigators’ incentive to give up irrigation and therefore cause low enrollment and ineffectiveness of the incentive payment program. In areas with low aquifer-saturated thickness, the incentive payment program is more effective, whereas in areas with relatively higher water availability, the cost-share program could be a better choice

The Impact of Weather Extremes on Agricultural Production Methods: Does Drought Increase Adoption of Conservation Tillage Practices?

The adoption of conservation tillage practices such as ridge till, mulch till, or no-till has been shown to reduce soil erosion. An additional benefit of these conservation practices is that they also increase soil moisture. Therefore, these practices appear to be a method that agricultural producers can use to reduce their risk associated with abnormally dry or wet conditions (i.e., drought or flood). Given the large amount of money spent by the USDA on crop insurance indemnity and ad-hoc disaster relief payments, practices that reduce the risk of drought to the farmer should be strongly encouraged. Using SUR estimation with random effects, the paper uses panel data to measure the impact of extreme weather events on the adoption of conservation tillage. Panel data allows the identification of differences in adoption rates as a function of the severity of the drought or flood event. The adoption of no-till, alternative conservation tillage, and reduced till are estimated relative to conventional tillage. Both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions are found to increase the adoption of conservation tillage; while extremely wet conditions increase the adoption of both no-till and other conservation tillage practices.Farm Management,

Structure and tanning properties of dialdehyde carboxymethyl cellulose: Effect of degree of substitution

Content: Developing novel tanning agents from renewable biomass is regarded as an effective strategy for sustainable leather industry. In this study, a series of dialdehyde carboxymethyl cellulose (DCMC) were prepared by periodate oxidation of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) with varying degrees of substitution (DS: 0.7, 0.9 and 1.2). The structural properties of DCMC were characterized. Size Exclusive Chromatography measurements showed that CMC underwent severe degradation during periodate oxidation, resulting in the decline of weight-average molecular weight from 250,000 g/mol to around 13,000 g/mol. FT-IR analysis illustrated that aldehyde group was successfully introduced into DCMC. The aldehyde group content of DCMC decreased from 8.38 mmol/g to 2.95 mmol/g as the DS rose from 0.7 to 1.2. Interestingly, formaldehyde was found to be produced in DCMC, and its content was 159.4, 151.7 and 38.4 mg/L, respectively when the DS of CMC was 0.7, 0.9 and 1.2, respectively. Further analysis by HPLC found that fructose was formed during oxidative degradation, and was subsequently oxidized to generate formaldehyde. This was in accordance with the fact that higher DS resulted in lower formaldehyde content in DCMC. The whole reaction mechanism is still under investigation at the moment. Tanning trials showed that the shrinkage temperature and thickening rate of DCMC tanned leather decreased as the DS increased. This should be due to the difference in aldehyde content of DCMC. Leather tanned by DCMC-0.7 (DS of CMC was 0.7) had the highest shrinkage temperature of 81°C and thickening rate of 76%. It was noteworthy that the formaldehyde content in DCMC tanned leather was only 0.11-0.40 mg/kg even though DCMC contained a small amount of formaldehyde. In general, we hope the work on dialdehyde tanning agent derived from CMC could provide some essential data for the development of sustainable tanning material and process. Take-Away: 1. Higher degree of substitution (DS) of CMC resulted in lower aldehyde group content of DCMC. 2. The formaldehyde content of DCMC was negatively correlated with DS. 3. The tanning performance of DCMC with lower DS was better

Lepton pair production in UPCs: towards the precision test of the resummation formalism

We present a detailed investigation of the azimuthal asymmetries and acoplanarity in lepton pair production in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs). These observables provide a unique opportunity to test the SCET resummation formalism, given the extremely high photon flux in UPCs, which enables precise measurements of these processes. We improve the accuracy of the previous calculations by including the soft photon contributions beyond the double leading logarithm approximation. Notably, the single logarithm terms arising from the collinear region are greatly enhanced by the small mass of the leptons. Our findings demonstrate the accessibility of these sub-leading logarithm resummation effects through the analysis of angular correlations in lepton pairs produced in UPCs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Comparative mapping of sequence-based and structure-based protein domains

BACKGROUND: Protein domains have long been an ill-defined concept in biology. They are generally described as autonomous folding units with evolutionary and functional independence. Both structure-based and sequence-based domain definitions have been widely used. But whether these types of models alone can capture all essential features of domains is still an open question. METHODS: Here we provide insight on domain definitions through comparative mapping of two domain classification databases, one sequence-based (Pfam) and the other structure-based (SCOP). A mapping score is defined to indicate the significance of the mapping, and the properties of the mapping matrices are studied. RESULTS: The mapping results show a general agreement between the two databases, as well as many interesting areas of disagreement. In the cases of disagreement, the functional and evolutionary characteristics of the domains are examined to determine which domain definition is biologically more informative