Green Carbon: Making sustainable agriculture real

The concept of sustainable development has evolved from a mere movement for the protection of the environment, to other multidimensional approaches. Indeed, today it calls for a holistic approach, seeking to preserve and improve not only the environment, but also to achieve social equity and economic sustainability. In Europe, society demands quality and safe products, not only in the industrial sector but also in agriculture. According to FAO, sustainable agriculture development is a key element of the new global challenges to meet human food security needs at 2050. Unsustainable practices based on intensive soil tillage and agro-chemical applications have increased agri-environmental risks. Whereas world’s food needs are expected to increase by 70% by 2050, agricultural land in Europe will also have to face environmental, economic and social challenges related to sustainable agriculture. As a result, in the EU 2020 Strategy, it is expressed that the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is required to contribute to smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, enhancing social well-being, providing ecosystem services, managing resources sustainably while avoiding environmental degradation. There is broad consensus within the scientific sector that human actions generate a large portion of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, causing global warming. Certainly, Kyoto Protocol states it. According to the European Environmental Agency (EEA), there has been a decrease of 17% in GHG emissions between 1990 and 2009. However, EEA also stressed the importance of the agricultural contribution to total emissions (10.3%). The fossil fuel used in agricultural field operations, along with increasing CO2 emissions from soil through tillage, are considered to be one of the main direct sources of GHG emissions from agriculture sector. Increased inputs required to sustain conventional agriculture also adds significantly to total GHG emissions. Therefore, intensification of production through tillage, agro-chemicals and heavy machinery, which characterizes conventional agriculture in Europe, strongly contributes to increased net GHG emissions instead of mitigating global warming. Sustainable agricultural soil management is crucial for mitigating climate change, especially for the restoration of lost soil organic carbon. In fact, "Agricultural soils management" is recognized as one of the 15 most promising technology options for reducing GHG emissions in the COM (2005) 35 final "Winning the battle against global climate change." The Green Carbon Conference aims to show sustainable management of agricultural soils can help to agriculture mitigate and adapt to climate change, being compatible with the objectives of environmental protection, enhancing biodiversity and supporting farmers’ welfare along with many other environmental, economic and social benefits. Over the last decade, Conservation Agriculture has become known as a set of interlinked agricultural practices, of no or minimum mechanical soil disturbance, maintenance of soil mulch cover, and diversified cropping system, capable of: (a) overcoming several of the severe sustainability limitations of conventional agriculture; and (b) raising productivity, enhancing resilience, reducing degradation and increasing the flow of ecosystem services. The discussion around both the Soil Thematic Strategy initiated in 2002, and the JRC SoCo (Soil Conservation) project clearly recognized the potential of Conservation Agriculture in mitigating and even reversing the problems of soil erosion, soil organic matter decline, soil compaction, loss of biodiversity, climate change vulnerability, among others. Whereas Conservation Agriculture is now practiced successfully on more than 125 million hectares worldwide, Europe has shown to be reluctant with regard to its adoption, despite many promising results confirming its suitability in Europe. Therefore, this European Conference on Green Carbon provides an opportunity to take a leap forward in terms of sharing farmers experiences on Conservation Agriculture across Europe, reviewing the recent progress made in knowledge generation regarding Conservation Agriculture, and to disseminate the outcomes of the currently running LIFE+ Agricarbon (LIFE08 ENV/E/000129). The slogan of ‘Green Carbon’ chosen for this Conference attempts to clarify and highlight the indivisible yet vital link between soil organic carbon and the role that soil health plays in the sustainability of agricultural production and in the flow of ecosystem services. Nevertheless, the topics addressed by the Green Carbon Conference are not only related to the importance of soil organic carbon for the overall soil quality and health, but also include other sustainability issues intimately related to the role of soil carbon such as landscape scale ecosystem functions and services, climate change mitigation and carbon offset, and economic aspects. This Conference also seeks to alert and inform EU policy stakeholders and technical officers of the urgent need to adopt sustainable soil and production practices of Conservation Agriculture to contribute to the objectives of Europe 2020, the EU's growth strategy for the coming decades

Polynomial approximation using particle swarm optimization of lineal enhanced neural networks with no hidden layers.

This paper presents some ideas about a new neural network architecture that can be compared to a Taylor analysis when dealing with patterns. Such architecture is based on lineal activation functions with an axo-axonic architecture. A biological axo-axonic connection between two neurons is defined as the weight in a connection in given by the output of another third neuron. This idea can be implemented in the so called Enhanced Neural Networks in which two Multilayer Perceptrons are used; the first one will output the weights that the second MLP uses to computed the desired output. This kind of neural network has universal approximation properties even with lineal activation functions. There exists a clear difference between cooperative and competitive strategies. The former ones are based on the swarm colonies, in which all individuals share its knowledge about the goal in order to pass such information to other individuals to get optimum solution. The latter ones are based on genetic models, that is, individuals can die and new individuals are created combining information of alive one; or are based on molecular/celular behaviour passing information from one structure to another. A swarm-based model is applied to obtain the Neural Network, training the net with a Particle Swarm algorithm

Mobilizing Greater Crop and Land Potentials Sustainably

The supply side of the food security engine is the way we farm. The current engine of conventional tillage farming is faltering and needs to be replaced. This presentation will address supply side issues of agriculture to meet future agricultural demands for food and industry using the alternate no-till Conservation Agriculture (CA) paradigm (involving no-till farming with mulch soil cover and diversified cropping) that is able to raise productivity sustainably and efficiently, reduce inputs, regenerate degraded land, minimise soil erosion, and harness the flow of ecosystem services. CA is an ecosystems approach to farming capable of enhancing not only the economic and environmental performance of crop production and land management, but also promotes a mindset change for producing ‘more from less’, the key attitude towards sustainable production intensification. CA is now spreading globally in all continents at an annual rate of 10 Mha and covers some 157 Mha of cropland. Today global agriculture produces enough food to feed three times the current population of 7.21 billion. In 1976, when the world population was 4.15 billion, world food production far exceeded the amount necessary to feed that population. However, our urban and industrialised lifestyle leads to wastage of food of some 30%-40%, as well as waste of enormous amount of energy and protein while transforming crop-based food into animal-derived food; we have a higher proportion of people than ever before who are obese; we continue to degrade our ecosystems including much of our agricultural land of which some 400 Mha is reported to be abandoned due to severe soil and land degradation; and yields of staple cereals appear to have stagnated. These are signs of unsustainability at the structural level in the society, and it is at the structural level, for both supply side and demand side, that we need transformed mind sets about production, consumption and distribution. CA not only provides the possibility of increased crop yields for the low input smallholder farmer, it also provides a pro-poor rural and agricultural development model to support agricultural intensification in an affordable manner. For the high output farmer, it offers greater efficiency (productivity) and profit, resilience and stewardship. For farming anywhere, it addresses the root causes of agricultural land degradation, sub-optimal ecological crop and land potentials or yield ceilings, and poor crop phenotypic expressions or yield gaps. As national economies expand and diversify, more people become integrated into the economy and are able to access food. However, for those whose livelihoods continue to depend on agriculture to feed themselves and the rest of the world population, the challenge is for agriculture to produce the needed food and raw material for industry with minimum harm to the environment and the society, and to produce it with maximum efficiency and resilience against abiotic and biotic stresses, including those arising from climate change. There is growing empirical and scientific evidence worldwide that the future global supplies of food and agricultural raw materials can be assured sustainably at much lower environmental and economic cost by shifting away from conventional tillage-based food and agriculture systems to no-till CA-based food and agriculture systems. To achieve this goal will require effective national and global policy and institutional support (including research and education)

Chitosan-Gold Nanoparticle Composites for Biomedical Application

The aim of this work is to synthesize chitosan-gold nanoparticles films by direct chemical reduction of HAuCl4 in a chitosan solution and to investigate the influence of gold nanoparticles concentration on the structure of films, conductivity and healing effect on mice skin after surgery. Results obtained have shown that new chitosan-gold nanoparticle-collagen bionananocomposites demonstrated better healing effect on the mice skin after surgery than control performed on commercial TheraFormTM material. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/3540

Recurrent invasive pneumococcal disease in children: Underlying clinical conditions, and immunological and microbiological characteristics.

Purpose Clinical, immunological and microbiological characteristics of recurrent invasive pneumo-coccal disease (IPD) in children were evaluated, differentiating relapse from reinfection, in order to identify specific risk factors for both conditions. Methods All patients<18 years-old with recurrent IPD admitted to a tertiary-care pediatric center from January 2004 to December 2011 were evaluated. An episode of IPD was defined as the presence of clinical findings of infection together with isolation and/or pneumococcal DNA detection by Real-Time PCR in any sterile body fluid. Recurrent IPD was defined as 2 or more episodes in the same individual at least 1 month apart. Among recurrent IPD, we differentiated relapse (same pneumococcal isolate) from reinfection. Results 593 patients were diagnosed with IPD and 10 patients died. Among survivors, 23 episodes of recurrent IPD were identified in 10 patients (1.7%). Meningitis was the most frequent form of recurrent IPD (10 episodes/4 children) followed by recurrent empyema (8 episodes/4 children). Three patients with recurrent empyema caused by the same pneumococcal clone ST306 were considered relapses and showed high bacterial load in their first episode. In contrast, all other episodes of recurrent IPD were considered reinfections. Overall, the rate of relapse of IPD was 0.5% and the rate of reinfection 1.2%. Five out of 7 patients with rein- fection had an underlying risk factor: cerebrospinal fluid leak (n = 3), chemotherapy treatment (n = 1) and a homozygous mutation in MyD88 gene (n = 1). No predisposing risk factors were found in the remainder. Conclusions recurrent IPD in children is a rare condition associated with an identifiable risk factor in case of reinfection in almost 80% of cases. In contrast, recurrent IPD with pleuropneumonia is usually a relapse of infection

Enseñanza-aprendizaje de insectos como temática a partir de una salida de campo con estudiantes de octavo grado de una institución educativa oficial de la ciudad de Neiva

El presente artículo recoge los resultados obtenidos del diseño y desarrollo de unapráctica de campo, realizada como actividad formativa en el espacio académico delseminario de didáctica I al interior del Programa de Licenciatura en Ciencias Naturales:Física, Química y Biología de la Universidad Surcolombiana (Neiva-Colombia) conestudiantes del curso 803 de una institución pública de la ciudad de Neiva, enfocada en laenseñanza y aprendizaje de los insectos. Esta estrategia didáctica constó de tres fases detrabajo, la primera fue la aplicación de cuestionarios uno con el fin de indagar de lossaberes previos y otro sobre las características socioeconómicas; la segunda fase fue eldesarrollo de la práctica en la cual por medio de videos y una salida de campo al parquebosque los estudiantes construyeron su propia idea sobre los insectos; por último seevaluó por medio de la resolución de una guía de campo según lo que habían observadodurante la salida, además de esto realizaron maquetas exponiendo el insecto que más lehabía llamado la atención, enfocando en él sus partes y el ecosistema al que pertenecen.Con estas actividades se evidenció que los educandos lograron superar algunasdebilidades que habían presentado durante la presentación de conceptos previos, engeneral se logró aclarar la concepción de insecto así como el entorno y ecosistema en elque se desarrolla, llevándolos a formular propuestas para el cuidado del entorno en el quese encuentran inmersos

Making Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptability Real in Africa with Conservation Agriculture

In this report, the authors have gathered essential information on how the agricultural sector can respond to climate change through Conservation Agriculture (CA). This document aims to serve as a basis for decision-making based on science and agricultural experimentation in Africa

Scintillation particle detection based on microfluidics

A novel type of particle detector based on scintillation, with precise spatial resolution and high radiation hardness, is being studied. It consists of a single microfluidic channel filled with a liquid scintillator and is designed to define an array of scintillating waveguides each independently coupled to a photodetector. Prototype detectors built using an SU-8 epoxy resin have been tested with electrons from a radioactive source. The experimental results show a light yield compatible with the theoretical expectations and confirm the validity of the approach

Conformación de semilleros de investigación como estrategia para el fortalecimiento de actitudes pro-ambientales en el departamento del Huila

El presente trabajo de investigación pretende fortalecer actitudes pro ambientales en lacomunidad educativa de la Institución Educativa El Núcleo Escolar el Guadual delmunicipio de Rivera Huila, a través de la creación e implementación de semilleros deinvestigación como estrategia didáctica para solucionar problemáticas ambientaleslocales y regionales. Esta propuesta se realiza en el ámbito de la Licenciatura en CienciasNaturales: Física, Química y Biología de la Universidad Surcolombiana, acorde con lamisión institucional de formar licenciados con espíritu investigativo, quienes sean capacesde forjar en sus estudiantes un sentido de pertenencia con su entorno natural e incentivaren ellos, su compromiso con la formación de un mundo ambientalmente sostenible. Eldiseño metodológico utilizado para el desarrollo de la investigación es de enfoquecualitativo y según su enfoque se clasifica como descriptivo. Esta investigación permitecaracterizar al estudiante a través de sus emociones, concepciones, conductas y demásacciones humanas, y presentar una revisión de los antecedentes relacionados con elfenómeno del pensamiento científico desde la escuela y que contribuyen a la solución deproblemáticas ambientales locales. Como instrumentos de recolección de datos seaplicaron: cuestionarios validados por expertos, en estudiantes y entrevistassemiestructuradas tipo exploratorio, en padres de familia y docentes, con el fin de indagar&nbsp;sobre su concepción acerca de sus actitudes ambientales y sobre la importancia de laformación de semilleros