Soil and water bioengineering: practice and research needs for reconciling natural hazard control and ecological restoration

Soil and water bioengineering is a technology that encourages scientists and practitioners to combine their knowledge and skills in the management of ecosystems with a common goal to maximize benefits to both man and the natural environment. It involves techniques that use plants as living building materials, for: (i) natural hazard control (e.g., soil erosion, torrential floods and landslides) and (ii) ecological restoration or nature-based re-introduction of species on degraded lands, river embankments, and disturbed environments. For a bioengineering project to be successful, engineers are required to highlight all the potential benefits and ecosystem services by documenting the technical, ecological, economic and social values. The novel approaches used by bioengineers raise questions for researchers and necessitate innovation from practitioners to design bioengineering concepts and techniques. Our objective in this paper, therefore, is to highlight the practice and research needs in soil and water bioengineering for reconciling natural hazard control and ecological restoration. Firstly, we review the definition and development of bioengineering technology, while stressing issues concerning the design, implementation, and monitoring of bioengineering actions. Secondly, we highlight the need to reconcile natural hazard control and ecological restoration by posing novel practice and research questions

On Low-Energy Effective Actions in N = 2, 4 Superconformal Theories in Four Dimensions

We study some aspects of low-energy effective actions in 4-d superconformal gauge theories on the Coulomb branch. We describe superconformal invariants constructed in terms of N=2 abelian vector multiplet which play the role of building blocks for the N=2,4 supersymmetric low-energy effective actions. We compute the one-loop effective actions in constant N=2 field strength background in N=4 SYM theory and in N=2 SU(2) SYM theory with four hypermultiplets in fundamental representation. Using the classification of superconformal invariants we then find the manifestly N=2 superconformal form of these effective actions. While our explicit computations are done in the one-loop approximation, our conclusions about the structure of the effective actions in N=2 superconformal theories are general. We comment on some applications to supergravity - gauge theory duality in the description of D-brane interactions.Comment: 18 pages, latex, comments/reference adde

1/4 Partial Breaking of Global Supersymmetry and New Superparticle Actions

We construct the worldline superfield massive superparticle actions which preserve 1/4 portion of the underlying higher-dimensional supersymmetry. The rest of supersymmetry is spontaneously broken and realized by nonlinear transformations. We consider the cases of N=4 to N=1 and N=8 to N=2 partial breaking. In the first case we present the corresponding Green-Schwarz type target superspace action with one $\kappa$-supersymmetry. It is related to the superfield action via a field redefinition. In the second case we find out two possible models, one of which is a direct generalization of the N=4 to N=1 case, while another is essentially different. For the first model we formulate Green-Schwarz type action with two kappa supersymmetries. We elaborate on the bosonic part of the superfield action for the second model and find that only in two special limits it takes the standard Nambu-Goto form. In the general case it is determined by a fourth-order algebraic equation. The characteristic common feature of these new superparticle models is that the algebras of their spontaneously broken supersymmetries are non-trivial truncations of the general extensions of N=1 and N=2 Poincare D=4 superalgebras by tensorial central charges.Comment: 22 page