Analysis of the differences in green farming behavior of operating agents in grassland pastoral areas

Green farming is the inevitable path to solving the problem of pasture ecological protection and a fundamental guarantee to realize the high-quality development of grassland animal husbandry. This study explores the differences in green farming behaviors of different operating agents in grassland pastoral areas. The mechanism of the formation of the differences is based on 274 working agents’ survey data from Xilin Gol league pastoral areas in Inner Mongolia, China, by constructing the Logit model and Fairlie decomposition method. The results show that family ranch is the primary operating agent of green farming in China’s grassland pastoral areas. The green farming behavior is 2.115 times more extreme than that of traditional pastoralists. Differences in the intensity of green farming behavior of the operating agents were significantly and positively correlated with differences in their ecological consciousness and differences in resource endowment. Differences in ecological consciousness and participation in training were the key factors contributing to the differences in the intensity of green farming behavior among the operators, with ecological consciousness contributing 51.34% and participation in training contributing 46.65% to the differences in the intensity of green farming behaviors. Therefore, to enhance the effective transformation of traditional pastoralists’ green farming behavior, we should guide them to raise ecological consciousness, focus on the role of resource endowment, and gradually form a new grassland animal husbandry development where green farming behavior fully landed

To fence or not to fence?: Perceptions and attitudes of herders in Inner Mongolia

Includes bibliographical references.Presented at the Building resilience of Mongolian rangelands: a trans-disciplinary research conference held on June 9-10, 2015 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.The most important part of recent grassland tenure reforms in Inner Mongolia has been to divide the collective grassland to household level, then fence and enclose grassland. Fencing is a form of strongest signal of private property right and aims to exclude over-boundary grazing, attempting to solve "tragedy of the commons" from open access. Fencing gives herders a "user right", though ownership still resides at a village level. But fencing significantly limit animal and herdsmen mobility critical to the pastoral society and coupled natural and human systems. The "dilemma of enclosure" has become a key debated issue of grassland management. Positive and negative effects have been widely discussed, but few empirical studies have been conducted into this dilemma. Ecologists in general believe fencing would negatively affect the integrated ecosystem and seasonal rotation of herding. In contrast, economists think the fence would avoid the "tragedy of the commons" and create an incentive to protect herders own resources. Economists also understand that fencing would reduce the scale of economy and fencing itself is costly. After reviewing current fencing policies and the scale of the fencing activities in Inner Mongolia, we surveyed the effects of existing fencing policies and their impact on herdsman households to evaluate herders' attitudes and perceptions towards fencing

Refining China's grassland policies: an interdisciplinary and ex-ante analysis

China is about to embark on a new round of grassland policies as part of its 14th Five-Year-Plan. While current grassland policies have generally been perceived positively in arresting widespread grassland degradation, concerns have arisen that the current policies may not be effective in achieving the desired reduction in livestock numbers. Furthermore there are concerns the incentive based payments that are part of these policy programs may not reflect herder opportunity costs or the marginal environmental benefits of the program with associated issues of herder satisfaction and compliance. Changes to current policy settings are being considered in response to these concerns. This paper reports on an interdisciplinary and ex-ante analysis of alternative policy settings affecting grazing and livestock management in terms of their environmental impacts, net social benefits and other impacts. The analysis finds that a bundle of instruments involving both positive and negative herder incentives is needed if desired stocking rates are to be achieved. The impact on herder incomes, both positive and negative depending on the grassland biome, along with transaction costs of implementing the policies, have the most influence on net social benefits

Dimension Analysis-Based Model for Prediction of Shale Compressive Strength

The compressive strength of shale is a comprehensive index for evaluating the shale strength, which is linked to shale well borehole stability. Based on correlation analysis between factors (confining stress, height/diameter ratio, bedding angle, and porosity) and shale compressive strength (Longmaxi Shale in Sichuan Basin, China), we develop a dimension analysis-based model for prediction of shale compressive strength. A nonlinear-regression model is used for comparison. A multitraining method is used to achieve reliability of model prediction. The results show that, compared to a multi-nonlinear-regression model (average prediction error = 19.5%), the average prediction error of the dimension analysis-based model is 19.2%. More importantly, our dimension analysis-based model needs to determine only one parameter, whereas the multi-nonlinear-regression model needs to determine five. In addition, sensitivity analysis shows that height/diameter ratio has greater sensitivity to compressive strength than other factors

HIV-Related Stigma, Sexual Identity, and Depressive Symptoms Among MSM Living With HIV: A Moderated Mediation Modeling Analysis

Depression is one of the biggest health issues among men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV, where sexual identity might play an intricate role. Yet, findings of the relationship between sexual identity and depression were mixed and few studies explored its underlying mechanisms. This study aimed to examine the association between sexual identity and depression, and the potential mediating role of HIV-related stigma and moderating role of age. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 203 MSM living with HIV in Guangxi, China. Participants provided information on sexual identity, depression, HIV-related stigma, and background information. Descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis, and path analysis were applied to examine our hypotheses. Bivariate analysis demonstrated that participants who self-identified as gay reported a lower level of HIV-related stigma and depression. Path analysis revealed an insignificant direct effect of identifying as gay on depression. Yet, the indirect pathway was significant, with identifying as gay being associated with a lower level of HIV stigma and thus a lower level of depression. This indirect effect was moderated by age. The conditional indirect effect was significant in the younger group yet ceased in the older group. The study provided information to better understand the effect of sexual identity on mental health among stigmatized sexual and gender minorities by highlighting the mediating effect of HIV-related stigma and the protective effect of age. Interventions targeting mental health of MSM living with HIV might consider placing greater emphasis on addressing HIV-related stigma among younger MSM

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Real-time Monitoring for the Next Core-Collapse Supernova in JUNO

Core-collapse supernova (CCSN) is one of the most energetic astrophysical events in the Universe. The early and prompt detection of neutrinos before (pre-SN) and during the SN burst is a unique opportunity to realize the multi-messenger observation of the CCSN events. In this work, we describe the monitoring concept and present the sensitivity of the system to the pre-SN and SN neutrinos at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), which is a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector under construction in South China. The real-time monitoring system is designed with both the prompt monitors on the electronic board and online monitors at the data acquisition stage, in order to ensure both the alert speed and alert coverage of progenitor stars. By assuming a false alert rate of 1 per year, this monitoring system can be sensitive to the pre-SN neutrinos up to the distance of about 1.6 (0.9) kpc and SN neutrinos up to about 370 (360) kpc for a progenitor mass of 30$M_{\odot}$ for the case of normal (inverted) mass ordering. The pointing ability of the CCSN is evaluated by using the accumulated event anisotropy of the inverse beta decay interactions from pre-SN or SN neutrinos, which, along with the early alert, can play important roles for the followup multi-messenger observations of the next Galactic or nearby extragalactic CCSN.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure