The impact of cattle drinking points on aquatic macroinvertebrates in streams in south-east Ireland

peer-reviewedTeagasc PublicationMeasures that prevent cattle access to watercourses are commonly implemented through agri-environment schemes, in an effort to address the objectives of the Water Framework Directive. Despite the widespread implementation, few studies have assessed the impact of cattle access to streams on aquatic macroinvertebrates. This study assessed the local-scale impact of cattle drinking points on water quality parameters (i.e. macroinvertebrate and water chemistry metrics) on 39 intensively-managed grassland farms in the south-east of Ireland. The results indicate that sites that were more than or equal to good quality upstream of cattle drinking points, were more susceptible to cattle access impacts than sites where upstream water quality was less than good. The European Court of Auditors (2011) recommended that there should be a higher rate of EU contribution for measures with higher environmental potential, in this instance, for cattle exclusion measures targeted to sites where background quality is more than or equal to good. Appropriate efforts should thus be made to incentivise farmers in good to high status sites to adopt cattle exclusion measures

Some new results on decidability for elementary algebra and geometry

We carry out a systematic study of decidability for theories of (a) real vector spaces, inner product spaces, and Hilbert spaces and (b) normed spaces, Banach spaces and metric spaces, all formalised using a 2-sorted first-order language. The theories for list (a) turn out to be decidable while the theories for list (b) are not even arithmetical: the theory of 2-dimensional Banach spaces, for example, has the same many-one degree as the set of truths of second-order arithmetic. We find that the purely universal and purely existential fragments of the theory of normed spaces are decidable, as is the AE fragment of the theory of metric spaces. These results are sharp of their type: reductions of Hilbert's 10th problem show that the EA fragments for metric and normed spaces and the AE fragment for normed spaces are all undecidable.Comment: 79 pages, 9 figures. v2: Numerous minor improvements; neater proofs of Theorems 8 and 29; v3: fixed subscripts in proof of Lemma 3

Managing for Sustainable Agriculture

The article presents the Agriculture Environmental Management System (AEMS) as a model for the integration of voluntary agriculture environmental management systems into agriculture production operations. The model can serve as guidance for Extension personnel as they assist operators in focusing on continual improvement of their enterprises\u27 interactions with air, water and land resources; pollution prevention; effective compliance management; and owner/operator involvement, using ISO 14001 standard as a baseline

A Tracking System to Assure Quality and User Satisfaction

This article describes a Tracking System employed to organize an enterprise information system into a comprehensive system to ensure quality and customer satisfaction. Using database searches to locate past users of a service and identify previous users of a similar or related service, the Tracking System allows Extension professionals to efficiently deliver value to customers

Crystal structures of four indole derivatives as possible cannabinoid allosteric antagonists

Acknowledgements We thank the EPSRC National Crystallography Service (University of Southampton) for the data collections and the EPSRC National Mass Spectrometry Service (University of Swansea) for the HRMS data. We thank John Low for carrying out the Cambridge Database survey.Peer reviewedPublisher PD