Resource use efficiency of groundnut farmers in Bekwara Local Government Area, Cross River State, Nigeria

The study assessed the resource use efficiency of groundnut farmers in Bekwara Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The specific objectives were to; describe the socio-economic characteristics of groundnut farmers, determine the cost and returns of groundnut production, determine the technical efficiency of groundnut farmers, identify the socio-economic factors influencing technical efficiency of groundnut production. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select groundnut farmers in the area. Data were obtained using a set of structuredquestionnaire. Descriptive, gross margin analysis and stochastic frontier were used for data analyses. Result from the study showed that majority (51.02%) of the respondents fall within age ranged of 31 – 40 years, with a mean age of 34 years. Females dominated groundnut production, 67.4% were married, 89.9% had family sizes of 1-10 persons per households, 94.9% had one form of education or the other. The result further shows that majority (79.60%) had 6 – 11 years of farming experience, 58% had farm sizes of between 1 – 1.5 hectares. The gross margin analysis shows that groundnut production was a profitable business with a gross margin and net farm income of ₦338, 019.249 and ₦330, 407.51 respectively. The result also revealed that quantity of seed used and farm size had positive and significant relationship with groundnut production. The mean technical efficiency was 0.97 with minimum and maximum efficiencies of 0.85 and 0.99. The inefficiency model showed that educational level, membership to co-operative, access to credit and the amount received were the significant variables that increased the technical efficiency of the respondents. It is recommended that policies by the government and non-governmental agencies should be geared towards encouraging farmers’ education on farm management practices so that they would be able to allocate production resources more efficiently especially agrochemicals for optimum yield.Keywords: Groundnut farmers, Resource efficiency, technical efficiency, inefficienc

Bed flow photoreactor experiments to assess the photocatalytic nitrogen oxides abatement under simulated atmospheric conditions

SSCI-VIDE+CARE+ABO:CGOInternational audienceHeterogeneous photocatalysi

Assembly of forest communities across East Asia - insights from phylogenetic community structure and species pool scaling

Local communities are assembled from larger-scale species pools via dispersal, environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and local stochastic demographic processes. The relative importance, scaling and interplay of these assembly processes can be elucidated by comparing local communities to variously circumscribed species pools. Here we present the first study applying this approach to forest tree communities across East Asia, focusing on community phylogenetic structure and using data from a global network of tropical, subtropical and temperate forest plots. We found that Net Relatedness Index (NRI) and Nearest Taxon Index (NTI) values were generally lower with geographically broad species pools (global and Asian species pools) than with an East Asian species pool, except that global species pool produced higher NTI than the East Asian species pool. The lower NRI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool may indicate an important role of intercontinental migration during the Neogene and Quaternary and climatic conservatism in shaping the deeper phylogenetic structure of tree communities in East Asia. In contrast, higher NTI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool is consistent with recent localized diversification determining the shallow phylogenetic structure

On-road measurements of VOCs and NOx: determination of light-duty vehicles emission factors from tunnel studies in Brussel city center, 5th Sino-French Joint Workshop on Atmospheric Environment

International audienc

On-road measurements of NMVOCs and NOX: Determination of light-duty vehicles emission factors from tunnel studies in Brussels city center

SSCI-VIDE+CARE+ABO:YDU:CGOInternational audienceEmission factors (EFs) of pollutants emitted by light-duty vehicles (LDV) were investigated in the Leopold II tunnel in Brussels city center (Belgium), in September 2011 and in January 2013, respectively. Two sampling sites were housing the instruments for the measurements of a large range of air pollutants, including non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The NMVOCs and NOx traffic EFs for LDV were determined from their correlation with CO2 using a single point analysis method.The emission factor of NOx is (544 ± 199) mg vehicle−1 km−1; NMVOCs emission factors vary from (0.26 ± 0.09) mg vehicle−1 km−1 for cis-but-2-ene to (8.11 ± 2.71) mg vehicle−1 km−1 for toluene. Good agreement is observed between the EFs determined in the Leopold II tunnel and the most recent EFs determined in another European roadway tunnel in 2004, with only a slight decrease of the EFs during the last decade. An historical perspective is provided and the observed trend in the NMVOCs emission factors reflect changes in the car fleet composition, the fuels and/or the engine technology that have occurred within the last three decades in Europe