Analysis report of the first benchmark survey of Mahaweli System C Upgrading Project

River basins / Development projects / Monitoring / Evaluation / Irrigated farming / Farmers’ associations / Water delivery / Water loss / Data storage and retrieval / Infrastructure / Operations / Maintenance / Agricultural production / Rice / Costs / Labor / Credit / Sri Lanka / Mahaweli Project

Replicative intermediates of porcine circovirus in animal tissue cultured cells or in bacteria undergoing copy-release replication

AbstractPorcine circovirus (PCV) has been assumed to replicate its genome via the rolling-circle replication (RCR) mechanism because it encodes a Rep protein that contains several amino acid motifs commonly found in other RCR biological systems. Two proteins, Rep and Rep', are essential for PCV DNA replication in mammalian cells. In this work, replicative intermediates of PCV-infected porcine kidney (PK15) cells or copy-release of PCV genomes from a head-to-tail tandem construct (without Rep') in Escherichia coli were examined. In PK15 cells, replicative intermediates consistent with complementary-strand replication which converts single-stranded circular genome to double-stranded supercoiled DNA and RCR which generates single-stranded plus strand progeny genome were observed. To a lesser extent, intermediates suggestive of recombination-dependent replication were also detected. In Escherichia coli, copy release of the single-stranded circular PCV genome with conversion to a supercoiled molecule by complementary-strand synthesis was observed. However, replicative intermediates indicative of RCR were not detected

Taking Control: Opportunities for and Impediments to the Use of Socio-Cultural Controls for Long-Term Stewardship of U.S. Department of Energy Legacy Waste Sites

The Institute brought together 25 indigenous and other storytellers, songwriters, poets, and dancers with historians and other representatives from a variety of tribal and disadvantaged communities in proximity to DOE legacy waste sites, along with policy makers from various public agencies with an interest in addressing environmental problems through the humanities. Roundtable participants were briefed on the types and hazards of persistent contamination from the DOE legacy sites, future hazards for human health and the environment, and the limitations of standard institutional controls. In facilitated discussions, roundtable participants set out the potential benefits of and strategies for encouraging creative/historical discourses that carry basic information about the histories of the sites, and risks of environmental contamination. This research was completed money allocated during Round 5 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/iiirm/1001/thumbnail.jp

Technology Showcases: Africa RISING project in the Ethiopian Highlands

United States Agency for International Developmen

Identifying the Burdens and Opportunities for Tribes and Communities in Federal Facility Cleanup Activities: Environmental Remediation Technology Assessment Matrix For Tribal and Community Decision-Makers

The cleanup of this country’s federal facilities can affect a wide range of tribal and community interests and concerns. The technologies now in use, or being proposed by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and other federal agencies can affect tribal treaty protected fishing, hunting and other rights, affect air and water quality thereby requiring the tribe to bear the burden of increased environmental regulation. The International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management developed a tribal and community decision-maker’s Environmental Remediation Technology Assessment Matrix that will permit tribes and communities to array technical information about environmental remediation technologies against a backdrop of tribal and community environmental, health and safety, cultural, religious, treaty and other concerns and interests. Ultimately, the matrix will allow tribes and communities to assess the impact of proposed technologies on the wide range of tribal and community interests and will promote more informed participation in federal facility cleanup activities. This research was completed money allocated during Round 1 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/iiirm/1000/thumbnail.jp

Gender Mainstreaming Workshop: ReWater MENA Project & GENDER Project: COVID-19 and Egypt’s Water Crisis - Generating Evidence for Gender-Transformative Innovations

This research project is conducted by IWMI and ICARDA, in collaboration with the Egyptian Agricultural Research Center and the Arab Water Council and supported by CGIAR GENDER Platform. It is built upon the preliminary findings of ReWater MENA project in Kafr El-Sheikh in Egypt, asking the question, “What are the gendered implications of COVID-19 on wastewater reuse agri-food value chains in Egypt?” Informed by a feminist political ecology approach, the project analyses how intersectional inequalities by gender, class and other social identities determine poverty, landlessness and [waste]water access, use and control. With this understanding, the project documents the nature and scale of challenges, including social and cultural barriers experienced by marginalized women as wastewater reuse irrigators, producers and entrepreneurs

Connecting Space to Village Geospatial information for improved environmental decision making in the Amazon

The process of decision making in humans involves a combination of the genuine information held by the individual, and the external influence from their social network connections. This helps individuals to make decisions or adopt behaviors, opinions or products. In this work, we seek to investigate under which conditions and with what cost we can form neighborhoods of influence within a social network, in order to assist individuals with little or no prior genuine information through a two-phase recommendation process. Most of the existing approaches regard the problem of identifying influentials as a long-term, network diffusion process, where information cascading occurs in several rounds and has fixed number of influentials. In our approach we consider only one round of influence, which finds applications in settings where timely influence is vital. We tackle the problem by proposing a two-phase framework that aims at identifying influentials in the first phase and form influential neighborhoods to generate recommendations to users with no prior knowledge in the second phase. The difference of the proposed framework with most social recommender systems is that we need to generate recommendations including more than one item and in the absence of explicit ratings, solely relying on the social network\u27s graph