Exploring the role and significance of consumer relationship quality and participation within online fashion brand communities

This study contributes towards the online value co-creation debate, by examining key theories within the relationship marketing literature for building online brand communities in a fashion context (Chae and Ko, 2016; Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Üçok Hughes et al., 2016). To this end, this research plugs an important gap for the highly lucrative global and digital fashion industry. In the empirical research, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with millennials who interact regularly with luxury fashion brands online. A thematic analysis approach is adopted, to discover common threads and similarities in behaviour. Data reveals that online brand communities facilitate customer engagement through quality interactive relationships amongst luxury fashion consumers. On this basis, the authors provide recommendations for luxury retailers on how to maximise business performance by enhancing online customer interactions. Originality of the paper lies on the revision and validation of a model (Hajli et al., 2017) that depicts the iterative process between virtual brand community participation, qualities of online relationships, loyalty and branding co-creation

Advances in Studies on Toxicity and Transformation of Zearalenone and Its Derivatives

Zearalenone (ZEN) is a mycotoxin produced by the Fusarium species, which has various toxic effects. The chemical structures of ZEN and its derivatives are similar to that of estrogen. When ingested by animals or humans, ZEN and its derivatives can lead to disturbance of estrogen balance, thereby harming the reproductive system. Moreover, they can alter gene structure and consequently affect gene expression, and can even cause damage to the immune system, thus weakening the immune response. ZEN is transformed and metabolized into ZEN derivatives during food processing or after absorption by animals and plants, and its toxicity is altered due to structural and physicochemical changes. Studying the toxicity of ZEN and its derivatives as well as their transformation and metabolism in various organisms is important for ensuring food security and mycotoxin toxicity risk assessment

Use acupuncture to relieve perimenopausal syndrome: study protocol of a randomized controlled trial

Law Number 11 / 2008 on Information and Electronic Transaction (UU ITE) is the regulation concerning on criminal law in addition to the Criminal Code (KUHP). UU ITE is commonly regarded additional regulation of the Criminal Code as a special law (lex specialis) in which Penal Code is deemed as lex generalis. It is based on the principle of lex specialis derogate legi generalis. This article uses legal research to review the decision of District Court in Bandung Number 1033/PID.B/2014/PN.BDG where it comprises legislation and cases. It concludes that the judge is not frugal in applying the principle lex specialis derogat legi generalis in the consideration. This is associated with the indictment of public prosecutor which only prejudges with article 303 paragraph (1) to 2. In contrast, the indictment which does not meet the requirement of a careful, clear, and complete description asserts to become void by law. Keywords: Online Gambling, Criminal Principle, Indictmen

Scenario analysis and relative importance indicators for combined impact of climate and land-use change on annual ecosystem services in the Karst mountainous region

Land use and climate change are important factors that help in driving changes in ecosystem services (ES); understanding the mechanisms behind the changes is critical to enhance ecosystem functions. However, the high degree of topographic heterogeneity in Karst mountainous leads to uncertainty in the spatial and temporal differences in their combined effects on ESs. To solve this problem, this study measured four ESs, the grain production (GP), carbon sequestration (CS), water conservation (WC), and soil retention (SR), taking the Qiangui Karst mountains as a case study area. The relative importance and combined effect indices were established to analyze the relative importance and interactions of year-by-year land use and climate change on ESs based on two scales of full-pixel and a simultaneous change in land use and climate. The results show a fluctuating trend of an increase in ES from 2010 to 2020, where both of them had positive and negative effects on ES fluctuation within different years. Generally, land-use change inhibited GP and enhanced other ESs, and they are facilitated by climate change. The ESs of the entire study area were mainly affected by the climate change; climate change had a stronger influence than land use on ESs in 80% of the pixels. When only the land use and climate change pixels were considered, SR was mainly influenced by climate change. The remaining ESs were mainly influenced by land-use change, but their contributions showed significant interannual differences. Their combined effect is dominated by trade-offs for GP and synergistic effects for the other ESs, with 50–75% of the areas dominated by synergistic effects. The study shows that analysis of the year-by-year spatial and temporal dynamics of ESs and their influencing factors provided more information, guiding the identification of hotspots with synergistic impact as the future priority of ecological conservation

Cropland data fusion and correction using spatial analysis techniques and the Google Earth Engine

Accurate regional identification of cropland quantities and spatial distributions is important for cropland monitoring, food security, and sustainable regional development. Various countries and organizations have produced series of land-cover products. However, variability among remote sensors, land-cover classification schemes, and classification methods has resulted in discrepancies. In this study, we develop a novel method to improve cropland data accuracy for the Belt and Road (B&R) region, by fusing and correcting four cropland products: CCI-LC, GFSAD30, MCD12Q1, and FROM-GLC. Spatial analysis techniques are implemented, including climate stratification, consistency assessment, and statistical filtering, to develop training samples for model correction. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform and random forest (RF) algorithm are executed with these training samples to correct fused multi-data product and generate a corrected 2015 cropland product. The corrected product indicates that cropland accounts for 14.94% of the B&R region, which is closer to the results found via FAO statistics than the results from any of the four individual land-cover products. On the national scale, the root mean square error between the corrected cropland product quantities and FAO statistics is 11.39% and the correlation coefficient value is 0.77. This indicates that the method exhibits better fitting characteristics. The accuracies of the areas of inconsistency among the four cropland products and our corrected product are assessed using 3112 visually interpreted samples and Google Earth. The overall accuracy of the corrected cropland product is 77.54% in inconsistent areas. The highest accuracy produced by the corrected cropland product indicates the effectiveness of our method, which can rapidly improve cropland data accuracy in heterogeneous regions. Combining the training samples produced by fusing existing cropland products and updating techniques with multi-source remote sensing data from the GEE platform, we foresee potential applications to update global cropland product

Differentiating effects of salvage logging and recovery patterns on post-fire boreal forests in Northeast China using a modified forest disturbance index

Forests are resilient to a range of disturbances, but combinations of severe natural and anthropogenic disturbances (e.g. wildfire and logging) may inhibit forest recovery and lead to forest degradation. Recent studies have explored long-term forest-disturbance detection and forest-recovery dynamics by using free and open-access remote-sensing images. However, mapping consecutive multiple disturbance agents is challenging using existing automated change-detection algorithms because the reduced canopy reflectance and the smoothing of consecutive disturbance signals mean that the initial disturbance cannot be spectrally separated from the second disturbance. Furthermore, uncertainty remains about post-disturbance vegetation dynamics and the effects of forest recovery under the interaction of burn severity, biological-legacy management, and active forest restoration (i.e. artificial regeneration and assisted natural regeneration). This contributes to biases in long-term forest-recovery monitoring, which are not conducive to the guidance of post-fire vegetation recovery. Here, we propose a modified disturbance index to separate the spectral characteristics of fire and forest logging using normalized tasseled-cap components (brightness and wetness) and detect the spatiotemporal distribution of post-fire logging by means of an index threshold and image differencing. On this basis, the recovery patterns of the post-fire forest are differentiated by considering the cumulative effect of fire, post-fire logging, and recovery approaches. The method is tested in the burn areas of the 5.6 Fire in the Greater Hinggan Mountain area (the largest forest fire in recorded history in China), giving an overall accuracy of 85% in post-fire forest logging mapping. Our results confirm that biological legacies (i.e. trees, logs, and snags) were removed across many areas in the fire, with activities peaking in the second year after the fire and located chiefly in areas of moderate and high burn severity. By identifying post-fire logging, the fluctuation and high disturbance index of the conventional temporal trajectory in the early stage of forest recovery are explained. The large-scale salvage logging slowed the recovery of the post-fire forest ecosystem and influenced the recovery process through the interaction of burn severity and active forest restoration. In areas of high burn severity, assisted natural regeneration (i.e. natural regeneration with artificial aids such as clearing the snags, weeding, digging pits, and supplemental planting) preserved biological legacies and achieved a higher proportion of forest recovery, second only to non-logged areas where natural regeneration (i.e. forestry recovering naturally without any artificial intervention) occurred. By contrast, salvage logging followed by artificial regeneration (i.e. clear-cutting all dead or damaged trees followed by tree planting or artificial seeding) hindered vegetation recovery in the early stage, but it improved the recovery rate in years 10–20 and approached the recovery proportion of non-logged areas where natural regeneration occurred as the recovery progressed and habitat conditions improved. The proposed method is shown to offer important advantages in detecting post-fire salvage logging, and it provides improved guidance for forest managers in developing strategies for forest recovery

Spatiotemporal Changes in the Geographic Imbalances between Crop Production and Farmland-Water Resources in China

Agricultural production is constrained by farmland and water resources, especially in China with limited per capita resources. Understanding of the geographic changes between national crop production and resource availability with the spatial shift of crop production has been limited in recent decades. To solve this issue, we quantified the changes in geographic relationships between crop production and farmland-water resources in China from 1990 to 2015 by a spatial imbalance measurement model. Results found a clear spatial concentration trend of crop production in China, which increased the pressure on the limited farmland and water resources in the main production areas. The geographic imbalances between the total production of crops and farmland resources (∑SMI_PF) alleviated slightly, whereas that of water resources (∑SMI_PW) increased by 9.12%. The rice production moved toward the north of the country with less water but abundant farmland resources, which led to a decrease of 1.34% in ∑SMI_PF and an increase of 14.20% in ∑SMI_PW. The shift of wheat production to the south was conducive to alleviating the pressure on water resources, but the production concentration still increased the demand for farmland and water resources, resulting in an increase in ∑SMI_PF and ∑SMI_PW by 39.96% and 10.01%, respectively. Of the five crops, adjustments to the spatial distribution of corn production had the most significant effect on reducing pressure on farmland and water resources and ∑SMI_PF and ∑SMI_PW decreased by 11.23% and 1.43%, respectively. Our results provided a reference for adjustments in crop production distribution and for policy formulation to sustainably utilize farmland and water resources

Spatiotemporal Changes in the Geographic Imbalances between Crop Production and Farmland-Water Resources in China

Agricultural production is constrained by farmland and water resources, especially in China with limited per capita resources. Understanding of the geographic changes between national crop production and resource availability with the spatial shift of crop production has been limited in recent decades. To solve this issue, we quantified the changes in geographic relationships between crop production and farmland-water resources in China from 1990 to 2015 by a spatial imbalance measurement model. Results found a clear spatial concentration trend of crop production in China, which increased the pressure on the limited farmland and water resources in the main production areas. The geographic imbalances between the total production of crops and farmland resources (∑SMI_PF) alleviated slightly, whereas that of water resources (∑SMI_PW) increased by 9.12%. The rice production moved toward the north of the country with less water but abundant farmland resources, which led to a decrease of 1.34% in ∑SMI_PF and an increase of 14.20% in ∑SMI_PW. The shift of wheat production to the south was conducive to alleviating the pressure on water resources, but the production concentration still increased the demand for farmland and water resources, resulting in an increase in ∑SMI_PF and ∑SMI_PW by 39.96% and 10.01%, respectively. Of the five crops, adjustments to the spatial distribution of corn production had the most significant effect on reducing pressure on farmland and water resources and ∑SMI_PF and ∑SMI_PW decreased by 11.23% and 1.43%, respectively. Our results provided a reference for adjustments in crop production distribution and for policy formulation to sustainably utilize farmland and water resources