Pathways towards coexistence with large carnivores in production systems

Coexistence between livestock grazing and carnivores in rangelands is a major challenge in terms of sustainable agriculture, animal welfare, species conservation and ecosystem function. Many effective non-lethal tools exist to protect livestock from predation, yet their adoption remains limited. Using a social-ecological transformations framework, we present two qualitative models that depict transformative change in rangelands grazing. Developed through participatory processes with stakeholders from South Africa and the United States of America, the models articulate drivers of change and the essential pathways to transition from routine lethal management of carnivores towards mutually beneficial coexistence. The pathways define broad actions that incorporate multiple values in grazing systems including changes to livestock management practices, financial support, industry capacity building, research, improved governance and marketing initiatives. A key fnding is the new concept of ‘Predator Smart Farming’, a holistic and conscientious approach to agriculture, which increases the resilience of landscapes, animals (domesticated and wild) and rural livelihoods. Implementation of these multiple pathways would lead to a future system that ensures thriving agricultural communities, secure livelihoods, reduced violence toward animals, and landscapes that are productive and support species conservation and coexistence

Exploring the Redundancy Capacity Through a System Dynamics Approach

Current urban agenda is interested in developing urban strategies to enhance urban resilience for cities. This paper examines the concept of urban resilience applied in the context of urban planning with specific attention to which are the capacities that make urban systems resilient. The knowledge and the understanding of these capacities are fundamental to set up suitable strategies. However, only few frameworks consider urban resilience and its capacity within the complexity of urban system. Through an in-depth literature review, this paper aims at providing a methodological framework both to recognize these capacities and analyze which are the main factors that mainly contribute to the achievement of these ability. The paper illustrates the first step of the application of a System Dynamics approach to analyze the redundancy capacity in order to define which are the key variables to enhance this capacity and also to determine which can be the impacts on the urban systems as a whole of the redundancy

Essays on Random Choice

Chapter 1 introduces and axiomatizes a new class of representations for incomplete preferences called confidence models, which describe decision makers who behave as if they have probabilistic uncertainty over their true preferences, and are only willing to express a binary preference if it is sufficiently likely to hold. Confidence models provide a natural way to connect incomplete preferences with stochastic choice; this connection is characterized by a simple condition that serves to identify the behavioral content of incomplete preferences. Chapter 2 studies random choice rules over finite sets that obey regularity but potentially fail to satisfy all of the Block-Marschak inequalities. Such random choice rules can be represented by capacities on the space of preferences. The higher-order Block-Marschak inequalities are shown to be related to the degree of monotonicity that can be achieved by a capacity representation. Finally, Chapter 3 shows that failures of uniqueness for random utility representations are widespread. Uniqueness can be restored by introducing a finite state space and considering random choice over Savage acts. A representation is characterized in which acts are chosen according to the probability that they are optimal in every state.Economic

Coherent diffraction of single Rice Dwarf virus particles using hard X-rays at the Linac Coherent Light Source

Single particle diffractive imaging data from Rice Dwarf Virus (RDV) were recorded using the Coherent X-ray Imaging (CXI) instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). RDV was chosen as it is a well-characterized model system, useful for proof-of-principle experiments, system optimization and algorithm development. RDV, an icosahedral virus of about 70 nm in diameter, was aerosolized and injected into the approximately 0.1 μm diameter focused hard X-ray beam at the CXI instrument of LCLS. Diffraction patterns from RDV with signal to 5.9 Ångström were recorded. The diffraction data are available through the Coherent X-ray Imaging Data Bank (CXIDB) as a resource for algorithm development, the contents of which are described here