Design of the high intensity exotic beams SPIRAL 2 project

International audienceThe SPIRAL 2 facility will be able to deliver stable heavy ion beams and deuteron beams at very high intensity, allowing to produce and accelerate light and heavy rare ion beams. The driver will accelerate a 5 mA deuteron beam up to 20 MeV/u and also q/A=1/3 heavy ions up to 14.5 MeV/u. The injector consist of the ion sources, a 4-vane RFQ and the low and medium beam transfer lines. It is followed by an independently phased superconducting linac with compact cryostats separated with warm focusing sections. The overall design and results of simulations with combined errors, the results of tests of prototypes for the most critical components are presented

Global oil palm suitability assessment

The palm oil boom of recent years has brought about both positive - economic development - and negative impacts - deforestation, habitat losses and increased GHG emissions - in the main producer countries in South-East Asia. As global demand for palm oil is still increasing, governments of developing and emerging countries increasingly promote oil palm cultivation as a major contributor to economic development, but there are concerns about the potential negative impacts of oil palm expansion on the natural environment in these countries. Against this backdrop, we present a global oil palm suitability map on the spatial resolution of 0.5 arc minutes (approximately 1 km) in order to i) help land use planning for production and conservation in tropical and sub-tropical areas, and ii) provide insights about the sustainability of further oil palm production expansion in the future iii) help identify potential trade-offs between further oil palm plantation expansion, forest conservation, and use planning at the regional level. By combining climate, soil and topography data, we find that global suitable areas are concentrated in nine tropical countries, with Brazil harboring the largest tracts of suitable land, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia. We conclude that this map will most useful to achieve the goals stated above when combined with a number of socio-economic factors that also drive of oil palm expansion dynamics

Improving Ethiopian Smallholders’ Income and Food Security: An Assessment of Alternative Policy Options

Smallholder farmers dominate food production, but also represent the largest share of people in developing countries experiencing food insecurity. In Ethiopia, agricultural growth now forms the backbone of the country’s long-term plans for economic growth. This study aims to analyze long-term changes to the agricultural sector and its consequences for the evolution of smallholder farmers under various policy scenarios. A farming typology based on the agro-ecological zone, the dominant activities, and the degree of market integration is established for this purpose. The agro-ecological zone is divided into the rainfall-sufficient and drought prone highland areas and the pastoralist lowlands. Dominant activities are either pure livestock-keeping or a combination of crops and livestock. Market integration is based on the share of agricultural output sold to the market. The resulting typology is extrapolated to all regions of Ethiopia. The spatially differentiated typology is integrated in an Ethiopia-version of Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM), a globally-consistent partial equilibrium model representing spatial land-use patterns and accounting for biophysical resource constraints. 19 crops (the standard GLOBIOM crops, teff, coffee and sesame), 4 animal types (cattle, sheep, goats and poultry) and 2 livestock products (milk and meat) are represented in the model. Projections of population and GDP growth per region are used to set up the initial demand for each product and each time step. Policies aiming to improve food security and reduce poverty are subsequently implemented. These include infrastructure and irrigation extensions as well as the improvement of access to fertilizers. Results show that the distribution of the farming systems changes across space and time under different policy scenarios. Impacts on smallholders’ poverty and food security status differ depending on the policy, enabling a spatially explicit assessment of policy options at both the local and national level

Progress in the Surveillance of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (Rsv) in Europe: 2001-2008

Item does not contain fulltextRespiratory syncytial virus (RSV) surveillance is important to get insight into the burden of disease and epidemic pattern of RSV infection. This information is useful for healthcare resource allocation as well as the timing of preventive messages and palivizumab prophylaxis. For influenza surveillance the European Influenza Surveillance Scheme (EISS) was established in 1996, but no surveillance platform is available for RSV. To improve surveillance an RSV Task Group was established in 2003 and recommendations for RSV surveillance were developed. By 2008, progress was made for four out of six recommendations: the number of European countries testing specimens for RSV increased from six to fourteen; nose and/or throat swabs were generally used for detection of influenza and RSV; a total of 25 laboratories performed molecular testing for diagnosis and participated in a quality control assessment for RSV with an overall good performance; four of the ten countries that joined EISS in 2004 started reporting RSV detections in addition to influenza in the period 2004-8. Limited progress was achieved for standardising methods and the development of a sentinel surveillance system of representative hospitals. Improving RSV surveillance is possible by further harmonising the data collection and increased reporting of RSV

Probabilistic Spatial and Temporal Resilience Landscapes for the Congo Basin

Recent research by Hirota et al. (2011) introduced the concept of resilience landscapes for tropical forests and savannahs. Basically, the approach statistically relates the probability of current forest/savannah occurrence with the concept of tipping points, at which the ecosystem has no other choice except to switch from on stable state (e.g., forest) to its alternative stable state (e.g., savannah) or vice versa. This work will use a biogeochemical modelling approach to establish such probabilistic resilience landscapes for the Congo Basin rainforest biome. In a first step, the occurrence of tipping points will be related to climate features like annual precipitation, dry season length, occurrence of startiform non-precipitating cloud cover and the inter-annual variation in precipitation. In the second, spatial resilience landscapes for the Congo Basin will be provided using present climate conditions. Their relation to current forest/savannah distribution will be assessed and evident congruencies and discrepancies will be discussed. In a third step, the concept of temporal resilience landscapes will be developed along the patch-level life cycle dynamics of the Congo Basin rainforest biome. In a final step, the implications of results for ecosystem management decision will be assessed and possible implications on policy and land-use decisions will be presented