Participatory and Holistic Approaches with Grassland Farmers and Development of Policies

The world is changing rapidly. Grassland farmers and ruminant livestock breeders will have to adapt to these changing environmental, social and economic conditions. Research can help them at the condition that linear ‘top-down’ technology transfer methods are abandoned for the benefit of participatory and holistic approaches. These approaches classified in the generic term of ‘Farming System Research’ consider farmers as real research partners, and they merge farmer’s and scientist’s ideas with those of other stakeholder types. They combine scientist’s and farmer’s knowledge for creating fast innovations, easily adopted by farmers since farmers themselves contribute to their design and their development. Innovations can then be disseminated by these farmers towards more important group of farmers. This process of innovation dissemination is very efficient because there is nothing more convincing for a farmer than listening and looking to what a similar farmer has achieved for improving its system and its income. These approaches proved to be successful in many parts of the world but it has still to be developed in many other regions. This will require a paradigm change in research, extension, teaching and production methods. It will also require a strong political will. The adoption of a holistic view is a prerequisite for developing an agriculture that conserves resources, maintains rural employment and minimizes external costs, while achieving high productions. Holistic livestock breeding is grassland-based. It minimizes the use of external inputs. It could maintain or restore biodiversity. Holistic livestock breeding is thus based on the principles of agroecology

PESTO: Pitch Estimation with Self-supervised Transposition-equivariant Objective

In this paper, we address the problem of pitch estimation using Self Supervised Learning (SSL). The SSL paradigm we use is equivariance to pitch transposition, which enables our model to accurately perform pitch estimation on monophonic audio after being trained only on a small unlabeled dataset. We use a lightweight ($<$ 30k parameters) Siamese neural network that takes as inputs two different pitch-shifted versions of the same audio represented by its Constant-Q Transform. To prevent the model from collapsing in an encoder-only setting, we propose a novel class-based transposition-equivariant objective which captures pitch information. Furthermore, we design the architecture of our network to be transposition-preserving by introducing learnable Toeplitz matrices. We evaluate our model for the two tasks of singing voice and musical instrument pitch estimation and show that our model is able to generalize across tasks and datasets while being lightweight, hence remaining compatible with low-resource devices and suitable for real-time applications. In particular, our results surpass self-supervised baselines and narrow the performance gap between self-supervised and supervised methods for pitch estimation

Exploratory data analysis and clustering of multivariate spatial hydrogeological data by means of GEO3DSOM, a variant of Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map

The use of unsupervised artificial neural network techniques like the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm has proven to be a useful tool in exploratory data analysis and clustering of multivariate data sets. In this study a variant of the SOM-algorithm is proposed, the GEO3DSOM, capable of explicitly incorporating three-dimensional spatial knowledge into the algorithm. The performance of the GEO3DSOM is compared to the performance of the standard SOM in analyzing an artificial data set and a hydrochemical data set. The hydrochemical data set consists of 131 groundwater samples collected in two detritic, phreatic, Cenozoic aquifers in Central Belgium. Both techniques succeed very well in providing more insight in the groundwater quality data set, visualizing the relationships between variables, highlighting the main differences between groups of samples and pointing out anomalous wells and well screens. The GEO3DSOM however has the advantage to provide an increased resolution while still maintaining a good generalization of the data set

Grasslands and herbivore production in Europe and effects of common policies

The European project Multisward (http://www.multisward.eu/multisward_eng/) aims at supporting developments and innovations in grassland use and management in different European farming systems (including low-input and organic farming systems), pedoclimatic and socio-economic conditions i) to enhance the role of grasslands at farm and landscape levels to produce environmental goods and to limit the erosion of biodiversity and ii) to optimise economic, agronomic and nutritional advantages for the development of innovative and sustainable ruminant production systems. The identification of the innovations and their implementation required an exhaustive analysis of the state of grasslands and herbivore production in Europe including how they changed over decades. The effects of public policies were investigated. The results of this analysis are published in the present book

Plio-Quaternary incision rates in the Meuse catchment vs long-term uplift rates of the Ardennes (E Belgium): new insights from 26Al/10Be burial dating of in cave-deposited alluvium

peer reviewe

Cosmogenic burial dating of in cave-deposited alluvium: unravelling long-term incision rates and complex speleogenesis in multi-level cave systems

Peer reviewe

Feeding Cyprinus carpio with infectious materials mediates cyprinid herpesvirus 3 entry through infection of pharyngeal periodontal mucosa

Cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3), also known as Koi herpesvirus, is the etiological agent of a mortal disease in common and koi carp. Recently, we investigated the entry of CyHV-3 in carp using bioluminescence imaging and a CyHV-3 recombinant strain expressing luciferase (LUC). We demonstrated that the skin is the major portal of entry after inoculation of carp by immersion in water containing CyHV-3. While this model of infection mimics some natural conditions in which infection takes place, other epidemiological conditions could favour entry of virus through the digestive tract. Here, we investigated whether ingestion of infectious materials mediates CyHV-3 entry through the digestive tract. Carp were fed with materials contaminated with the CyHV-3 LUC recombinant (oral contamination) or immersed in water containing the virus (contamination by immersion). Bioluminescence imaging analyses performed at different times post-infection led to the following observations: (i) the pharyngeal periodontal mucosa is the major portal of entry after oral contamination, while the skin is the major portal of entry after contamination by immersion. (ii) Both modes of inoculation led to the spreading of the infection to the various organs tested. However, the timing and the sequence in which some of the organs turned positive were different between the two modes of inoculation. Finally, we compared the disease induced by the two inoculation modes. They led to comparable clinical signs and mortality rate. The results of the present study suggest that, based on epidemiological conditions, CyHV-3 can enter carp either by skin or periodontal pharyngeal mucosal infection