A Transdisciplinary Approach to Landscape Transformation Towards Perennial, Diverse, Circular Systems: Why and How

Prevailing agricultural systems in the U.S. are dominated by intensification through annual crop monocultures and high amounts of external inputs. Increased yields per unit of land have resulted but many undesirable environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic outcomes have co-occurred. Lack of resilience within intensified agricultural systems is a factor in these outcomes. Redesign of agricultural systems and changes in federal policy are needed to better support resilience in agriculture. Redesign for greater resilience must encourage adoption of agricultural systems that are diverse, perennial, circular, and include forages. We developed a transdisciplinary framework within a project orientation with a focus on crops and forages as agents of landscape transformation, and a diverse team of researchers, stakeholders and agency personnel. Our framework features a national network of farmers engaged in prevailing agriculture and practices of diverse, perennial, circular forage systems. Network farmers are collaborating with project scientists to gather on-farm data for better understanding of the opportunities and challenges to greater agricultural resilience. Over the next five years we aim to analyze the economic conditions, social structures, and public policies that prevent wider adoption of diverse perennial circular forage systems, and develop strategies to overcome these constraints

Global versus local environmental impacts of grazing and confined beef production systems

Carbon footprint is a key indicator of the contribution of food production to climate change and its importance is increasing worldwide. Although it has been used as a sustainability index for assessing production systems, it does not take into account many other biophysical environmental dimensions more relevant at the local scale, such as soil erosion, nutrient imbalance, and pesticide contamination. We estimated carbon footprint, fossil fuel energy use, soil erosion, nutrient imbalance, and risk of pesticide contamination for five real beef background-finishing systems with increasing levels of intensification in Uruguay, which were combinations of grazing rangelands (RL), seeded pastures (SP), and confined in feedlot (FL). Carbon footprint decreased from 16.7 (RL–RL) to 6.9 kg (SP–FL) CO2 eq kg body weight-1 (BW; 'eq': equivalent). Energy use was zero for RL–RL and increased up to 17.3 MJ kg BW-1 for SP–FL. Soil erosion values varied from 7.7 (RL–RL) to 14.8 kg of soil kg BW-1 (SP–FL). Nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient balances showed surpluses for systems with seeded pastures and feedlots while RL–RL was deficient. Pesticide contamination risk was zero for RL–RL, and increased up to 21.2 for SP–FL. For the range of systems studied with increasing use of inputs, trade-offs were observed between global and local environmental problems. These results demonstrate that several indicators are needed to evaluate the sustainability of livestock production systems

Microwave apparatus for gravitational waves observation

In this report the theoretical and experimental activities for the development of superconducting microwave cavities for the detection of gravitational waves are presented.Comment: 42 pages, 28 figure

Effect of age on melanoma risk, prognosis and treatment response

As for all types of cancer, the incidence of melanoma increases with age. However, naevus counts (the principal risk factor for melanoma) decrease with age; hence the relationship between ageing and melanoma is complex. Subjects who maintain a high naevus count after the age of 50 years are more likely to be affected by melanoma, as their lesions do not senesce. Longer telomere length, which is strongly related to age, is linked to high naevus counts/melanoma risk; thus melanoma biology is influenced by factors that slow down ageing. Age is also an important prognostic factor in melanoma. Increasing age leads to worse survival in stages I, II and III. Sentinel lymph node (SLN) status, which is a strong predictor of melanoma survival, is also affected by age, as SLN positivity decreases with age. However, the prognostic value of SLN on survival increases with age, so, again, these relationships are complex. In patients with stage IV melanoma, age impacts on survival because it affects responses to treatment. This review examines the effects of age on melanoma risk, prognostic factors and responses to treatment

Determining Ratios of WIMP-Nucleon Cross Sections from Direct Dark Matter Detection Data

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. So far the usual procedure for constraining the WIMP-nucleon cross sections in direct Dark Matter detection experiments have been to fit the predicted event rate based on some model(s) of the Galactic halo and of WIMPs to experimental data. One has to assume whether the spin-independent (SI) or the spin-dependent (SD) WIMP-nucleus interaction dominates, and results of such data analyses are also expressed as functions of the as yet unknown WIMP mass. In this article, I introduce methods for extracting information on the WIMP-nucleon cross sections by considering a general combination of the SI and SD interactions. Neither prior knowledge about the local density and the velocity distribution of halo WIMPs nor about their mass is needed. Assuming that an exponential-like shape of the recoil spectrum is confirmed from experimental data, the required information are only the measured recoil energies (in low energy ranges) and the number of events in the first energy bin from two or more experiments.Comment: 33 pages, 20 eps figures; v2: typos fixed, references added and updated, revised version for publicatio

Forage Data Hub – A Platform for Sharing Valuable Datasets for Resilience

In accord with the necessity to enhance ecosystem services and productivity in food systems, is the increase of data availability at multiple scales and over time. To help meet this need, we discuss the development of a National Forage Data Hub which will act as a platform to curate, share, and analyze data pertaining to forage systems. This centralized hub will leverage existing datasets by bridging multiple sources including forage crop—soil, water, and nutrient availability—yield (animal and crop) potential (and gaps)— climate—management systems at high spatial and temporal resolution enabling system interaction assessments through next-generation analytics. This novel approach to existing datasets will integrate Big Data at the soilwater- plant-animal-climate nexus to advance data storage technology systems for multiple trophic-level research projects