Cost-effectiveness of managing Natura 2000 sites: an exploratory study for Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland

Natura 2000 sites are expected to assure the long-term survival of Europe's most valuable and threatened species and habitats. It follows that successful management of the sites is of great importance. Next to goal attainment, cost-effectiveness is increasingly recognised as a key requirement for gaining social and political acceptance for costly conservation measures. We identify and qualitatively examine issues of cost-effectiveness related to the design and implementation of management measures in Natura 2000 sites in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. Given the wide variety of management design and implementation options within the four countries, our study is purely of an exploratory nature. We derive recommendations for improving the cost-effectiveness of management in Natura 2000 sites and for future research. Examples of policy recommendations include guaranteeing the availability of funds for longer periods, and ensuring the appropriate allocation of funds between the different tasks of designing and implementing management plans. Further research should examine the cost-effectiveness of controversial suggestions such as, for example, more tailored payment schemes for conservation measures that result in higher ecological outputs but are costly to administer. Moreover, more research is needed to better understand how rules for administrations, as well as rules and governance structures for tasks within administrations, should be designed

Global discretization of continuous attributes as preprocessing for machine learning

AbstractReal-life data usually are presented in databases by real numbers. On the other hand, most inductive learning methods require a small number of attribute values. Thus it is necessary to convert input data sets with continuous attributes into input data sets with discrete attributes. Methods of discretization restricted to single continuous attributes will be called local, while methods that simultaneously convert all continuous attributes will be called global. In this paper, a method of transforming any local discretization method into a global one is presented. A global discretization method, based on cluster analysis, is presented and compared experimentally with three known local methods, transformed into global. Experiments include tenfold cross-validation and leaving-one-out methods for ten real-life data sets

Chromium coated silicon nitride electron beam exit window

A Si3N4 membrane with a thin Cr coating is proposed and demonstrated as an electron beam exit window. On average, 85% electron power transmission efficiency was achieved with a 1 μm thick Si3N4 membrane coated with 1 μm thick Cr and the membrane sustained a beam current of up to 3 mA at 60 keV electron energy for the continuous operation of 3 min. However, for an uncoated membrane of same thickness, the average electron power transmission efficiency was 71% and the maximum beam current sustained was 800 μA. It was also shown that a one micron thick Si3N4 square membrane window of 10 mm × 10 mm could withstand a differential pressure of 1.3 bars.The work carried out at Brunel University was co-funded by the EC Seventh Framework Programme theme FP7-SST-2011-RTD-1 for the DEECON project (grant number 284745)

Deoxyribonucleoside Phosphoramidites

The detailed preparation of deoxyribonucleoside phosphoramidites bearing a 4‐[N‐methyl‐N‐(2,2,2‐trifluoroacetyl)amino]butyl group for P(III) protection is presented. The use of this group circumvents nucleobase alkylation during oligonucleotide deprotection. Two syntheses of phosphoramidites starting from either a phosphordichloridite precursor or a bis‐(N,N‐diisopropylamino)chlorophosphine intermediate are described for the phosphinylation of suitably protected deoxyribonucleosides.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143622/1/cpnc0207.pd