RWU Student Team Captures Regional Design-Build Championship

For the second-year in a row, Architecture and Construction Management team is among eight regional winners in the National Design-Build Student Competition

Implementation dynamics in EU ‘Mobility’ Partnerships

This paper contributes to the very limited literature on the implementation of EU external migration policy. Cooperation with non-EU countries has become a central policy priority for the EU over the past decade, with the main policy tool being the Mobility Partnership framework. Since 2008, seven such partnerships have been signed with countries in the EU’s neighbourhood. Since the Commission’s 2009 evaluation, however, little has been written about how the Mobility Partnerships are playing out in practice. This paper addresses this deficit, and focuses in particular on the concept of mobility. It first attempts to assess the whether the Mobility Partnerships have created extra channels of migration from the non-EU countries concerned to the EU. However, the paper concludes that implementation is still at too early a stage, and no sound conclusion can be drawn regarding the overall contribution of the Mobility Partnerships to mobility. Instead, the paper applies the literature on implementation in a ‘backward’ fashion: starting with the implementation dynamics at play, it concludes that successful implementation of the Mobility Partnerships will depend on the particular third country and project concerned

Chapter 3 Horizontal and Vertical Diversity

"Unintended consequences arising from EU external migration policy are a result of the multi-actor nature of this policy and of policy interactions. In addition, scholars face serious methodological challenges in establishing what the EU’s ‘intent’ is in external migration policy and, therefore, in determining which consequences are intended and which are unintended. The literature on the implementation and evaluation of EU external migration policy is in its infancy, and future work should take into account all policy outcomes – both those that were intended and those that were not.

(Un)intended Consequences in High-Skilled Migrants' Integration and Inequalities: A comparison of Policy in Germany and the Netherlands

This paper analyses the interaction between national policies on the admission of highly-skilled migrants and on the integration of migrants. There is a long-standing debate in the literature as to whether or not migration and integration policies are effective; however there is little consideration of the unintended consequences that these policies may have. We argue that, through their interaction, migration and integration policies have unintended consequences, which create or contribute to social inequalities among migrants. We illustrate our argument through case studies of Germany and the Netherlands, based on expert interviews and interviews with highly-skilled migrants from Asia. Migrants reported facing linguistic, bureaucratic and social challenges, and difficulties in finding employment. These disadvantages accumulate and interact with, for example, gender inequalities, adding up to a high price for migration. The evidence presented in this paper demonstrates the importance for policy-makers to consider how policies interact with each other and what effects this can have

Genetic gains in potato breeding as measured by field testing of cultivars released during the last 200 years in the Nordic Region of Europe

Genetic gains (Delta(G)) are determined by the breeders' equation Delta(G) = [(ck sigma(2)(G))/(y sigma(P))], where c, k and y are the parental control, a function of the selection intensity and number of years to complete one selection cycle, respectively, while sigma(2)(G) and are sigma(P) the genetic variance and the square root of the phenotypic variance. Plant breeding programs should deliver above 1% of annual genetic gains after testing and selection. The aim of this research was to estimate genetic gains in potato breeding after testing of cultivars released in western Europe in the last 200 years under high yield potential, and stress-prone environments affected by a pest (late blight) or daylength. The annual genetic gains for tuber yield and flesh's starch content for potato breeding in Europe were about 0.3 and -0.1%, respectively, thus telling that the realized genetic gains of foreign cultivars for both traits are small or negative, respectively, in the Nordic testing sites. The national annual productivity gains in potato grown in Sweden were on average 0.7% in the last 60 years while the genetic gains for tuber yield considering only the table cultivars released after the 2nd World War were about 0.36%, thus showing that breeding contributed just above 1/2 of it. Furthermore, genetic gains for breeding low reducing sugars in the tuber flesh, and high host plant resistance to late blight were small (<0.2% per year). These results highlight that genetic gains are small when testing bred germplasm outside their target population of environments

The power of genomic estimated breeding values for selection when using a finite population size in genetic improvement of tetraploid potato

Potato breeding relies heavily on visual phenotypic scoring for clonal selection. Obtaining robust phenotypic data can be labor intensive and expensive, especially in the early cycles of a potato breeding program where the number of genotypes is very large. We have investigated the power of genomic estimated breeding values (GEBVs) for selection from a limited population size in potato breeding. We collected genotypic data from 669 tetraploid potato clones from all cycles of a potato breeding program, as well as phenotypic data for eight important breeding traits. The genotypes were partitioned into a training and a test population distinguished by cycle of selection in the breeding program. GEBVs for seven traits were predicted for individuals from the first stage of the breeding program (T1) which had not undergone any selection, or individuals selected at least once in the field (T2). An additional approach in which GEBVs were predicted within and across full-sib families from unselected material (T1) was tested for four breeding traits. GEBVs were obtained by using a Bayesian Ridge Regression model estimating single marker effects and phenotypic data from individuals at later stages of selection of the breeding program. Our results suggest that, for most traits included in this study, information from individuals from later stages of selection cannot be utilized to make selections based on GEBVs in earlier clonal generations. Predictions of GEBVs across full-sib families yielded similarly low prediction accuracies as across generations. The most promising approach for selection using GEBVs was found to be making predictions within full-sib families

Genome-Based Genotype × Environment Prediction Enhances Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Improvement Using Pseudo-Diploid and Polysomic Tetraploid Modeling

Potato breeding must improve its efficiency by increasing the reliability of selection as well as identifying a promising germplasm for crossing. This study shows the prediction accuracy of genomic-estimated breeding values for several potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) breeding clones and the released cultivars that were evaluated at three locations in northern and southern Sweden for various traits. Three dosages of marker alleles [pseudo-diploid (A), additive tetrasomic polyploidy (B), and additive-non-additive tetrasomic polyploidy (C)] were considered in the genome-based prediction models, for single environments and multiple environments (accounting for the genotype-by-environment interaction or G × E), and for comparing two kernels, the conventional linear, Genomic Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (GBLUP) (GB), and the non-linear Gaussian kernel (GK), when used with the single-kernel genetic matrices of A, B, C, or when employing two-kernel genetic matrices in the model using the kernels from B and C for a single environment (models 1 and 2, respectively), and for multi-environments (models 3 and 4, respectively). Concerning the single site analyses, the trait with the highest prediction accuracy for all sites under A, B, C for model 1, model 2, and for GB and GK methods was tuber starch percentage. Another trait with relatively high prediction accuracy was the total tuber weight. Results show an increase in prediction accuracy of model 2 over model 1. Non-linear Gaussian kernel (GK) did not show any clear advantage over the linear kernel GBLUP (GB). Results from the multi-environments had prediction accuracy estimates (models 3 and 4) higher than those obtained from the single-environment analyses. Model 4 with GB was the best method in combination with the marker structure B for predicting most of the tuber traits. Most of the traits gave relatively high prediction accuracy under this combination of marker structure (A, B, C, and B-C), and methods GB and GK combined with the multi-environment with G × E model

Public potato breeding progress for the Nordic Region of Europe: evidence from multisite testing of selected breeding clones and available released cultivars

The breeding of new cultivars is a powerful approach to increase both the quantity and quality of potato harvest per land unit. The aim of this research was to determine using multi-site testing the progress made by the genetic enhancement of potato in Sweden in the last 1.5 decades by comparing advanced breeding clones (T4 upwards) bred in Sweden (Svensk potatisförädling hereafter) versus available released cultivars in Europe and grown in its Nordic Region. The multi-site testing results show that potato breeding based in Scandinavia offers to the growers of the Nordic Region of Europe cultivars for prevailing farming environments and end-user needs rather than relying, as happens today in the market, on foreign cultivars. These cultivars bred elsewhere are not always very suitable for the challenging Nordic agroecosystems, as shown by the results of the multi-site testing herein. Such an approach on relying on foreign cultivars may be advocated for not funding potato breeding in, and for Fennoscandia by those ignoring the results shown by this research