An evaluation of the benefits and costs of in-field shelterbelts in Midwestern USA

Selected field windbreak (shelterbelt) designs were evaluated to assess their cost effectiveness of providing additional crop production, carbon sequestration, and hunting opportunities.;In terms of additional crop production, a three-row mixed windbreak with extensive management and low cost is the most cost effective because it requires the smallest corn yield increases to break even. Using a sheltering effect of 12 windbreak heights, the required additional yield is 0.28 Mg ha -1 yr-1. A four-row spruce windbreak with intensive management and high costs is the least cost effective because it requires the largest corn yield increases that are 28 times larger than those of the mixed windbreak. Trees that grow faster and taller are more cost effective because they provide sheltering effect sooner and over larger distances allowing to break even with smaller yield increases that are more likely to be achieved.;In terms of carbon sequestration, a four-row cottonwood windbreak is the most cost effective because it accumulates the greatest amounts of above and below-ground carbon that allow it to break even with a lifespan as short as 30 years. Only a cottonwood windbreak accumulates enough carbon to break even at a comparison price of 10.48 Mg-1. A higher carbon price of 32.38 Mg-1 enables a mixed windbreak to break even. Spruce windbreaks (two and four rows) require higher prices to break even. Continuous CRP payments offset a significant portion of windbreak costs and allow more windbreaks to break even and at earlier times.;About 55% of agricultural producers in Northeastern Iowa indicated that there is potential for fee hunting in field shelterbelts and on adjacent lands. However, they think that the potential is either weak or moderate. Almost all producers (95%) currently allow hunting. They believe that hunting is more important in providing intangible benefits such as recreation/enjoyment and better stewardship than tangible ones such as additional income and economic opportunities for the local community. On average, the producers require 22.74 per visit to allow a party of four hunters to access their land to hunt pheasants. The compensation amount is influenced more by producers\u27 attitudes toward hunting than by socioeconomic factors

Die Erstellung des Leitbildes für Corporate Social Responsibility der österreichischen Wirtschaft (CSR-Austria Leitbild). Process-review und lessons learned.

Series: Research Paper Series of the Research Focus Managing Sustainabilit

Farming for Health: Aspects from Germany

Until now, the term ‘Farming for Health’ is unknown in Germany but it would cover a wide spectrum of different kinds of social agriculture already existing in Germany, such as farms that integrate disabled people or drug therapy into their farming system, or farms that integrate children, pupils or older people. Relevant work in Germany is done in ‘Sheltered Workshops’, where supporting and healing powers of farming and gardening are used for disabled people with a diversity of work possibilities. Relevant activities also take place in work-therapy departments using horticultural therapy and in animalassisted therapy. There are an estimated number of 1000 different projects for mentally ill, disabled and elderly people in hospitals, Sheltered Workshops, on farms and other projects in Germany with a multitude of individual work places. The upcoming idea of Farming for Health may be met by the term ‘multifunctionality’ as one of the future goals of agriculture: to combine the production of cash crops with social functions, like providing space for recreation, care for landscapes and care for disabled people. Research showed that farms that work together with clients in their farming system have more time and financial support to integrate aims like caring for biotopes and landscape measures into their work schedule

Serialization in Object-Oriented Programming Languages

This chapter depicts the process of converting object state into a format that can be transmitted or stored in currently used object-oriented programming languages. This process is called serialization (marshaling); the opposite is called deserialization (unmarshalling) processes. It is a low-level technique, and several technical issues should be considered like endianness, size of memory representation, representation of numbers, object references, recursive object connections and others. In this chapter we discuss these issues and give them solutions. We also include a short review of tools currently used, and we showed that meeting all requirements is not possible. Finally, we presented a new C++ library that supports forward compatibility