Tropical forest and peatland conservation in Indonesia: Challenges and directions

Tropical forests and peatlands provide important ecological, climate and socio‐economic benefits from the local to the global scale. However, these ecosystems and their associated benefits are threatened by anthropogenic activities, including agricultural conversion, timber harvesting, peatland drainage and associated fire. Here, we identify key challenges, and provide potential solutions and future directions to meet forest and peatland conservation and restoration goals in Indonesia, with a particular focus on Kalimantan. Through a round‐table, dual‐language workshop discussion and literature evaluation, we recognized 59 political, economic, legal, social, logistical and research challenges, for which five key underlying factors were identified. These challenges relate to the 3Rs adopted by the Indonesian Peatland Restoration Agency (Rewetting, Revegetation and Revitalization), plus a fourth R that we suggest is essential to incorporate into (peatland) conservation planning: Reducing Fires. Our analysis suggests that (a) all challenges have potential for impact on activities under all 4Rs, and many are inter‐dependent and mutually reinforcing, implying that narrowly focused solutions are likely to carry a higher risk of failure; (b) addressing challenges relating to Rewetting and Reducing Fire is critical for achieving goals in all 4Rs, as is considering the local socio‐political situation and acquiring local government and community support; and (c) the suite of challenges faced, and thus conservation interventions required to address these, will be unique to each project, depending on its goals and prevailing local environmental, social and political conditions. With this in mind, we propose an eight‐step adaptive management framework, which could support projects in both Indonesia and other tropical areas to identify and overcome their specific conservation and restoration challenges

FIRST NuSTAR OBSERVATIONS of MRK 501 WITHIN A RADIO to TeV MULTI-INSTRUMENT CAMPAIGN

© 2015. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. We report on simultaneous broadband observations of the TeV-emitting blazar Markarian 501 between 2013 April 1 and August 10, including the first detailed characterization of the synchrotron peak with Swift and NuSTAR. During the campaign, the nearby BL Lac object was observed in both a quiescent and an elevated state. The broadband campaign includes observations with NuSTAR, MAGIC, VERITAS, the Fermi Large Area Telescope, Swift X-ray Telescope and UV Optical Telescope, various ground-based optical instruments, including the GASP-WEBT program, as well as radio observations by OVRO, Metsähovi, and the F-Gamma consortium. Some of the MAGIC observations were affected by a sand layer from the Saharan desert, and had to be corrected using event-by-event corrections derived with a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) facility. This is the first time that LIDAR information is used to produce a physics result with Cherenkov Telescope data taken during adverse atmospheric conditions, and hence sets a precedent for the current and future ground-based gamma-ray instruments. The NuSTAR instrument provides unprecedented sensitivity in hard X-rays, showing the source to display a spectral energy distribution (SED) between 3 and 79 keV consistent with a log-parabolic spectrum and hard X-ray variability on hour timescales. None (of the four extended NuSTAR observations) show evidence of the onset of inverse-Compton emission at hard X-ray energies. We apply a single-zone equilibrium synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model to five simultaneous broadband SEDs. We find that the SSC model can reproduce the observed broadband states through a decrease in the magnetic field strength coinciding with an increase in the luminosity and hardness of the relativistic leptons responsible for the high-energy emission

Competing for advantage

xxvii, 450 hlm. ; ill. ; 24 cm

Use Case Modeling and Refinement : A Quality-Based Approach

noten this paper, we propose a quality-based use case refinement approach. It consists of a step by step refinement process that combines quality metrics with use case transformation rules. We propose several quality metrics, based on complexity concepts, aimed at measuring the complexity of use cases. Starting from an initial use case, we apply successively a set of transformation rules and measure the resulting use case based on the quality metrics. Our approach is embedded in a general framework allowing us to guide software designers by the mean of quality metrics

Combination of radiographic measurement of cortical width and clinical risk index for diagnosis of osteoporosis : the OSTEDENT study

Objectives: To determine the diagnostic validity of the width of the inferior mandibular cortex on dental panoramic radiographs (DPRs), as measured by an Active Shape Model (ASM) method in combination with a clinical risk index, for the diagnosis of osteoporosis in peri- and post-menopausal women. Methods: Volunteer female subjects in the 45 to 70 year age band, recruited from four European centres, underwent dual x-ray energy absorptiometry (DXA) of the hip and lumbar spine, to provide a gold standard diagnosis of osteoporosis, and a DPR examination. A questionnaire was completed for each subject to identify factors related to osteoporosis risk and calculate a clinical risk index (OSIRIS). A manually initialised ASM method was used to derive cortical width measurements from each radiograph. ROC analysis was used to identify the most effective clinical index. Logistic regression analysis was used to build a model, with the presence or absence of osteoporosis as the dichotomous dependent variable and OSIRIS and the radiographic data as independent variables. Results: ROC analysis gave an Az value for OSIRIS of 0.841 (95% CI: 0.811 to 0.868). The sensitivity and specificity of the combined radiographic-clinical risk assessment were 38.6% and 97.9% respectively. Conclusions: Combining the cortical width measurement and the clinical risk index provided a high specificity method for detection of subjects with osteoporosis, although sensitivity was modest. This model would be most suitable for use in the context of restricted availability of DXA. This work was supported by a research and technological development project grant from the European Commission FP5 'Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources' (QLK6-2002-02243)