Habitat Selection of Invasive Sika Deer Cervus nippon Living in a UK Lowland Heathland-Woodland-Grassland Mosaic: Implications for Habitat Conservation Management.

Understanding the factors determining the choice and use of habitats by invasive species is key to the conservation management of habitats and may also enable species to be harnessed as conservation tools. Here we explore the habitat use of an invasive population of sika deer, Cervus nippon on internationally important heathland in a landscape of heathland, grassland and woodland in southern UK. We used radio telemetry to test two hypotheses 1) grasses form a major part of the diet of non-native UK sika deer throughout the year 2) deer select grassland habitats above other habitats available. Results showed that although grasses form a major part of their diet, the strongest habitat selection was for heathland, the habitat that offered the least nutrient reward but which offered a source of roughage in the diet and some harbourage from human disturbance. This has implications for the conservation management of heathlands used by sika deer as it strongly indicates that heathland is a vulnerable habitat due to being favoured by sika deer but that its vulnerability can be reduced by coupling population control with targeted habitat management action such as increased disturbance or the removal of harbourage

Evaluation of frameworks of analysis employed in studies of exclusion zones

The purpose of this Work Package is to examine the various approaches to analysing fishery exclusion zones (FEZs) and to identify the circumstances in which one approach might be preferred to another. Our concern here is not so much with answering questions about exclusion zones - these being dealt with in later Work Packages - as with articulating the questions themselves and in understanding how in principle they could be addressed. An important theme is the precision with which questions need to be answered, since this will determine the type of information collected and how such information is analysed. The question ' is an exclusion zone likely to improve the condition of this fishery ?' is less precise and less demanding of data than the question ' by how much will an exclusion zone improve this fishery ?' since it could in principle be answered by expert judgement rather than quantitative analysis. In practice fisheries managers may be confronted with situations where decisions have to be made quickly, and qualitative answers may be the only thing possible in circumstances where data cannot be obtained in the available time. The Work Package will look at FEZs from a number of different perspectives, but its dominant concern is with the information – principally in the form of socio-economic and biological indicators - needed by fisheries managers in order to evaluate the effectiveness of FEZs. To contextualise the discussion we start by outlining a paradigm for understanding the linkages between human activities and the environment, showing how it can be applied to fisheries and marine resources. The Work Package then considers the substantive information requirements of fisheries managers, commencing with socio-economic assessment and moving on to a review of biological assessment and the progress which has been made in the development of mathematical models of FEZs. Bio-economic modelling, which is essentially a specialised type of socio-economic assessment in which explicit account is taken of the interaction between the biological and economic components of the fishing system, is dealt with in the final section

Resilience in groundwater supply systems: integrating resource based approaches with agency, behaviour and choice

Access to safe and reliable water supplies is a key goal for households and governments across most of Africa. Groundwater reserves can play a critical role in achieving this, yet risks of contamination and over-abstraction threaten to undermine the resilience of this supply. A rapidly rising trend for privately-developed wells and boreholes raises additional concerns about the vulnerability of water supplies to natural or man-made environmental shocks. The potential scale of the situation is particularly marked in Nigeria where the use of boreholes has increased exponentially since 1999 (from 10% of the population to 38% in 2015), with most other forms of water supply, notably piped tap water, falling. Developing effective groundwater management approaches that build the resilience of communities is challenging, not least given the range of different actors involved, their competing interests and demands, and variations in the hydrogeological environment. Insights from resilience studies in social science emphasise how the resilience of ecological resources to shocks and change is critically linked to the adaptive capacity of social systems and their agents. Choices made now have long-lasting effects, yet these choices are little understood. Understanding the choices made by consumers, drillers and policy actors requires a strong interdisciplinary dimension and argues for new perspectives as to how the resilience of communities and societies might be built. The project brings together a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between academics from the UK and Nigeria working in the fields of economic geography, psychology, hydrogeology and journalism studies

Domestic groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria: a disjuncture in the Science-Policy-Practice Interface?

The rapid development of groundwater systems as part of urban water supplies around the globe is raising critical questions regarding the sustainable management of this essential resource. Yet, in many major cities, the absence of an effective policy regime means that the practice of groundwater exploitation is driven by the actions of domestic households and drilling contractors. Understanding what shapes the decisions and practices of these actors, their understandings of the groundwater resource and the extent to which scientific knowledge shapes this understanding, is an area of critical importance that is currently under-researched. Using a mixed-methods methodology, the paper explores domestic practices of groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria. It finds that there is a disjuncture between the households who are actively shaping exploitation of the groundwater resource on a day-to-day basis and science and state actors. This disjuncture results in household decisions that are influenced by commonly held, but potentially outdated, perceptions of the groundwater resource rather than scientific evidence or policy instruments. The unseen nature of groundwater resources effectively renders the scale of changing groundwater conditions invisible to households and the state, adding to the challenge of influencing practice. Addressing this disjuncture requires not just more scientific knowledge, but also the active construction of interfaces with, and between, non-state actors through which knowledge can be confronted, discussed and shared

Fisheries Exclusion Zones: Value and its sensitivity to data uncertainty

This paper focuses on the findings of the project that pertain particularly to the determination of the value of fisheries exclusion zones and the sensitivity of value estimation to data uncertainty. It necessarily draws on both the lite rature review and the case studies and in terms of its content extracts, presents and su mmarises the pertinent material therein covered. By collating this material a more directed consid eration of the topic of value is facilitated and the findings of the study as a whole more clear ly highlighted, and through consideration of uncertainty, also qualified

Trapping in scale-free networks with hierarchical organization of modularity

A wide variety of real-life networks share two remarkable generic topological properties: scale-free behavior and modular organization, and it is natural and important to study how these two features affect the dynamical processes taking place on such networks. In this paper, we investigate a simple stochastic process--trapping problem, a random walk with a perfect trap fixed at a given location, performed on a family of hierarchical networks that exhibit simultaneously striking scale-free and modular structure. We focus on a particular case with the immobile trap positioned at the hub node having the largest degree. Using a method based on generating functions, we determine explicitly the mean first-passage time (MFPT) for the trapping problem, which is the mean of the node-to-trap first-passage time over the entire network. The exact expression for the MFPT is calculated through the recurrence relations derived from the special construction of the hierarchical networks. The obtained rigorous formula corroborated by extensive direct numerical calculations exhibits that the MFPT grows algebraically with the network order. Concretely, the MFPT increases as a power-law function of the number of nodes with the exponent much less than 1. We demonstrate that the hierarchical networks under consideration have more efficient structure for transport by diffusion in contrast with other analytically soluble media including some previously studied scale-free networks. We argue that the scale-free and modular topologies are responsible for the high efficiency of the trapping process on the hierarchical networks.Comment: Definitive version accepted for publication in Physical Review

Towards standard setting for patient-reported outcomes in the NHS homeopathic hospitals

We report findings from a pilot data collection study within a programme of quality assurance, improvement and development across all five homeopathic hospitals in the UK National Health Service (NHS).<p></p> <b>Aims</b> (1) To pilot the collection of clinical data in the homeopathic hospital outpatient setting, recording patient-reported outcome since first appointment; (2) to sample the range of medical complaints that secondary-care doctors treat using homeopathy, and thus identify the nature and complexity of complaints most frequently treated nationally; (3) to present a cross section of outcome scores by appointment number, including that for the most frequently treated medical complaints; (4) to explore approaches to standard setting for homeopathic practice outcome in patients treated at the homeopathic hospitals.<p></p> <b>Methods</b> A total of 51 medical practitioners took part in data collection over a 4-week period. Consecutive patient appointments were recorded under the headings: (1) date of first appointment in the current series; (2) appointment number; (3) age of patient; (4) sex of patient; (5) main medical complaint being treated; (6) whether other main medical complaint(s); (7) patient-reported change in health, using Outcome Related to Impact on Daily Living (ORIDL) and its derivative, the ORIDL Profile Score (ORIDL-PS; range, –4 to +4, where a score ≤−2 or ≥+2 indicates an effect on the quality of a patient's daily life); (8) receipt of other complementary medicine for their main medical complaint.<p></p> <b>Results</b> The distribution of patient age was bimodal: main peak, 49 years; secondary peak, 6 years. Male:female ratio was 1:3.5. Data were recorded on a total of 1797 individual patients: 195 first appointments, 1602 follow-ups (FUs). Size of clinical service and proportion of patients who attended more than six visits varied between hospitals. A total of 235 different medical complaints were reported. The 30 most commonly treated complaints were (in decreasing order of frequency): eczema; chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS); menopausal disorder; osteoarthritis; depression; breast cancer; rheumatoid arthritis; asthma; anxiety; irritable bowel syndrome; multiple sclerosis; psoriasis; allergy (unspecified); fibromyalgia; migraine; premenstrual syndrome; chronic rhinitis; headache; vitiligo; seasonal allergic rhinitis; chronic intractable pain; insomnia; ulcerative colitis; acne; psoriatic arthropathy; urticaria; ovarian cancer; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); epilepsy; sinusitis. The proportion of patients with important co-morbidity was higher in those seen after visit 6 (56.9%) compared with those seen up to and including that point (40.7%; P < 0.001). The proportion of FU patients reporting ORIDL-PS ≥ +2 (improvement affecting daily living) increased overall with appointment number: 34.5% of patients at visit 2 and 59.3% of patients at visit 6, for example. Amongst the four most frequently treated complaints, the proportion of patients that reported ORIDL-PS ≥ +2 at visit numbers greater than 6 varied between 59.3% (CFS) and 73.3% (menopausal disorder).<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b> We have successfully piloted a process of national clinical data collection using patient-reported outcome in homeopathic hospital outpatients, identifying a wide range and complexity of medical complaints treated in that setting. After a series of homeopathy appointments, a high proportion of patients, often representing “effectiveness gaps” for conventional medical treatment, reported improvement in health affecting their daily living. These pilot findings are informing our developing programme of standard setting for homeopathic care in the hospital outpatient context

Individual water sourcing: understanding risks and resilience to groundwater resource abstraction in Nigeria

Across much of Africa, domestic water supplies are increasingly dependent on groundwater reserves. As the cost of accessing these reserves fall, expertise becomes more widely available and incomes rise there is a rising trend towards the private commissioning of boreholes and wells. This nascent shift towards a distributed and increasingly individualised water supply may have many implications for the resilience of communities to future environmental shocks, which are, as yet, under-explored. Drawing on the case of Nigeria and new interdisciplinary research, this paper addresses this gap, through a specific focus on understanding the behaviour and choices of individuals and other key stakeholders which underpin this trend. It also seeks to understand the possible implications of this for the resilience of associated social and ecological systems

Prospects for radical emissions reduction through behaviour and lifestyle change

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, in policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviours and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of iconic behaviours such as recycling, it has however proved extremely difficult to bring about meaningful transformations in personal greenhouse gas emissions at either the individual or societal level, with multiple reviews now pointing to the limited efficacy of current approaches. We argue that the majority of approaches designed to achieve mitigation have been constrained by the need to operate within prevailing social scientific, economic and political orthodoxies which have precluded the possibility of non-marginal change. In this paper we ask what a truly radical approach to reducing personal emissions would look like from social science perspectives which challenge the unstated assumptions severely limiting action to date, and which explore new alternatives for change. We emphasise the difficulties likely to impede the instituting of genuinely radical societal change regarding climate change mitigation, whilst proposing ways that the ground could be prepared for such a transformation to take place

Visual Climate Change Communication: From Iconography To Locally Framed 3D Visualization

Climate change is an urgent problem with implications registered not only globally, but also on national and local scales. It is a particularly challenging case of environmental communication because its main cause, greenhouse gas emissions, is invisible. The predominant approach of making climate change visible is the use of iconic, often affective, imagery. Literature on the iconography of climate change shows that global iconic motifs, such as polar bears, have contributed to a public perception of the problem as spatially and temporally remote. This paper proposes an alternative approach to global climate change icons by focusing on recognizable representations of local impacts within an interactive game environment. This approach was implemented and tested in a research project based on the municipality of Delta, British Columbia. A major outcome of the research is Future Delta, an interactive educational game featuring 3D visualizations and simulation tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation future scenarios. The empirical evaluation is based on quantitative pre/post-game play questionnaires with 18 students and 10 qualitative expert interviews. The findings support the assumption that interactive 3D imagery is effective in communicating climate change. The quantitative post-questionnaires particularly highlight a shift in support of more local responsibility