Carbon Incentive Mechanisms and Land-Use Implications for Canadian Agriculture

This research examines effects of various factors on participation in agricultural tree plantations for economic, environmental, social and carbon-uptake purposes. Using survey data from 2000 mail surveys of Canadian farmers, a discrete choice random utility analysis is used to determine probability of farmers' participation and the corresponding mean willingness to accept a tree-planting program. Estimation results show that the required compensation for accepting a tree-planting program is higher than the compensation suggested by a normative approachEnvironmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Institutions of sustainability in Central and Eastern European Countries

The agricultural sector in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is confronted by two huge problems simultaneously: transition processes and sustainability. Institutions are very important for both these problems. The purpose of this paper is to make clear that the institutional setting is very important, and to give insight into the initial situation of institutions for sustainability and transitions. For this purpose we carried out surveys in CEE with questions about government performance, institutional environment, government structures and social capital. There is strong relationship between the determinants of good government performance in general and those for good government for realizing sustainable agriculture. However, besides formal rules, the informal rules of the institutional environment and social capital are also very important for realizing of sustainable agriculture. Results of surveys show that these institutional elements and the level of social capital are different in the countries of CEE, and have to be developed. Knowledge of government performance, institutional environment and social capital is a necessary condition for developing more suitable governance structures for realizing sustainable agriculture.institutions, social capital, sustainable agriculture and Central and Eastern Europe, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

An unsupervised data-driven method to discover equivalent relations in large linked datasets

This article addresses a number of limitations of state-of-the-art methods of Ontology Alignment: 1) they primarily address concepts and entities while relations are less well-studied; 2) many build on the assumption of the ‘well-formedness’ of ontologies which is unnecessarily true in the domain of Linked Open Data; 3) few have looked at schema heterogeneity from a single source, which is also a common issue particularly in very large Linked Dataset created automatically from heterogeneous resources, or integrated from multiple datasets. We propose a domain- and language-independent and completely unsupervised method to align equivalent relations across schemata based on their shared instances. We introduce a novel similarity measure able to cope with unbalanced population of schema elements, an unsupervised technique to automatically decide similarity threshold to assert equivalence for a pair of relations, and an unsupervised clustering process to discover groups of equivalent relations across different schemata. Although the method is designed for aligning relations within a single dataset, it can also be adapted for cross-dataset alignment where sameAs links between datasets have been established. Using three gold standards created based on DBpedia, we obtain encouraging results from a thorough evaluation involving four baseline similarity measures and over 15 comparative models based on variants of the proposed method. The proposed method makes significant improvement over baseline models in terms of F1 measure (mostly between 7% and 40%), and it always scores the highest precision and is also among the top performers in terms of recall. We also make public the datasets used in this work, which we believe make the largest collection of gold standards for evaluating relation alignment in the LOD context

Institutions of sustainability in Central and Eastern European Countries

The agricultural sector in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is confronted by two huge problems simultaneously: transition processes and sustainability. Institutions are very important for both these problems. The purpose of this paper is to make clear that the institutional setting is very important, and to give insight into the initial situation of institutions for sustainability and transitions. For this purpose we carried out surveys in CEE with questions about government performance, institutional environment, government structures and social capital. There is strong relationship between the determinants of good government performance in general and those for good government for realizing sustainable agriculture. However, besides formal rules, the informal rules of the institutional environment and social capital are also very important for realizing of sustainable agriculture. Results of surveys show that these institutional elements and the level of social capital are different in the countries of CEE, and have to be developed. Knowledge of government performance, institutional environment and social capital is a necessary condition for developing more suitable governance structures for realizing sustainable agriculture

Carbon Incentive Mechanisms and Land-Use Implications for Canadian Agriculture

This research examines effects of various factors on participation in agricultural tree plantations for economic, environmental, social and carbon-uptake purposes. Using survey data from 2000 mail surveys of Canadian farmers, a discrete choice random utility analysis is used to determine probability of farmers' participation and the corresponding mean willingness to accept a tree-planting program. Estimation results show that the required compensation for accepting a tree-planting program is higher than the compensation suggested by a normative approac

DOES INCLUSION OF LANDOWNERS' NON-MARKET VALUES LOWER COSTS OF CREATING CARBON FOREST SINKS?

This research examines effects of various factors on farmer participation in agricultural tree plantations for economic, environmental, social and carbon-uptake purposes. Using data from a survey of Canadian agricultural landowners, a discrete choice random utility model is used to determine the probability of farmers' participation and corresponding mean willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for a tree-planting program. WTA includes positive and negative nonmarket benefits to landowners from planting trees. Estimates of WTA are less than foregone agricultural rents, but average costs of creating carbon credits still exceed their projected value under a CO2-emissions trading schem

Solution synthesis of hydroxyapatite designer particulates

This paper reviews our research program for intelligent synthesis of hydroxyapatite (HAp) designer particulates by low-temperature hydrothermal and mechanochemical–hydrothermal methods. Our common starting point for hydrothermal crystallization is the generation and validation of equilibrium diagrams to derive the relationship between initial reaction conditions and desired phase assemblage(s). Experimental conditions were planned based on calculated phase boundaries in the system CaO–P2O5–NH4NO3–H2O at 25–200 °C. HAp powders were then hydrothermally synthesized in stirred autoclaves at 50–200 °C and by the mechanochemical–hydrothermal method in a multi-ring media mill at room temperature. The synthesized powders were characterized using X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetry, chemical analysis and electron microscopy. Hydrothermally synthesized HAp particle morphologies and sizes were controlled through thermodynamic and non-thermodynamic processing variables, e.g. synthesis temperature, additives and stirring speed. Hydrothermal synthesis yielded well-crystallized needle-like HAp powders (size range 20–300 nm) with minimal levels of aggregation. Conversely, room-temperature mechanochemical–hydrothermal synthesis resulted in agglomerated, nanosized (∼20 nm), mostly equiaxed particles regardless of whether the HAp was stoichiometric, carbonate-substituted, or contained both sodium and carbonate. The thermodynamic model appears to be applicable for both stoichiometric and nonstoichiometric compositions. The mechanochemical–hydrothermal technique was particularly well suited for controlling carbonate substitution in HAp powders in the range of 0.8–12 wt.. The use of organic surfactants, pH or nonaqueous solvents facilitated the preparation of stable colloidal dispersions of these mechanochemical–hydrothermal-derived HAp nanopowders

Mechanochemical–hydrothermal synthesis of carbonated apatite powders at room temperature

Crystalline carbonate- and sodium-and-carbonate-substituted hydroxyapatite (CO3HAp and NaCO3HAp) powders were prepared at room temperature via a heterogeneous reaction between Ca(OH)2/CaCO3/Na2CO3 and (NH4)2HPO4 aqueous solution using the mechanochemical–hydrothermal route. X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetry, and chemical analysis were performed. Room temperature products were phase-pure CO3HAp and NaCO3HAp containing 0.8–12wt of carbonate ions in the lattice. Dynamic light scattering revealed that the median agglomerate size of the room temperature CO3HAp and NaCO3HAp powders was in the range of 0.35–1.6μm with a specific surface area between 82 and 121m2/g. Scanning and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that the carbonated HAp powders consisted of mostly submicron aggregates of nanosized, ≈20nm crystals. The synthesized carbonated apatite powders exhibit chemical compositions and crystallinities similar to those of mineral constituents of hard tissues and therefore are promising for fabrication of bone-resembling implants

The role of ammonium citrate washing on the characteristics of mechanochemical--hydrothermal derived magnesium-containing apatites

The role of citrate washing on the physical and chemical characteristics of magnesium-substituted apatites (HAMgs) was performed. HAMgs were synthesized by a mechanochemical--hydrothermal route at room temperature in as little as 1 h, which is five times faster than our previous work. Magnesium-substituted apatites had concentrations as high as 17.6 wt% Mg with a corresponding specific surface area (SSA) of 216 m2/g. A systematic study was performed to examine the influence of increasing magnesium content on the physical and chemical characteristics of the reaction products. As the magnesium content increased from 0 to 17.6 wt%, magnesium-doped apatite crystallite size decreased from 12 to 8.8 nm. The Mg/(Mg + Ca) ratio in the product was enriched relative to that used for the reacting precursor solution. During mechanochemical--hydrothermal reaction, magnesium doped apatites co-crystallize with magnesium hydroxide. Citrate washing serves to remove the magnesium hydroxide phase. The concomitant increase in surface area results because of the removal of this phase. Possible mechanisms for magnesium hydroxide leaching are discussed to explain the measured trends