Identifying obstacles to the design and implementation of payment schemes for ecosystem services provided through farm trees

An important determinant of ecosystem services provision from European farmland is the amount and spatial arrangement of trees, shrubs, and woodlands that are integrated into the respective land use systems. Farm trees are considered ‘keystone structures’ of agroecosystems because of their disproportionally large ecological value (relative to their low abundance), but are threatened by agricultural intensification, land abandonment, and urbanization. While the preservation of farm trees is a component of several command-and control approaches and while numerous payment schemes for ecosystem services (PES schemes) provided through agricultural practices do in general exist, there are few incentive-based policies that specifically target the conservation of farm trees. This paper uses an institutional economics framework for the analysis of PES schemes that enhance the establishment, protection, and management of farm trees. Using the German state of Saxony as a case, it elaborates on the reasons for the very reluctant participation of farmers in these schemes. The obstacles identified include high production and opportunity costs, contractual uncertainties, and land tenure implications. Further, since scheme adoption has been low compared with the total area covered by the respective farm tree types, the PES schemes alone cannot explain the substantial increase in number and size of some farm-tree types. Options to improve participation comprise regionalised premiums, result-oriented remuneration, and cooperative approaches. The example of PES schemes for farm trees highlights one of the major challenges for the protection and preservation of cultural landscapes: they are man-made and thus need to be preserved, managed, and maintained continuously.Payments for ecosystem services (PES), agroecosystems, trees outside forests, institutional economics, East Germany, Saxony, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Non-technological and Technological Innovation: Strange Bedfellows?

Non-technological innovation is an important element of firms? innovation activities that both supplement and complement technological innovation, i.e. the introduction of new products and new processes. We analyse the spread of nontechnological innovation in firms, their relation to technological innovation, and their effects to firm performance and success with product and process innovation, using data from the German Community Innovation Survey conducted in 2005 (German CIS 4). Non-technological innovation is defined as the introduction of new organisational methods or the introduction of new marketing methods. We find that the determinants of a firm?s propensity to introduce technological and non-technological innovations are very similar and that both types are closely related. There are only small effects of non-technological innovation on a firm? profit margin, which contrasts the strong effects to be found from technological innovation. However, non-technological innovation spurs success with product and process innovation terms of sales with market novelties and cost reductions from new processes. --organisational innovation,marketing innovation,effects of innovation,CIS 4

TASKers: A Whole-System Generator for Benchmarking Real-Time-System Analyses

Implementation-based benchmarking of timing and schedulability analyses requires system code that can be executed on real hardware and has defined properties, for example, known worst-case execution times (WCETs) of tasks. Traditional approaches for creating benchmarks with such characteristics often result in implementations that do not resemble real-world systems, either due to work only being simulated by means of busy waiting, or because tasks have no control-flow dependencies between each other. In this paper, we address this problem with TASKers, a generator that constructs realistic benchmark systems with predefined properties. To achieve this, TASKers composes patterns of real-world programs to generate tasks that produce known outputs and exhibit preconfigured WCETs when being executed with certain inputs. Using this knowledge during the generation process, TASKers is able to specifically introduce inter-task control-flow dependencies by mapping the output of one task to the input of another

Relics of structure formation: extra-planar gas and high-velocity clouds around the Andromeda Galaxy

Using the 100-m radio telescope at Effelsberg, we mapped a large area around the Andromeda Galaxy in the 21-cm line emission of neutral hydrogen to search for high-velocity clouds (HVCs) out to large projected distances in excess of 100 kpc. Our 3-sigma HI mass sensitivity for the warm neutral medium is 8x10^4 solar masses. We can confirm the existence of a population of HVCs with typical HI masses of a few times 10^5 solar masses near the disc of M31. However, we did not detect any HVCs beyond a projected distance of about 50 kpc from M31, suggesting that HVCs are generally found in proximity of large spiral galaxies at typical distances of a few 10 kpc. Comparison with CDM-based models and simulations suggests that only a few of the detected HVCs could be associated with primordial dark-matter satellites, whereas others are most likely the result of tidal stripping. The lack of clouds beyond a projected distance of 50 kpc from M31 is also in conflict with the predictions of recent CDM structure formation simulations. A possible solution to this problem could be ionisation of the HVCs as a result of decreasing pressure of the ambient coronal gas at larger distances from M31. A consequence of this scenario would be the presence of hundreds of mainly ionised or pure dark-matter satellites around large spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and M31.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Multiplicative Approximations, Optimal Hypervolume Distributions, and the Choice of the Reference Point

Many optimization problems arising in applications have to consider several objective functions at the same time. Evolutionary algorithms seem to be a very natural choice for dealing with multi-objective problems as the population of such an algorithm can be used to represent the trade-offs with respect to the given objective functions. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective problems. We consider indicator-based algorithms whose goal is to maximize the hypervolume for a given problem by distributing {\mu} points on the Pareto front. To gain new theoretical insights into the behavior of hypervolume-based algorithms we compare their optimization goal to the goal of achieving an optimal multiplicative approximation ratio. Our studies are carried out for different Pareto front shapes of bi-objective problems. For the class of linear fronts and a class of convex fronts, we prove that maximizing the hypervolume gives the best possible approximation ratio when assuming that the extreme points have to be included in both distributions of the points on the Pareto front. Furthermore, we investigate the choice of the reference point on the approximation behavior of hypervolume-based approaches and examine Pareto fronts of different shapes by numerical calculations