Breeding biology of the pied kingfisher Ceryle Rudis on lake victoria

Volume: 3

DDT in the tropics: The impact on wildlife in Zimbabwe of ground spraying for Tsetse fly control

Acclaimed less than twenty-five years ago as the greatest chemical ever discovered, DOT has been instrumental in changing the course of history for many nations. Yet today, with the realization that its residues are persistent and can accumulate in the environment and man himself, DOT pollution has become a major concern of the western world. Public agitation has led to policy decisions which take little account of the risks and benefits of continued use, particularly for less-developed countries. DDT in the Tropics presents the results and conclusions of four years of research in Zimbabwe. The study is the first to assess the impact of DOT ground-spraying on animal populations in tropical ecosystems, and is also one of the most comprehensive studies of DOT undertaken anywhere. Consequently, the findings can contribute significantly to the development of a rational policy on the use of DOT in the Tropics. The organization of the text reflects the different needs of its potential readers. The Scientific Report can be read as an uninterrupted narrative covering the investigation of each component group in the system for those who need a sound background knowledge. Readers requiring greater detail will find experimental techniques and results included in the numbered boxes within each chapter. Finally, those involved in policy planning and implementation will be most interested in the overview given by the opening Environmental Statement

What Influences the Diffusion of Grassroots Innovations for Sustainability? Investigating Community Currency Niches

Community action for sustainability is a promising site of socio-technical innovation. Here we test the applicability of co-evolutionary niche theories of innovation diffusion (Strategic Niche Management, SNM) to the context of ‘grassroots innovations’. We present new empirical findings from an international study of 12 community currency niches (such as LETS, time banks, local currencies). These are parallel systems of exchange, designed to operate alongside mainstream money, meeting additional sustainability needs. Our findings confirm SNM predictions that niche-level activity correlates with diffusion success, but we highlight additional or confounding factors, and how niche theories might be adapted to better fit civil-society innovations. In so doing, we develop a model of grassroots innovation niche diffusion which builds on existing work and tailors it to this specific context. The paper concludes with a series of theoretically-informed recommendations for practitioners and policymakers to support the development and potential of grassroots innovations

Rapidly growing left atrial myxoma: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Left atrial myxomas are rare benign tumors of the heart. They vary widely in size, and very little is known about their growth rate. The reported growth rates of left atrial myxomas from several published case reports appears to vary from no growth, to between 1.3 to 6.9 mm/month in diameter within patients with established myxoma who have not undergone surgery.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a rapidly growing pedunculated left atrial myxoma in a 62-year-old asymptomatic Caucasian woman found incidentally during routine transthoracic echocardiography. Our patient was attending her annual valve clinic assessment for moderate aortic regurgitation, and her two previous consecutive transthoracic echocardiography scans performed 12 and 24 months prior to this appointment had demonstrated a clear left atrium and aortic regurgitation of moderate severity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>To the best of our knowledge, our case is the first to provide images of absence and presence of myxoma from transthoracic echocardiography scans taken a year apart, with estimated growth rate of 2.2 mm/month. Rapidly growing myxoma may be mistaken for thrombus, and may require urgent surgical excision to reduce the risk of associated complications such as thrombo-embolic events, sudden cardiac death and removal of a possibly malignant tumor. The potential for rapid growth should be considered if there is a plan to delay surgery. Furthermore, it would be pertinent to consider annual echocardiography in patients presenting with clinical features suggestive of cardiac myxoma such as constitutional symptoms, as these tumors may be rapid growing and may only become apparent on subsequent echocardiography.</p

Institutional Learning and Change: an introduction

Originally published by the International Service for National Agricultural Research as: Watts, J. R. Mackay, D. Horton, A. Hall, B. Douthwaite, R. Chambers and A. Acosta. (2003). Institutional learning and change: An introduction. ISNAR Discussion Paper No.03-10, The Hague: International Service for National Agricultural ResearchThroughout the world, the pace of environmental, social and technological change is accelerating, and this in turn has major implications for the poor and their development prospects. Traditional transfer-of-technology approaches to agricultural research can no longer keep pace with the complex, diverse, risk-prone and dynamic realities of poor farmers. If agricultural research organizations are to be more successful in reducing poverty and increasing the sustainability of agricultural production systems, they must become less isolated, more interconnected and more responsive. In so doing, they must transform themselves into learning organizations, more in touch with field realities and better able to learn and to change. Recent research on the poverty alleviating impacts of technology associated with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has identified institutional learning and change (ILAC) as a key area for intervention if research is to be more efficient and effective in serving the poor

Participatory impact pathways analysis : A practical application of program theory in research-for-development

The Challenge Program on Water and Food pursues food security and poverty alleviation through the efforts of some 50 research-for-development projects. These involve almost 200 organizations working in nine river basins around the world. An approach was developed to enhance the developmental impact of the program through better impact assessment, to provide a framework for monitoring and evaluation, to permit stakeholders to derive strategic and programmatic lessons for future initiatives, and to provide information that can be used to inform public awareness efforts. The approach makes explicit a project's program theory by describing its impact pathways in terms of a logic model and network maps. A narrative combines the logic model and the network maps into a single explanatory account and adds to overall plausibility by explaining the steps in the logic model and the key risks and assumptions. Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis is based on concepts related to program theory drawn from the fields of evaluation, organizational learning, and social network analysis

Using theory of change to achieve impact in AAS

The CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework sets out four system level outcomes (SLOs), namely: reducing rural poverty, improving food security, improving nutrition and health and sustainable management of natural resources. In pursuit of these objectives the CGIAR has developed a set of sixteen CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs), each of which is expected to make specific contributions to a range of intermediate development outcomes (IDOs) linked to the SLOs. As part of this work the CRPs are developing impact pathways and theories of change designed to explain how the programs will achieve IDOs. The purpose of the present paper is to explain the approach that the CRP on Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS) is taking to using these programmatic tools to help achieve impact