Innovation in Plant-Greenhouse Interactions and Crop Management

(Semi)-closed greenhouses allow for better control of climate conditions compared to conventional greenhouses. To make the high investments for such greenhouses economically feasible, substantial yield increases are necessary. In north-Europe supplementary assimilation light in greenhouse horticulture is increasingly used to improve yield and product quality to meet market demands for year-round production and to obtain a more regular labor demand throughout the year. Using inter-lighting instead of lights only on top of the crop, and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), could increase substantially light and energy efficiency. As soon as LEDs will reach high enough efficiency and feasible price, they are expected to replace high pressure sodium lamps in greenhouse horticulture. Another important issue is the choice of the greenhouse cover which should be optimized from the crop point of view. A cover with high transmission of light, but low transmission of NIR, results in a better climate during the warm season (reduced temperatures, less crop transpiration, higher CO2-concentration possible because of reduced ventilation demand). Increasing the diffusive power of the cover material could result in a better distribution of the radiation over the crop canopy, therefore leading to substantial increase in absorbed radiation (up to 20% for highly diffusive covers) and improving radiation use efficiency and yield. Under these new conditions (high CO2 and high light levels) other genotypes than the present cultivars may be superior. However, the possible effect of breeding especially for these new conditions is still little investigated. Under improved crop management, maintaining leaf area index high enough and controlling source-sink balance is discussed. In conclusion, there are a lot of possibilities to further improve yield and quality of greenhouse produce, and meanwhile reduce the input of fossil fuel energy

EVALUATION OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES FAILURES WITHIN THE 2007-13 REGIONAL POLICY FRAME

New 2007-13 planning framework of the EU keeps using economic criteria (GDP) to identify those regions requiring priority attention (convergence objective). Although these criteria are useful for the overall Regional Policy, nevertheless it might result some planning failures of the strategies of rural development. This work focuses in evaluating possible failures of the Rural Development Programmes. For this purpose, a wide range of member Estates and Regions has been selected and two analysis have been applied: first, the coherence analysis (in relation to the economic, social and environmental situation of territories); and second, the conflict (among the rural territories development objectives) analysis. As result of this evaluation, a typology of the analysed Rural Development Programmes will be shown, which identifies different cases of failures. This work concludes that the use of methodological criteria in Regional Policy complementing to the Efficiency criteria might improve the territorial cohesion process and reduce some of the analysed failures in rural areas.Rural Development Programmes, Regional Policy, European Union, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

A Political Economy Model of Regulation Explained Through Fuzzy Logics

The basic problem of environmental regulation involves the government trying to induce a polluter to take socially desirable actions, which ostensibly are not in the best interest of the polluter. But the government may not always be able to precisely control the polluter. To further complicate matters the government faces a complex problem of determining exactly what level of pollution is best for society. In reality the government faces pressures from consumers and polluters. There are some important lessons to gather from the analysis of current models of regulation. One is that there are many imperfect links between the legislature and the pollution-generating process. In this case regulation may be excessively costly, may result in considerable cheating, and may result in excessive pollution. Another lesson is that legislature does not necessarily act as an efficient benevolent maximizer of social well-being. The authors intend in this paper to explain the current view of political models of regulation, analysing them for their complexity, and attempt to provide a reasonable explanation of their functioning recurring to fuzzy logics. Understanding how the browns and greens interact with the legislature and regulatory agencies can to some extent explain the current environmental regulations. The fuzzy approach, intends to allow for easier understanding of these interactions, and provide an answer for more effective decision making. Keywords: Environmental Regulation, Environmental Economics, Fuzzy Logics, Models, Pollution Control, Sustainability

McCook\u27s Man on Main Street: Publisher Harry D. Strunk and the politics of water reclamation in southwest Nebraska, 1928-1938

By the time Harry D. Strunk arrived in his new home of McCook, Nebraska in 1909, he had set his sights on becoming a newspaperman. While only seventeen years-old at the time of his first job with a McCook newspaper, he had already worked as a printer\u27s devil and itinerant printer since the age of fourteen. With his arrival in McCook and first job in that city with the established Tribune, he soon found that his future in the newspaper business lay with starting his own paper. In 1911, without benefit of a formal journalistic education, Strunk opened the Red Willow County Gazette. With his own newspaper, he immediately challenged the community\u27s recognized editorial voice at the Tribune. In 1924, he established a daily newspaper. For the next forty-seven years until its publisher\u27s death in 1961, the McCook Daily Gazette served as the newspaper and editorial voice for Southwest Nebraska and Northwest Kansas. In 1926, when he built a new office building for the Gazette on McCook\u27s Main Street, Strunk had etched in the concrete above the building\u27s entryway his concept of service to the community. With the motto, Service is the Rent We Pay for the Space We Occupy in This World, Strunk set the tone and direction for both himself and his newspaper. Strunk\u27s dedication to community service was no more evident than in his lifetime work on behalf of flood control and irrigation along the Republican River. For a span of some three decades, McCook\u27s man on Main Street hurled editorial challenges at state and national politicians to fund water control projects in Southwest Nebraska. Within his editorial demands for government programs to benefit his community, Strunk maintained a healthy dose of political pragmatism. In 1928, Strunk began an active role in the foundation and work of the Twin Valley Association of Commercial Clubs. That organization stood in the forefront for planning irrigation and flood control programs along the Republican and Frenchman rivers. As a member of the group\u27s executive committee and chairman o f its flood control committee, Strunk played an important role in making the goals of the organization known to elected officials. Among the politicians who felt the wrath of Strunk\u27s editorial attacks on sometimes inattentive politicians was a fellow townsman, the popular five-term senator from Nebraska, George W. Norris. In a volatile exchange of correspondence in advance of the 1930 senatorial election, the two men engaged in political polemics over their differing visions of water control in semi-arid Southwest Nebraska. With similar visions about water control but different methods for achievement, the two men sparred over how best to bring both flood control and irrigation to a land of sparse water resources. It was over the issue of water control that they had their greatest disagreement. Norris favored combining hydro-electric power with irrigation and flood control, while Strunk believed that water power had no place along the Republican River. Their differences would largely disappear when they found common bond after a devastating flood hit along the Republican River in 1935. Strunk became well known throughout the state and much o f the Midwest because of his dedication to water control and reclamation on the upper Republican River. His importance in bringing federally funded water programs to southwestern Nebraska was recognized by Congress. Congress passed legislation in 1952 designating the body of water held by Medicine Creek Dam near Cambridge, Nebraska, as Harry Strunk Lake. From an itinerant printer to newspaper publisher to a recognized water reclamationist, Harry Strunk fulfilled his motto of service to his community o f McCook and Southwest Nebraska

Strength curves for web crippling design of cold-formed stainless steel hat sections

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Thin-Walled Structures on 02/09/2014, available online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263823114002341?via%3Dihub The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The web crippling design guides are based on empirical adjustments of available test data. These equations differ from the basic concept underpinning most of the other instabilities, the so-called strength curves. This investigation presents a new design approach for web crippling design of stainless steel hat sections based on strength curves controlled by slenderness-based functions ��(). The effects of web crippling on such cross-sections were studied numerically and the obtained results were used to derive the design expressions. Comparisons with tests and FE data, and with design guides show that the proposed design approach provides more accurate web crippling resistance.Research Fund for Coal and Stee

Soil Functional Ability for groundwater recharge related with Land Use and Tillage System in a dry Mediterranean climate, southern Portugal

Groundwater has capacities like storing, filtering and transforming, which allows regulates atmospheric, hydrological and nutrient cycles. For agronomists, groundwater recharge is defined as the quantity of freshwater derived from precipitation that infiltrates vertically downward from the land surface to below the root zone. At this point the water may move laterally to discharge in streams or downward to enter an aquifer. Fresh water sustains biomass growth in terrestrial ecosystems, and provides key ecological services that supports biodiversity, sequesters carbon and combats desertification. On the other hand, soils provide us services like give clean water and abundant crops. To do this, soils plays there function of “regulator” distributing water for the recharge of groundwater and for the use by plants and animals, regulating the drainage, flow and storing water. Soil functions are difficult to measure directly, so they are usually assessed by measuring soil quality indicators. The soil functional ability to provide groundwater recharge is dependent on the water flowing within soils, under natural conditions or ones affected by its exploitation. Thus Soil Functional Ability to recharge groundwater (SFAgr) and Land use are essential to study the environmental sustainability and agricultural production capability once groundwater is a key component of a healthy watershed. But it is necessary pay attention to the Tillage System and not only to Land Use because the same Land Use can be related with more or less soil mobilizations and that have a great influence on soil structure and its hydrological skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between Soil Functional Ability for groundwater recharge (SFAgr), different Land Uses and different Tillage Systems in a Dry Mediterranean climate in Alentejo, Portugal. This will be achieved by building a SFAgr, generated with combination of four properties related to water infiltration and percolation into the soil: depth; bulk density; saturated hydraulic conductivity; and drainable porosity. The saturated hydraulic conductivity was calculated by an indirect method based on texture and drainable porosity was also calculated by an indirect method though the difference between total porosity and field capacity. Each unit Soil/ Land Use/ Tillage System was analyzed in several identical units within the same catchment. When comparing SFAgr for different Land Uses and different soils, the results show a higher dependency of the groundwater recharge ability on Soil properties than on Land Use. The highest influences on SFAgr were bulk density and saturated hydraulic conductivity and the smallers were depth and drainage porosity. Better situations are where soils have bulk density rounding 1,2 covered by Cork/Holm Oak (50%) + Pasture and the worst situation are soils with bulk density greater than 1,5 even with Cork/Holm Oak (30%) + Pasture. When comparing SFAgr only for Annual Crops at same soils but having different Tillage Systems, the results showed that in both soils studied, the SFAgr was highest when Tillage System was a conservation one than when was a traditional system. The conclusions of this study for a Dry Mediterranean Climate are: 1 – Land Use influences the Soil Functional Ability to recharge groundwater, but more important than Land Use itself is the Tillage System used; 2- Tillage Systems associated with Conservation Agriculture more specifically No Tillage Systems provide better ability to recharge groundwater in clayey soils; 3 - The more years a system of No Tillage is practiced the higher Soil Functional Ability to Groundwater Recharge is expected in clayey soils

Pullback attractors for a semilinear heat equation on time-varying domains

AbstractThe existence of a pullback attractor is established for the nonautonomous dynamical system generated by the weak solutions of a semilinear heat equation on time-varying domains with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. It is assumed that the spatial domains Ot in RN are obtained from a bounded base domain O by a C2-diffeomorphism, which is continuously differentiable in the time variable, and are contained, in the past, in a common bounded domain

The biogeographic basis of Ebola-virus disease outbreaks: A model for other zoonotic diseases?

We first determined the differential role of favorability of environmental conditions and mammalian chorotypes in explaining the presence of the Ebola virus in Africa. We then combined environmental factors and chorotypes using fuzzy logic, which better explained the distribution of Ebola virus. The core area for the virus was associated with human infections of known animal origin, with infections of unknown source detected in areas that are biogeographically more peripheral. Variation in the environmental favorability for disease outbreaks may be monitored using indices of macroclimatic oscillations. This may provide the basis for an early warning system based on the variation in macroclimatic indices and the locations where human contact with multiple animal species tend to occur. We propose to study the biogeography of zoonoses by: 1) determining the potential spatial distribution of these diseases, according to environmental factors and the biogeographic structure of animals linked to the zoonosis cycle; 2) search for relationships between disease outbreaks and global atmospheric oscillations to forecast periods of higher risk of emergence of the infectious diseases.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech