Prioritising investment to enhance biodiversity in an agricultural landscape

The removal, alteration and fragmentation of habitat are key threats to the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Investment to protect biodiversity assets (e.g. restoration of native vegetation) in dominantly agricultural landscapes usually results in a loss of agricultural production. This can be a significant cost that is often overlooked or poorly addressed in analyses to prioritise such investments. Accounting for this trade-off is important for more successful, realistically feasible and cost-effective biodiversity conservation. We developed a spatially explicit bio-economic optimisation model that simulates the effect of conservation effort on the diversity of woodland-dependent birds in the Avoca catchment (330 thousand ha) in North-Central Victoria. The model minimises opportunity cost of agricultural production and cost of biodiversity conservation effort on a catchment level subject to achieving different levels of biodiversity outcome. We identify the locations and spatial arrangement of conservation efforts that offers the best value for money.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Optimising the spatial pattern of landscape revegetation

The spatial pattern of landscape reconstruction makes a substantial difference to environmental outcomes. We develop a spatially explicit bio-economic model that optimises the reconstruction of a heavily cleared landscape through revegetation. The model determines the spatial priorities for revegetation that minimises economic costs subject to achieving particular improvements in habitat for 29 woodland-dependent bird species. The study focuses on the Avoca catchment (330 thousand ha) in North-Central Victoria. Our model incorporates spatial pattern and heterogeneity of existing and reconstructed vegetation types. The revegetation priorities are identified as being: sites in the vicinity of existing remnants, riparian areas, and parts of the landscape with diverse land uses and vegetation types. Optimal reconstruction design is affected by opportunity costs due to the loss of agricultural production and the costs of revegetation. 1 Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, 6009 2 Department of Primary Industries, Rutherglen, RMB 1145 Chiltern Valley Rd, Rutherglen, Victoria, 3685 3 North Central Catchment Management Authority, PO Box 18, Huntly, Victoria, 3551landscape reconstruction, biodiversity, optimisation, habitat, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Q57,

Glomerulosclerosis in the Col1a2-deficient mouse model : homotrimer pathogenesis and MMP expression

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb. 20, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Charlotte L. Phillips.Vita.|Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2009.The Col1a2-deficient (oim) mouse model exclusively synthesizes homotrimeric type I collagen due to the lack of functional pro [alpha] 2(I) collagen chains. The mouse develops a type I collagen glomerulopathy that has previously been shown to initiate postnatally and progress in a gene dose-dependent manner, accumulating type I collagen within the renal mesangium, resulting in podocyte foot effacement and proteinuria. In this study we examine the pre- and post-translational expression of type I collagen and MMPs -2, -3, and -9 in wildtype, heterozygous and Col1a2-deficient glomeruli to determine whether the pathogenic collagen is homotrimeric in nature, and whether alterations in MMP expression play a role in disease progression. Analysis of whole kidney and isolated glomeruli by immunohistochemistry and CNBr peptide mapping suggest that homotrimer is the accumulating type I collagen isotype in sclerotic glomeruli of both affected and heterozygous mice. Steady state MMPs-2, and -3 mRNA levels exhibited significant increases by three months of age, with corresponding protein increases compared to age-matched wildtype mice. Steady state MMP-9 mRNA levels significantly increased by three months of age, but MMP-9 protein expression was significantly decreased. Our findings suggest that upregulation of MMPs-2 and -3 expression is not sufficient to prevent homotrimeric type I collagen deposition and that their induction does not appear to be an initiating event, but may represent a secondary wound response.Includes bibliographical reference

Practical and Theoretical Underpinnings of INFFER (Investment Framework For Environmental Resources)

INFFER (Investment Framework for Environmental Resources) was developed to help investors of public funds to improve the delivery of outcomes from environmental programs. It assists environmental managers to design projects, to select delivery mechanisms, and to rank competing projects on the basis of benefits and costs. The design of INFFER and the activities of the INFFER projects are based on extensive experience of working with environmental managers and policy makers. This experience has highlighted a number of important practical lessons, that have strongly influenced the design and implementation of INFFER. These lessons include the need for simplicity, training and support of users, trusting relationships with users, transparency, flexibility, compatibility with the needs and contexts of users, and supportive institutional arrangements. In additions, the developers have paid close attention to the need for processes that are theoretically rigorous, resulting in a tool that deals appropriately and consistently with projects for different assets types, of different scales and durations, consistent with Benefit: Cost Analysis. The paper outlines theoretical considerations underpinning the way that INFFER deals with asset valuation, time lags, uncertainty, and the design of the metric used to rank projects.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Lessons from implementing INFFER with regional catchment management organisations

Investment in natural resource management (NRM) by regional organisations in Australia has been widely criticised for failing to achieve substantial environmental outcomes. The Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER) is a tool for developing and prioritising projects to address environmental issues such as water quality and biodiversity decline, environmental pest impacts and land degradation. It aims to achieve the most valuable environmental outcomes with the available resources. During 2008 and 2009 INFFER has been implemented with a number of catchment management organisations (CMOs) throughout Australia. In this paper, we report on lessons from and implications of this experience. Data on implementation were collected in formal and informal ways from staff of organisations that were using INFFER and state agencies, including: an on-line survey, benchmarking questions at training workshops, a formal on-going monitoring and evaluation process tracking the use of INFFER by CMOs, and comments made in correspondence and informal feedback to the INFFER team. In this paper we describe issues that arise when implementing INFFER with regions and organisations, and how the INFFER team has attempted to address these. Key issues include a desire to consider the community as an asset and emphasise capacity building, a rejection of the need for targeted investment, and various difficulties associated with specific aspects of the Framework. Existing institutional arrangements, and the legacy of past institutional arrangements, remain serious barriers to the adoption of methods to improve environmental outcomes from NRM investment. A lack of rigour in investment planning has become accepted as the norm, and resistance to processes to improve rigour is common. However, many CMOs want to achieve better environmental outcomes with their limited funds, and we report on our efforts to work with them to achieve this by using INFFER.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Changing the direction of environmental investment in Australia: Learnings from implementing INFFER

Investment in natural resource management (NRM) by regional organisations in Australia has been widely criticised for failing to achieve substantial environmental outcomes. The Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER) is a tool for developing and prioritising projects to address environmental issues such as water quality, biodiversity decline, environmental pest impacts and land degradation. INFFER is an asset-based, targeted, and outcome-focussed approach to environmental investment, and as such is a very different and more rigorous approach to prioritising possible environmental projects than used previously by most catchment management organisations (CMOs) in Australia. From 2008 to 2010 INFFER has been trialled with CMOs. Evaluation and benchmarking data obtained at 2-day INFFER training sessions with seven CMOs in three eastern Australia states are reported. Before commencing to use INFFER, CMO staff are generally confident about the current decision-making processes for environmental investment used within their organisation. In some cases, this initial perception challenges their acceptance of a new approach to investment decisionmaking. Key issues when implementing INFFER include concerns about changing the direction of CMO investment, concerns about compatibility with funder requirements, and various issues associated with specific aspects of the Framework. Perceived complexity of INFFER, existing institutional arrangements, and the legacy of past institutional arrangements remain serious barriers to the adoption of methods to improve environmental outcomes from NRM investment. Despite these difficulties INFFER is being used by a number of CMOs. However, it is likely that widespread adoption of INFFER, or indeed any other transparent and robust process, will only occur with greater requirement from governments for environmental decision making by regional NRM bodies that is more focused on outcomes and cost-effectiveness.NRM investment planning, NRM investment prioritisation, regional catchment management organisations, NRM policy, environmental planning, environmental prioritisation, environmental policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q50, Q58,

Magnetic Monopole Noise

Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical elementary particles exhibiting quantized magnetic charge $m_0=\pm(h/\mu_0e)$ and quantized magnetic flux $\Phi_0=\pm h/e$. A classic proposal for detecting such magnetic charges is to measure the quantized jump in magnetic flux $\Phi$ threading the loop of a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) when a monopole passes through it. Naturally, with the theoretical discovery that a plasma of emergent magnetic charges should exist in several lanthanide-pyrochlore magnetic insulators, including Dy$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$, this SQUID technique was proposed for their direct detection. Experimentally, this has proven extremely challenging because of the high number density, and the generation-recombination (GR) fluctuations, of the monopole plasma. Recently, however, theoretical advances have allowed the spectral density of magnetic-flux noise $S_{\Phi}(\omega,T)$ due to GR fluctuations of $\pm m_*$ magnetic charge pairs to be determined. These theories present a sequence of strikingly clear predictions for the magnetic-flux noise signature of emergent magnetic monopoles. Here we report development of a high-sensitivity, SQUID based flux-noise spectrometer, and consequent measurements of the frequency and temperature dependence of $S_{\Phi}(\omega,T)$ for Dy$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ samples. Virtually all the elements of $S_{\Phi}(\omega,T)$ predicted for a magnetic monopole plasma, including the existence of intense magnetization noise and its characteristic frequency and temperature dependence, are detected directly. Moreover, comparisons of simulated and measured correlation functions $C_{\Phi}(t)$ of the magnetic-flux noise $\Phi(t)$ imply that the motion of magnetic charges is strongly correlated because traversal of the same trajectory by two magnetic charges of same sign is forbidden