Transmission of Environmental and Conservation Knowledge in Andohahela National Park

Andohahela National Park : Legends and Laws The legendary forests of Andohahela National Park (N.P.) have long been respected as a source of inspiration and life for the Anosy region in the extreme southeast of Madagascar. Hundreds of years ago, according to various oral traditions, Prince Mana offered himself as a sacrifice in order to quench the drought that brought war and famine to his people, the Tahela (a clan of the Anosy tribe). Zanahary, the Malagasy creator, responded by unleashing the rains and springs in the mountains, which made the land fertile again, and stopped the wars. In gratitude, the King of the Tahelas named the rivers that flowed from the newly created springs after his son: Manantavona, Mananara, Mandrare, Manambolo, and Manampanihy. (ANGAP 1997, in Fenn 2003.) This legend emphasizes the importance of the watershed that feeds these rivers, thereby supporting the region’s economic and biological productivity (O’Connor, 1981). Andohahela N.P.’s geography and geology provide the conditions for its unique mélange of three distinct, species-rich forest ecosystems: the rainforest to the east, the dry spiny forest to the west, and the transitional forest between them. The diversity of the region can be explained by its strategic location straddled over the Anosyennes Chain, a mountain range that blocks moisture-rich trade winds from the Indian Ocean, to the southeast. The various habitats created by these factors allow for a high level of faunal diversity, even compared to other regions nationwide (Fenn, 2003). The cultural diversity is also reflected in that two distinct ethnic groups share this space: the Antanosy or Tanosy (People of the Island), and the Antandroy or Tandroy (People of the Spines). The History of Andohahela as a Protected Area: It was to protect colonial biodiversity resources that Andohahela was originally established as a strict nature reserve (SNR or R.N.I. - Réserve Naturelle Intégrale) by the French in 1939. It grew from a 30 000 ha parcel to three parcels totalling 76 020 ha, but the SNR status remained until 1997 (when National Park status was conferred). The S.N.R. is the most severe and restrictive category in terms of access to and exploitation of the reserve’s interior. During Madagascar’s period of colonization (1896-1960), armed forest guards enforced reserve boundaries. This and other factors (low population density, fertile rice fields in the exterior) protected the reserve from much human impact originally but this is no longer the case. The current conservation strategy of Andohahela N.P. attempts to integrate the needs of local communities through the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP). The ICDP concept was inaugurated as part of the 1980 World Conservation Strategy, which emphasized local economic development alongside the management of protected areas (Marcus, 2001). In 1988 it was incorporated into Madagascar’s National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP), which outlines a gradual transfer of protected-area management and ownership from international organizations and donors to Malagasy state and local counterparts over the course of 15 years. (Marcus, 2001). Once the transfer process is complete, most if not all of the burden of financing the park will fall on park revenues. Therefore, there is a major effort to encourage tourism, especially ecotourism, in order to increase profits from entry fees. Ecotourism has been defined by ANGAP as “tourisme engagée et responsible, liée à l’idée de conservation. » (Baorondro, 11 fev 2005). In 1999, Andohahela NP won the Silver Otter Award for “Best Overseas Tourism Project” from the British Guild of Travel Writers. Conservation and Development: the Context Not only at Andohahela NP, but all over the country, protected areas are trying to attract visitors. Moreover, in 2003, President Marc Ravalomanana promised the international community that Madagascar would add 4.3 million ha of protected areas to the 1.7 million ha in existence. If successfully achieved by the target year of 2008, it will increase the National Protected Area System from 3% to 10% of the country’s surface area, as part of the third and terminal phase of the NEAP. In addition to encouraging ecotourism, ANGAP and partners are devising strategies similar to the ICDP to ensure a smooth transition for the communities living in areas slated to join the protected areas network.(Ramarokoto, 2003.) The Andohahela ICDP began in 1990, and as of 1996 it was still under the management of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and received 75% of its funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The ICDP sought to encourage environmental conservation ethics and appropriate behaviors in local communities. Despite ICDP activities to increase environmental awareness and literacy, to confer more and more management responsibilities to locals, and to ensure their livelihood and economic development, the same environmental pressures that threatened the park in 1981 were still present in 199¬6, due to the subsistence activities of the locals (Simsik, 1996). That is to say that slash-and-burn agriculture (tavy), cattle-grazing, and wood-product exploitation continued. In the same year an SIT Independent Study Project (ISP) studied traditional honey harvesting techniques, wild honey collection, and the modified niche technique proposed by WWF as an alternative to the potentially destructive traditional techniques practiced in the villages surrounding the then-S.N.R. Andohahela. While the distinctions between each technique were unclear from the report, wild honey collection risks the introduction of forest fires through the use of a “burning cloth” (Jaeger, 1996). The modified niche apiculture technique and other sustainable livelihood alternatives have met with varying degrees of success. A study conducted in 2001 found that locals at Andohahela NP, Ranomafana NP, and Masoala NP perceived the parks and related conservation efforts as a foreign concept. Especially those who could see few direct benefits from the creation of the park had problems internalising the conservation messages promoted by the ICDPs conducted there (Marcus, 2001). Since then, efforts have been made to take indigenous culture and oral traditions into account in “sensibilisation” campaigns (Fenn, 2003). “Sensibilisation” refers to the process of educating local communities in environmental awareness for the purpose of conservation and management of resources. Thus, in spite of consensus on all levels (international, state, local) that Madagascar’s biodiversity is a valuable inheritance, there remains a lack of harmony on conceptualising the appropriate management of this heritage for the future. The source of this discrepancy appears to derive from the foreign nature of conservation strategies, and above all, foreign communication strategies for “sensibilizing” and thereby empowering local communities. The Flows of Knowledge through the Park System: One key aspect in the empowerment process is the exchange of information and knowledge. In fact one of the main premises of “sensibilisation” efforts is to empower local populations to overcome poverty in a way that is environmentally sustainable. Some types of knowledge are inaccessible to villages with low literacy rates, a weak transportation and communication infrastructure, and limited access to formal education. On the other hand, local communities are rich in other types of knowledge, that is, environmental and cultural knowledge. Thus, there are different types of knowledge, concentrated in certain key actors, within a knowledge-exchange network. The actors in this network, are - the local community (ie: villagers who used to exploit the park, and still do) - ANGAP and other NGOs (and the guides, agents, etc. representing them) - Visitors to the Park (vazaha; students) - Researchers - The general public Of these actors, it would seem that there are certain gate-keepers, who have more power to direct the flow of knowledge. For the purposes of this study, I have identified ANGAP and the local community as two gate-keepers. Researchers are certainly the gate-keepers of a highly specialised form of academic, or formal environmental knowledge, but since they come infrequently to the park, I was unable to include them in the study. Furthermore, I identified park guides and agents in particular, as a major information conduit between ANGAP and the community. I wanted to learn more about how they receive and convey environmental knowledge, how they conceive the environment of the park, and how they conceive their role in relation to the other key actors in the knowledge-exchange network. ANGAP agents live and work based out of four villages which serve as park entrances. Tsimelahy, located 56km outside of Fort Dauphin, is the entrance to the transitional forest section of the park, and is associated with a 2-hour circuit, graded “easy”. Mangatsiaka is 62 km away from Fort Dauphin and serves as one of the entrances to the dry forest. Its associated circuit is also “easy” and takes 3 hours to complete. The other entrance to the dry forest is at Ihazofotsy village, 110 km from Fort Dauphin, and offers three circuits with various durations and levels of difficulty. Finally, Malio village serves as the entrance to the rainforest, 36 km from Fort Dauphin. The hike is graded “athletic” and takes 4-5 hours. (ANGAP office bulletin board, 12 avril 2005)

Prediksi Terkena Diabetes menggunakan Metode K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) pada Dataset UCI Machine Learning Diabetes

Penelitian ini menggunakan algoritma K- Nearest Neighbor (KNN) untuk memprediksi resiko seseorang terkena diabetes. Variabel yang digunakan dalam prediksi adalah pregnancies, glucose, blood pressure, skin thickness, insulin, BMI, diabetes pedigree function, dan age. Analisis menunjukkan bahwa Glucose, BMI, dan Age memiliki korelasi tinggi dengan diagnosis diabetes, menjadikannya indikator yang kuat untuk prediksi. Melalui metode KNN dengan k=1, dilakukan evaluasi model menggunakan Confusion Matrix. Hasil menunjukkan akurasi sebesar 96%, precision sebesar 91,6%, sensitivitas sebesar 88,7%, dan MSE sebesar 0,1376. Temuan ini menunjukkan bahwa KNN dengan k=1 efektif dalam memprediksi diabetes berdasarkan variabel klinis. Informasi ini dapat memberikan manfaat dalam pencegahan dan pengobatan diabetes secara lebih efektif

Diffusion-emission theory of photon enhanced thermionic emission solar energy harvesters

Numerical and semi-analytical models are presented for photon-enhanced-thermionic-emission (PETE) devices. The models take diffusion of electrons, inhomogeneous photogeneration, and bulk and surface recombination into account. The efficiencies of PETE devices with silicon cathodes are calculated. Our model predicts significantly different electron affinity and temperature dependence for the device than the earlier model based on a rate-equation description of the cathode. We show that surface recombination can reduce the efficiency below 10% at the cathode temperature of 800 K and the concentration of 1000 suns, but operating the device at high injection levels can increase the efficiency to 15%.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Cosmic Neutrino Last Scattering Surface

Neutrinos decoupled from the rest of the cosmic plasma when the Universe was less than one second old, far earlier than the photons which decoupled at t=380,000 years. Surprisingly, though, the last scattering surface of the neutrinos is much closer to us than that of the photons. Here we calculate the properties of the last scattering surfaces of the three species of neutrinos.Comment: Important reference to earlier work of Bisnovatyi-Kogan and Seidov added, and mis-spelling of Opher reference correcte

Cancellation of soft and collinear divergences in noncommutative QED

In this paper, we investigate the behavior of non-commutative IR divergences and will also discuss their cancellation in the physical cross sections. The commutative IR (soft) divergences existing in the non-planar diagrams will be examined in order to prove an all order cancellation of these divergences using the Weinberg's method. In non-commutative QED, collinear divergences due to triple photon splitting vertex, were encountered, which are shown to be canceled out by the non-commutative version of KLN theorem. This guarantees that there is no mixing between the Collinear, soft and non-commutative IR divergences

Quantum key distribution with realistic states: photon-number statistics in the photon-number splitting attack

Quantum key distribution can be performed with practical signal sources such as weak coherent pulses. One example of such a scheme is the Bennett-Brassard protocol that can be implemented via polarization of the signals, or equivalent signals. It turns out that the most powerful tool at the disposition of an eavesdropper is the photon-number splitting attack. We show that this attack can be extended in the relevant parameter regime such as to preserve the Poissonian photon number distribution of the combination of the signal source and the lossy channel.Comment: 4 page

Enrichment and ranking of the YouTube tag space and integration with the Linked Data cloud

The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones has increased the amount of user-generated videos on the Web. People are spending more and more time viewing online videos as a major source of entertainment and “infotainment”. Social websites allow users to assign shared free-form tags to user-generated multimedia resources, thus generating annotations for objects with a minimum amount of effort. Tagging allows communities to organise their multimedia items into browseable sets, but these tags may be poorly chosen and related tags may be omitted. Current techniques to retrieve, integrate and present this media to users are deficient and could do with improvement. In this paper, we describe a framework for semantic enrichment, ranking and integration of web video tags using Semantic Web technologies. Semantic enrichment of folksonomies can bridge the gap between the uncontrolled and flat structures typically found in user-generated content and structures provided by the Semantic Web. The enhancement of tag spaces with semantics has been accomplished through two major tasks: a tag space expansion and ranking step; and through concept matching and integration with the Linked Data cloud. We have explored social, temporal and spatial contexts to enrich and extend the existing tag space. The resulting semantic tag space is modelled via a local graph based on co-occurrence distances for ranking. A ranked tag list is mapped and integrated with the Linked Data cloud through the DBpedia resource repository. Multi-dimensional context filtering for tag expansion means that tag ranking is much easier and it provides less ambiguous tag to concept matching

Factors contributing to carbon fluxes from bioenergy harvests in the U.S. Northeast: An analysis using field data

With growing interest in wood bioenergy there is uncertainty over greenhouse gas emissions associated with offsetting fossil fuels. Although quantifying postharvest carbon (C) fluxes will require accurate data, relatively few studies have evaluated these using field data from actual bioenergy harvests. We assessed C reductions and net fluxes immediately postharvest from whole-tree harvests (WTH), bioenergy harvests without WTH, and nonbioenergy harvests at 35 sites across the northeastern United States. We compared the aboveground forest C in harvested with paired unharvested sites, and analyzed the C transferred to wood products and C emissions from energy generation from harvested sites, including indirect emissions from harvesting, transporting, and processing. All harvests reduced live tree C; however, only bioenergy harvests using WTH significantly reduced C stored in snags (P \u3c 0.01). On average, WTH sites also decreased downed coarse woody debris C while the other harvest types showed increases, although these results were not statistically significant. Bioenergy harvests using WTH generated fewer wood products and resulted in more emissions released from bioenergy than the other two types of harvests, which resulted in a greater net flux of C (P \u3c 0.01). A Classification and Regression Tree analysis determined that it was not the type of harvest or amount of bioenergy generated, but rather the type of skidding machinery and specifics of silvicultural treatment that had the largest impact on net C flux. Although additional research is needed to determine the impact of bioenergy harvesting over multiple rotations and at landscape scales, we conclude that operational factors often associated with WTH may result in an overall intensification of C fluxes. The intensification of bioenergy harvests, and subsequent C emissions, that result from these operational factors could be reduced if operators select smaller equipment and leave a portion of tree tops on site. Copyright © 2013

Net carbon fluxes at stand and landscape scales from wood bioenergy harvests in the US Northeast

The long-term greenhouse gas emissions implications of wood biomass (\u27bioenergy\u27) harvests are highly uncertain yet of great significance for climate change mitigation and renewable energy policies. Particularly uncertain are the net carbon (C) effects of multiple harvests staggered spatially and temporally across landscapes where bioenergy is only one of many products. We used field data to formulate bioenergy harvest scenarios, applied them to 362 sites from the Forest Inventory and Analysis database, and projected growth and harvests over 160 years using the Forest Vegetation Simulator. We compared the net cumulative C fluxes, relative to a non-bioenergy baseline, between scenarios when various proportions of the landscape are harvested for bioenergy: 0% (non-bioenergy); 25% (BIO25); 50% (BIO50); or 100% (BIO100), with three levels of intensification. We accounted for C stored in aboveground forest pools and wood products, direct and indirect emissions from wood products and bioenergy, and avoided direct and indirect emissions from fossil fuels. At the end of the simulation period, although 82% of stands were projected to maintain net positive C benefit, net flux remained negative (i.e., net emissions) compared to non-bioenergy harvests for the entire 160-year simulation period. BIO25, BIO50, and BIO100 scenarios resulted in average annual emissions of 2.47, 5.02, and 9.83 Mg C ha-1, respectively. Using bioenergy for heating decreased the emissions relative to electricity generation as did removing additional slash from thinnings between regeneration harvests. However, all bioenergy scenarios resulted in increased net emissions compared to the non-bioenergy harvests. Stands with high initial aboveground live biomass may have higher net emissions from bioenergy harvest. Silvicultural practices such as increasing rotation length and structural retention may result in lower C fluxes from bioenergy harvests. Finally, since passive management resulted in the greatest net C storage, we recommend designation of unharvested reserves to offset emissions from harvested stands

Dietary Prebiotics and Bioactive Milk Fractions Improve NREM Sleep, Enhance REM Sleep Rebound and Attenuate the Stress-Induced Decrease in Diurnal Temperature and Gut Microbial Alpha Diversity.

Severe, repeated or chronic stress produces negative health outcomes including disruptions of the sleep/wake cycle and gut microbial dysbiosis. Diets rich in prebiotics and glycoproteins impact the gut microbiota and may increase gut microbial species that reduce the impact of stress. This experiment tested the hypothesis that consumption of dietary prebiotics, lactoferrin (Lf) and milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) will reduce the negative physiological impacts of stress. Male F344 rats, postnatal day (PND) 24, received a diet with prebiotics, Lf and MFGM (test) or a calorically matched control diet. Fecal samples were collected on PND 35/70/91 for 16S rRNA sequencing to examine microbial composition and, in a subset of rats; Lactobacillus rhamnosus was measured using selective culture. On PND 59, biotelemetry devices were implanted to record sleep/wake electroencephalographic (EEG). Rats were exposed to an acute stressor (100, 1.5 mA, tail shocks) on PND 87 and recordings continued until PND 94. Test diet, compared to control diet, increased fecal Lactobacillus rhamnosus colony forming units (CFU), facilitated non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep consolidation (PND 71/72) and enhanced rapid eye movement (REM) sleep rebound after stressor exposure (PND 87). Rats fed control diet had stress-induced reductions in alpha diversity and diurnal amplitude of temperature, which were attenuated by the test diet (PND 91). Stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed a significant linear relationship between early-life Deferribacteres (PND 35) and longer NREM sleep episodes (PND 71/72). A diet containing prebiotics, Lf and MFGM enhanced sleep quality, which was related to changes in gut bacteria and modulated the impact of stress on sleep, diurnal rhythms and the gut microbiota