Integrated environmental modeling:an SDI - based framework for integrated assessment of agricultural information

Urban villages are widespread in many Chinese cities, providing affordable and accessible hous-ing for rural migrants. These urban villages are developed by the indigenous village population base on a self-help approach and in an unauthorized style. Consequently, urban villages are characterized by rapid physical development. This paper uses GIS applications and Municipal building surveys as instruments to examine the development patterns of urban villages in Shenzhen, one of the most dy-namic cities in China. Analyses reveal significant variation in development patterns and trends across urban villages, which can provide informative support for policy making associated with urban vil-lage (re)development

Open Educational Resources:Basic concepts, challenges, and business models

Besides research, education is the raison d’être of each university. Education can help close equity gaps and maintain social cohesion between and within countries. In this context, the digitisation era offers new opportunities, for example, in the form of distance and online learning. However, innovations can also come with challenges, such as employed and unemployed people requiring to adapt to a progressing working environment at ever shorter intervals (life-long learning). Consequently, it is increasingly important to gain free access to up-to-date educational materials about a wide range of subjects and at multiple academic levels. In this document, we introduce the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER). We start with establishing a definition of OER, what is needed to call educational materials OER, and the differences in comparison to related concepts, such as Massive open online courses. We then address the question of who can benefit from OER. It reports on the incentives to publish OER taking into account the perspectives of the involved stakeholders, i.e., the general public, universities and lecturers, and students. Afterwards, we pay attention to the challenges that come with OER. Subsequently, we provide a list of potential business models around OER, their underlying concepts, benefits, limitations, and projects making use of them. We also consider the paradox that OER are not intended to generate revenue but that ignoring income can make OER unsustainable. The document concludes by outlining possible steps to realize OER (e.g., organizing a round table to initiate a discussion about how to realise OER at the faculty level)

Development and analysis of spring plant phenology products: 36 years of 1-km grids over the conterminous US

Time series of phenological products provide information on the timings of recurrent biological events and on their temporal trends. This information is key to studying the impacts of climate change on our planet as well as for managing natural resources and agricultural production. Here we develop and analyze new long term phenological products: 1 km grids of the Extended Spring Indices (SI-x) over the conterminous United States from 1980 to 2015. These new products (based on Daymet daily temperature grids and created by using cloud computing) allow the analysis of two primary variables (first leaf and first bloom) and two derivative products (Damage Index and Last Freeze Day) at a much finer spatial resolution than previous gridded or interpolated products. Furthermore, our products provide enough temporal depth to reliably analyze trends and changes in the timing of spring arrival at continental scales. Validation results confirm that our products largely agree with lilac and honeysuckle leaf and flowering onset observations. The spatial analysis shows a significantly delayed spring onset in the northern US whereas in the western and the Great Lakes region, spring onset advances. The mean temporal variabilities of the indices were analyzed for the nine major climatic regions of the US and results showed a clear division into three main groups: early, average and late spring onset. Finally, the region belonging to each group was mapped. These examples show the potential of our four phenological products to improve understanding of the responses of ecosystems to a changing climat