The Influence of Scale Preferences on the Design of a Water Innovation: A Case in Dutch River Management

The debate on scale use in river management focuses primarily on the (lack of) fit between the bio-geophysical and institutional systems. However, in this article we focus on the ‘subjective’ aspect of scale preferences in water governance. We apply an adapted version of the Integrated Scale Hierarchy for Rivers to determine the degree of fit between the scale preferences of the actors involved in a Dutch case study and the scale requirements of the innovative river management concept. This allows us to understand which riverine processes and characteristics are regarded as important by the different actors and to identify mismatches in scale perspectives as they manifest themselves in water management practice. We discover that inflexibility in scale use on the part of the involved actors places bounds on the design and quality of interventions and demonstrate that a more flexible use of scales in the design phase of a river management intervention has the potential to lead to more effective solutions

Forest landscape ecology and global change: an introduction

Forest landscape ecology examines broad-scale patterns and processes and their interactions in forested systems and informs the management of these ecosystems. Beyond being among the richest and the most complex terrestrial systems, forest landscapes serve society by providing an array of products and services and, if managed properly, can do so sustainably. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the field of forest landscape ecology, including major historical and present topics of research, approaches, scales, and applications, particularly those concerning edges, fragmentation, connectivity, disturbance, and biodiversity. In addition, we discuss causes of change in forest landscapes, particularly land-use and management changes, and the expected structural and functional consequences that may result from these drivers. This chapter is intended to set the context and provide an overview for the remainder of the book and poses a broad set of questions related to forest landscape ecology and global change that need answers

Applikation von mikrolithographischen Methoden zur Herstellung von #mu#-Rissfortpflanzungssensoren zur Bestimmung der Risskinetik nach Rissinitiierung und zur in-situ-Lebensdauerueberwachung in keramischen Bauteilen Abschlussbericht

Available from TIB Hannover: F01B1607 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Bildung und Forschung, Berlin (Germany); Arbeitsgemeinschaft Industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen 'Otto von Guericke' e.V. (AIF), Koeln (Germany)DEGerman

Altruism and infidelity among warblers.

In cooperatively breeding vertebrates, indirect fitness benefits are maximized by subordinates who choose to help their own closely related kin after accurately assessing their relatedness to the group's offspring. Here we show that in the cooperatively breeding Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis), female subordinates help to raise new nestlings by providing them with food only when the offspring are being raised by parents who also fed the subordinates themselves when they were young. These helper females use the continued presence of the primary female, rather than of the primary male, as their provisioning cue — presumably because female infidelity is rife in this species, making their relatedness to the father less reliable.