SoFISHticated policy – social perspectives on the fish conflict in the Northeast Atlantic

Ecosystem changes currently question the traditional allocation of fishing rights and quotas in the fishery of Northeast Atlantic mackerel and Norwegian spring-spawning herring in the Northeast Atlantic. Variability in the distribution of these highly migratory species escalated in a political conflict between member states of the European Union, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Norway, which is a driving force for unsustainable fishery. The aim of this paper is to investigate this conflict by outlining the social understandings of diverse stakeholders by using the Q methodology. The method reduced the complexity of numerous opinions, detected four distinct perspectives and simultaneously categorised the participating stakeholders. Although the perspectives differ in various elements, the protection of economic interests seems to dominate over the quest for sustainability. The call of all stakeholders in this study to clarify the fishing rights in the Northeast Atlantic reveals a clear deficiency of the current international fishery management in handling abrupt ecological changes and the necessity to acknowledge this as a complex adaptive system.     

Transforming agricultural land use through marginal gains in the food system

There is an increasing need for transformational changes in the global food system to deliver healthy nutritional outcomes for a growing population while simultaneously ensuring environmental sustainability. However, such changes are subject to political and public constraints that usually allow only gradual, incremental changes to occur. Drawing inspiration from the British cycling team’s concept of marginal gains, we show how transformation might be reconciled with incremental changes. We demonstrate that a set of marginal food system changes acting to increase production efficiency, to reduce losses or to adjust diets could collectively reduce the agricultural land required globally for food production by 21%, or over a third given higher adoption rates. The results show that while all categories of action are important, changes in consumer choices in Europe, North America and Oceania and in the supply-chain in Africa and West and Central Asia have the greatest potential to reduce the land footprint of the food system.     

ANALYTICAL AND FIELD EVIDENCE OF THE DAMAGING EFFECT OF VERTICAL EARTHQUAKE GROUND MOTION

The paper is an attempt to collate field evidence and results from dynamic analysis on possible structural effects of strong vertical ground motion. Observational evidence from three earthquakes are presented and assessed with regard to failure modes of buildings and bridges attributable to high vertical earthquake forces. Analytical results from previous studies for the same structural types are reviewed. These collectively confirm that structural failure may ensue due to direct tension or compression as well as due to the effect of vertical motion on shear and flexural response.     

钢筋混凝土底层柔性结构的需求变形能力

本文提出用累积延性系数评价底层柔性结构的底层需求变形能力,并根据地震时能量守恒关系推导了底层需求变形能力计算公式,然后对多质点体系使用实际地震加速度记录进行弹塑性响应分析,并与上述公式的计算结果进行比较。结果表明,本文提出的计算公式能够较好并安全地预测底层柔性结构的需求变形能力。     

Winter cover crops in Dutch maize fields: Variability in quality and its drivers assessed from multi-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery

Planting a cover crop between the main cropping seasons is an agricultural management measure with multiple potential benefits for sustainable food production. In the maize production system of the Netherlands, an effective establishment of a winter cover crop is important for reducing nitrogen leaching to groundwater. Cover crop establishment after maize cultivation is obliged by law for sandy soils and consequently implemented on nearly all maize fields, but the winter-time vegetative ground cover varies significantly between fields. The objectives of this study are to assess the variability in winter vegetative cover and evaluate to what extent this variability can be explained by the timing of cover crop establishment and weather conditions in two growing seasons (2017–2018). We used Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to construct NDVI time series for fields known to be cultivated with maize within the province of Overijssel. We fitted piecewise logistic functions to the time series in order to estimate cover crop sowing date and retrieve the fitted NDVI value for 1 December (NDVI_Dec). We used NDVI_Dec to represent the quality of cover crop establishment at the start of the winter season. The Sentinel-2 estimated sowing dates compared reasonably with ground reference data for eight fields (RMSE = 6.6 days). The two analysed years differed considerably, with 2018 being much drier and warmer during summer. This drought resulted in an earlier estimated cover crop sowing date (on average 19 days) and an NDVI_Dec value that was 0.2 higher than in 2017. Combining both years and all fields, we found that Sentinel-2 retrieved sowing dates could explain 55% of the NDVI_Dec variability. This corresponded to a positive relationship (R² = 0.50) between NDVI_Dec and the cumulative growing degree days (GDD) between sowing date and 1 December until reaching 400 GDD. Based on cumulative GDD derived from two weather stations within Overijssel, we found that on average for the past three decades a sowing date of 19 September (± 7 days) allowed to attain these 400 GDD; this provides support for the current legislation that states that from 2019 onwards a cover crop should be sown before 1 October. To meet this deadline, while simultaneously ascertaining a harvest-ready main crop, in practice implies that undersowing of the cover crop during spring will gain importance. Our results show that Sentinel-2 NDVI time series can assess the effectiveness and timing of cover crop growth for small agricultural fields, and as such has potential to inform regulatory frameworks as well as farmers with actionable information that may help to reduce nitrogen leaching.     

Geographies of energy transition: the case of high-performing commercial office space in the central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne,Australia

As a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, Australia committed to reduce emissions significantly by 2030. In a country highly urbanised and dependent on fossil fuels as its primary energy source, one key avenue for meeting these commitments is energy transition in the built environment. Australia has emerged as a leader in the design and construction of high-performance buildings in the premium commercial office sector. In this paper, we address a significant gap in understanding the diverse mechanisms through which building energy transition is being constituted in this sector, focusing on Sydney and Melbourne. In the absence of substantive publicly available data, we draw on mixed methods comprising a database developed around high-performing CBD office buildings and qualitative interviews with a range of sectoral stakeholders. We characterise the building stock in each city, and document five trends constituting energy transitions. We demonstrate that building energy transitions are not only shaped purposefully by dominant governance regimes but also by opportunistic responses to specific material and commercial conditions and legacies in each city. Thus the urban built environment affords significant opportunity for energy transitions, but pathways towards such transitions are necessarily multiple and ultimately shaped by material as well as institutional geographies.     

基于2030年可持续发展目标的吉林省城镇化可持续发展评价

结合联合国2030年可持续发展目标（SDGs）构建城镇化可持续发展评价指标体系,从省内、外两个角度研究吉林省城镇化可持续发展状况。结果表明：吉林省城镇化可持续发展水平波动上升,发展趋势良好,大致可分为3个阶段;研究期内各子系统可持续发展水平均呈上升趋势,其中社会子系统上升幅度最大,经济子系统上升幅度最小。城镇化可持续发展水平空间格局呈“核心-边缘”结构,即长春市水平高、其它地区水平低;经济、社会、资源和环境子系统可持续发展水平总体上表现为“中东部高,西部低”。研究期内吉林省城镇化可持续发展水平低于黑龙江省,2015年后高于辽宁省;相较辽黑两省,吉林省社会子系统可持续发展水平较低。     

改进A?的高层建筑逃生路径规划算法研究

针对高层建筑内部结构复杂,发生火灾时没有疏散引导情况,逃生通道极易发生拥堵导致疏散效率降低的问题,本文基于对A*算法的改进,提出了高层建筑逃生路径规划算法。该算法以高层建筑内部路网节点为关键要素,综合火灾发生位置、人员密度、人员数量等因素,从逃生终点优化分配、节点扩展优化、权值优化3个方面进行改进,实现了火灾发生时高层建筑内部的逃生路径规划,并以某高层建筑为例,验证了本文算法的可行性。     

An improved building detection approach using L-band POLSAR two-dimensional time-frequency decomposition over oriented built-up areas

The objective of this study is to efficiently extract detailed information about various man-made targets in oriented built-up areas using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) images. This paper develops an improved approach for building detection by utilizing Two-Dimensional Time-Frequency (2-D TF) decomposition. This method performs outstandingly in distinguishing between man-made and natural targets based on the isotropic behaviors, frequency-sensitive responses, and scattering mechanisms of objects. The proposed method can preserve the spatial resolution and exploit the advantages of TF decomposition; specifically, the exact outlines of buildings can be effectively located, and more types of features (e.g., flat roofs, roads, and walls that are oblique to the radar illumination) can be distinguished from forests in complex built-up areas by 2-D TF decomposition. The coarser-resolution subaperture images that are produced in the azimuth direction, which correspond to different looking angles, are beneficial for detecting man-made structures with main scattering centers oriented at oblique angles with respect to the radar illumination. In the range direction, the obtained subaperture images, which correspond to various observation frequencies, can be helpful in distinguishing flat roofs and roads from forests. This method was successfully implemented to analyze both NASA/JPL L-band AIRSAR and L-band EMISAR data sets. The building detection results of the proposed method exhibit a significant improvement over those of other methods and reach an overall accuracy over 80%, with approximately 20% higher than the accuracies of K-means clustering and the entropy/alpha-Wishart classifier and approximately 10% higher than the accuracy of the support vector machine method. Moreover, building details can be precisely detected, obliquely oriented buildings can be identified, and the distinction between buildings and forests is significantly improved, as both visually and statistically indicated. This method is highly adaptable and has substantial application value.     

建筑物沉降观测技术方法探讨

随着城市建设的迅猛发展,城市规模越来越大,建筑物越来越高,由此带来的安全隐患越来越大,由于高层建筑一般采用桩基基础,且荷载较大,对高层建筑的内部基础和设备的位置关系有很高的精度要求,其施工安装阶段将给高层建筑本身及周边建筑群体带来复杂的形变影响。为了保障建筑物施工和运营的安全,就必须对其进行沉降观测。本文结合笔者多年的实际工作经验,并结合具体的实例,对高层建筑物沉降原因、沉降观测前的准备工作及沉降观测的实施过程和观测数据的处理方法等进行了论述,最后指出如何通过沉降观测技术准确地反映出高层建筑物的沉降情况。