Impact of farmer households’livelihood assets on their options of economic compensation patterns for cultivated land protection

With rapid urbanization and the socio-economic transformation,cultivated land protection has gradually become a major concern in China. The economic compensation plays a crucial role in promoting cultivated land protection and improving the utilization ratio of cultivated land. Farmer household's satisfaction has a great influence on the effectiveness of compensation. Therefore,households' willingness to select the economic compensation pattern for cultivated land protection has been considered and re-examined. By employing Participatory Rural Appraisal method (PRA),3 villages and 392 households were investigated and sampled in mesa and hilly areas of Chongqing. Then a quantitative analysis framework of household livelihood hexagon has been developed to quantify the livelihood assets of different farmer households. Finally,the Gray Relation Model and Probit Regression Model have been employed to explore the coupling relationship between the household livelihood assets and their compensation pattern options. The results show that there are both qualitative and spatial heterogeneity in household livelihood assets. We found that the inequality of livelihood assets is evident for five household types. There is a spatial trend that the higher the elevation,the less livelihood assets are. In addition,their options of economic compensation pattern vary from Chengdu Pattern to Foshan Pattern due to their difference in livelihood assets and difference in location. In detail,there is a coupling relationship between household livelihood assets and their compensation pattern;negative correlation is observed between natural assets value and household pattern options,while the other livelihood assets have positive impacts on compensation pattern in varying degrees,which from the top are psychological assets,human assets,physical assets,financial assets,and social assets respectively. A conceptual compensation pattern system has been designed to meet the demands for farmer households mainly according to their shortage in livelihood assets. In addition,compensation method,compensation standard,the basis of compensation and the source of compensation funds have been proposed accordingly.     

新疆近半个世纪以来季节性干旱变化特征及其影响研究

系统分析新疆不同季节的干旱时空分布,讨论干旱对新疆农业生产的影响,研究结果表明:1新疆四季干旱整体异常均表现为北疆旱(湿润)南疆湿润(旱)或西部干旱(湿润)东部湿润(干旱)2种基本结构。新疆夏季和冬季有向湿润或涝的趋势发展;2北疆西部及北疆南部干旱影响范围减小趋势明显;冬季干旱影响范围减小明显;3北疆地区的受旱面积增加趋势不显著,南疆地区和东疆地区受旱面积显著增加,干旱除受降水影响外,还受到抗旱灌溉设施、抗旱能力、耕地面积的影响。     

Spatial and diel variations of the prokaryotic community in the Phaeocystis globosa blooms area of Beibu Gulf,China

While prokaryotes play key roles in nutrient cycling and energy flow during Phaeocystis globosa blooms, the information on the spatial and diel temporal distribution of the prokaryotic community during Phaeocystis blooms remains scarce. In January 2019, we used high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to explore the spatial and diel variations of particle-attached (PA) and free-living (FL) prokaryotic communities during the blooming phase of P. globosa in Beibu Gulf, Guangxi, China. The results suggested a significant spatial variation pattern in the horizontal distribution of prokaryotic communities, while there was no significant difference in the vertical direction. Both spatial distance and environmental variables shaped the horizontal distribution of the prokaryotic community structure, while environmental variables, particularly the abundance of P. globosa colony and Chl a, showed more significant influence and were closely related to the structure and variation of the prokaryotic community. Strong vertical mixing of the water column disrupted the vertical structure heterogeneity of the prokaryotic community in winter. There were significant differences in the diel samples of PA prokaryotic communities, but not in the FL prokaryotic communities. Nitrate, ammonium and the abundance of P. globosa colony were the key environmental variables impacting the diel variations of prokaryotic communities over the sampling period. The present study provided valuable information to depict the spatial-temporal variations of the microbial community and its association with environmental parameters during P. globosa bloom in the tropical gulf.     

Crime on the edges: patterns of crime and land use change

ABSTRACT

Criminologists have long-known that different locations have varying levels of risk for criminal victimization. Based on the geometry of crime and its corresponding crime generators and crime attractors, edges (boundaries between relatively homogeneous neighborhoods) are locations with an elevated risk of criminal victimization. In this article, we investigate the importance of edges. We find that criminal victimization rates are 2–3 times on an edge compared to elsewhere. However, this effect decreases very quickly moving away from these locations, with the effect gone at 40 meters. This general effect is identified in a number of contexts and locations.     

Archaeological Survey in the Foulke Fjord Region,Inglefield Land,Northwestern Greenland

Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 110(2):297–314, 2010

The Inglefield Land Archaeology Project undertook archaeological survey of three areas of Foulke Fjord in 2006, during which 639 archaeological features were recorded, exclusive of the large Reindeer Point Longhouse site (Darwent et al., 2008). Basedon comparisons with surveys completed in Eastern Inglefield Land (Darwent et al., 2007), the density of features in Foulke Fjord substantially exceeded those from other regions of Inglefield Land. The most parsimonious explanation for the higher occurrence of features in this region is the presence of little auk colonies on the scree slopes of the inner fjords. These birds, which roost in the millions, served as a reliable summer food source, but their feces likely provided enrichment for the local ecosystem, increasing the numbers of terrestrial and marine fauna in the region. Based on excavations at Iita (Etah) and densities of features in the fiord, Foulke Fjord appears to have been continually occupied throughout the Thule-historic period (A.D. 1250–1953), and during the previous Late Dorset period (ca. A.D. 800–1250). However, features associated with the early Paleoeskimo period (2500–500 B.C.) are located only at the outer margins of the fjord.     

Ethnic Restructuring in Rural America: Migration and the Changing Faces of Rural Communities in the Great Plains

Scholars have long documented widespread aging and depopulation of rural communities in the Great Plains. Paralleling these trends is the emergence, growth, and spatial dispersion of new and longtime non-white populations across the region. The dual processes of population loss in many counties combined with the growth of new, non-white population groups suggest that the ethnic structure of the population is changing. In this article we utilize choropleth maps, Hoover and Simpson indexes, and cluster analysis to assess whether the emergence and growth of ethnic minority groups in the Great Plains between 1970 and 2008 is a localized phenomenon or region-wide shift in the ethnic composition of the population. Results suggest that as depopulation is occurring in many counties of this region, the growth of non-white populations, both immigrant and native born, is changing or restructuring the ethnic composition of the Great Plains.     

Precipitation patterns and associated hydrological extremes in the Yangtze River basin,China, using TRMM/PR data and EOF analysis

Abstract

A decadal-scale study to retrieve the spatio-temporal precipitation patterns of the Yangtze River basin, China, using the Tropical Rain Mapping Mission, Precipitation Radar (TRMM/PR) data is presented. The empirical orthogonal function (EOF) based on monthly TRMM/PR data extracts several leading precipitation patterns, which are largely connected with physical implications at the basin scale. With the aid of gauge station data, the amplitudes of major principal components (PCs) were used to examine the generic relationships between precipitation variations and hydrological extremes (e.g. floods and droughts) during summer seasons over the past decade. The emergence of such major precipitation patterns clearly reveals the possible linkages with hydrological processes, and the oscillations in relation to the amplitude of major PCs are consistent with these observed hydrological extremes. Although the floods in some sections of the Yangtze River were, to some extent, tied to human activities, such as the removal of wetlands, the variations in major precipitation patterns are recognized as the primary driving force of the flow extremes associated with floods and droughts. The research findings indicate that long-distance hydro-meteorological signals of large-scale precipitation variations over such a large river basin can be successfully identified with the aid of EOF analysis. The retrieved precipitation patterns and their low-frequency jumps of amplitude in relation to PCs are valuable tools to help understand the association between the precipitation variations and the occurrence of hydrological extremes. Such a study can certainly aid in disaster mitigation and decision-making in water resource management.

Editor Z.W. Kundzewicz; Associate editor A. Montanari

Citation Sun, Z., Chang, N.-B., Huang, Q., and Opp, C., 2013. Precipitation patterns and associated hydrological extremes in the Yangtze River basin, China, using TRMM/PR data and EOF analysis. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 57 (7), 1315–1324.     

Movement similarity assessment using symbolic representation of trajectories

This article describes a novel approach for finding similar trajectories, using trajectory segmentation based on movement parameters (MPs) such as speed, acceleration, or direction. First, a segmentation technique is applied to decompose trajectories into a set of segments with homogeneous characteristics with respect to a particular MP. Each segment is assigned to a movement parameter class (MPC), representing the behavior of the MP. Accordingly, the segmentation procedure transforms a trajectory to a sequence of class labels, that is, a symbolic representation. A modified version of edit distance called normalized weighted edit distance (NWED) is introduced as a similarity measure between different sequences. As an application, we demonstrate how the method can be employed to cluster trajectories. The performance of the approach is assessed in two case studies using real movement datasets from two different application domains, namely, North Atlantic Hurricane trajectories and GPS tracks of couriers in London. Three different experiments have been conducted that respond to different facets of the proposed techniques and that compare our NWED measure to a related method.     

QANAT SYSTEMS IN IRAN

Abstract

A fuzzy rule-based technique is used for modelling the relationship between climatic forcing and droughts in a Central/Eastern European country, Hungary. Two types of climatic forcing'called premises'are considered: atmospheric circulation patterns (CP) and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Both the Hess-Brezowsky CP types and ENSO events influence the occurrence of droughts, but the ENSO signal is relatively weak in a statistical sense. The fuzzy rule-based approach is able to learn the high space—time variability of monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and results in a proper reproduction of the empirical frequency distributions. The “engine” of the approach, the fuzzy rules, are ascertained from a subset called the learning set of the observed time series of premises (monthly CP frequencies and Southern Oscillation Index) and PDSI response. Then an independent subset, the validation set, is used to check how the application of fuzzy rules reproduces the observed PDSI.     

近30年天津滨海新区湿地景观格局遥感监测分析

在GIS和FRAGSTATS软件支持下,结合景观格局数量分析方法,利用1979-2008年间共6期TM遥感影像与非遥感数据,对天津滨海新区近30年的湿地景观空间格局进行了动态分析。结果表明,滨海新区湿地(以人工湿地为主),1979-2004年滨海新区湿地总面积变化不大,但各类型间转换较大,主要是自然湿地转变为人工湿地,沼泽湿地几近消失。2006-2008年,由于城市建设大量滨海滩涂湿地被围填占用,到2009年5月自然海岸线的90%以上被占用。景观破碎度增加,湿地斑块数量从137个增加到704个,同时造成平均斑块面积下降。驱动力分析表明,降雨量减少的同时,年平均气温上升是主要的自然驱动因素。和自然因素相比,人类干扰为主要人文驱动因素,表现在水产养殖为主的农业经济活动、城市建设用地占用和围海造地等方面。目前,滨海新区几乎没有自然湿地生态系统,破碎化和人工化是该区域湿地的主要特征。