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ESMAX for spatial agroecology: A conceptual spatial model for the quantification and visualisation of ES performance from different configurations of landscape
No full textIntroduction: Agriculture is confronted by the dual challenges of increasing global demand for food production while reducing negative impacts on the environment. One suggested solution is transitioning modern industrial agriculture to more agroecologically-informed practices, thus realigning increased food production with the carrying capacity of Earth Systems. The transition to multifunctional agroecological systems, that promote the production of multiple ecosystem services (ES) as well as food production, requires an adaptive management process that addresses climate-change, market complexity, practical implementation and knowledge transfer.
Materials & Methods: This work proposes a spatially explicit methodology to support this process. Spatial agroecology, in this context, combines a new Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based model (ESMAX) with development of a ‘solution space’ to assist stakeholders identify configurations of agroecological components (in this case, trees on farm) at the scale of a 1 ha paddock to supply a targeted range of regulating ES (cooling effect, flood mitigation and habitat). ESMAX uses distance-decay characteristics specific to each type of regulating ES to quantify and visualise the influence of spatial configuration of ES-supplying tree clumps on overall ES performance.
Results: The results from this application of spatial agroecology suggest regulating ES production at farm and paddock scale is influenced by the arrangement of trees on farm. ESMAX's results show paddocks with large tree clumps return the best cooling effect, while small clumps deliver the best flood mitigation and most suitable habitat. Evenly dispersed arrangements of small tree clumps provide the best multifunctional performance across all three ES modelled in this work.
Conclusion: Designed spatial agroecological interventions can affect landscape multifunctionality at paddock scale, where practical decisions are made and implemented. This provides spatially explicit support of an adaptive management process. Utilising agroecological systems as spatial mechanisms for supplying critical regulating ES also highlights a new function for agriculture in the Anthropocene epoch
Female-dominated disciplines have lower evaluated research quality and funding success rates, for men and women
No full textWe use data from 30 countries and find that the more women in a discipline, the lower quality the research in that discipline is evaluated to be and the lower the funding success rate is. This affects men and women, and is robust to age, number of research outputs, and bibliometric measures where such data are available. Our work builds on others’ findings that women’s work is valued less, regardless of who performs that work
A Trajectory of Financial Inclusion: An Empirical Analysis of Ghana Households
No full textThe need for a paradigm shift towards inclusive growth has recently received increased attention from governments and policy-makers. Financial inclusion plays a central role in inclusive growth. This is because financial inclusion is an enabler of economic growth, poverty reduction, income inequality reduction and women empowerment, especially in developing countries such as Ghana. Notwithstanding these benefits, the level of financial inclusion in Ghana is low.
The World Bank provides a roadmap (the gateway to financial inclusion) on how to move people from being unserved (financial exclusion) to being served (financial inclusion). This roadmap highlights the need for households to have access to formal financial services such as payments, credit, savings, insurance, and remittances. This means that measuring the level of a country’s financial inclusion must include these services for it to be representative. Previous studies focused on banks and neglected other financial intermediaries, such as insurance companies (insurance financial services) in creating a financial inclusion index to measure a country’s level of financial inclusion. This study includes insurance in creating a financial inclusion index for Ghana for our study period (1980 to 2021) to find that there have been improvements in the level of financial inclusion during that time. This suggests that several financial sector reform programmes implemented in Ghana, as well as legal and regulatory reforms in the banking and insurance sectors, have had a positive impact on financial inclusion in Ghana. The financial inclusion score average was 0.25 for Ghana for the study period, which categorizes Ghana as a low financial inclusion country per Sarma’s (2008; 2012) categorization. Overall, however, the upward trend in financial inclusion in Ghana during the study period is an encouraging sign for the push to ensure all Ghanaian households are financially included. The study investigates what factors drive financial inclusion in Ghana and finds financial inclusion has a positive, significant relationship with GNI per capita and MSCPS in Ghana. Conversely, the study finds a negative relationship between financial inclusion and the real effective exchange rate. Government spending, inflation and money supply are negatively but insignificantly related to the level of financial inclusion in Ghana. Finally, I find that insurance and financial service imports (positive), urbanization (positive), mobile money availability (positive), fixed telephone ownership (negative), and remittances (positive) had no influence on the level of financial inclusion in Ghana during the study period.
The literature suggests that there is no consensus on the direction of the relationship between financial inclusion, poverty and income inequality. To investigate the direction of the relationship for Ghana, the study runs an ordinary least square multiple regression using household consumption (a proxy for poverty) as the dependent variable, which is regressed against several independent factors including our comprehensive financial inclusion index. I find that level of financial inclusion, which averages 0.25, did not improve household consumption (reduce the prevalence of household poverty) in Ghana during the study period. A possible explanation could be the structure of the financial system of Ghana is not well-developed and financially included (Ghana is classified as low financial inclusion country with an average financial inclusion score of 0.25) to reach majority of the households (especially poorer individuals and households) to effectively reduce the prevalence of poverty in Ghana positively. The ineffectiveness of the financial sector in the allocation of funds causes low labour productivity, which increases the prevalence of poverty amongst households. In addition, an underdeveloped financial system with a low level of competition creates an ineffective financial system and discourages improvements in the level of financial inclusion in an economy. Our finding is supported by a recent study that found household consumption improved countries that had a financial inclusion index score of 0.356 or higher. For the relationship between financial inclusion and Human Development Index (HDI), which is the proxy for income inequality in this study, I find that financial inclusion positively and significantly influences HDI in Ghana. A possible explanation could be that financial inclusion enables households and individuals to afford education to build their skill and capacity, which can help them to secure employment with better and sustainable disposable income to reduce the overall level of income inequality in the country. Access to finance (through borrowing from the financial sector) can support the financial needs of individuals and households as well as help those individuals with entrepreneurial ambition to start small businesses, which can generate further income for them. Further, access to the financial sector helps individuals to save and invest their excess disposable income to generate investment income. Therefore, financial inclusion helps to reduce the level of income inequality amongst households in Ghana. I also find that the GDP per capita growth, ICT literacy and personal inward remittances have positive, significant effects on the HDI level in Ghana, whereas government spending and rural population growth have an inverse effect on HDI. Inflation (negative) and trade openness (negative) both have an insignificant impact on HDI in Ghana over the study period. I also find that FII*GNI per capita is positive and significantly impacts the HDI.
An index to measure the level of women’s empowerment in Ghana is missing from the Ghanaian empirical literature. This study uses the PCA approach to create a women empowerment index for Ghana using four dimensions (labour and economics; good-life and health; politics, governance and leadership; and education and skill building) to find that the level of women’s empowerment improved year-on-year during the study period (1990 – 2021). Despite the fact that many studies have suggested that financial inclusion improves women’s empowerment (and vice versa), a study examining the direction of the relationship is missing from the Ghanaian literature. This study investigates the relationship and finds that financial inclusion and women empowerment are positively related during the study period, which means Ghanaian women are increasingly being empowered as time passes. In investigating the relationship between financial inclusion and women’s empowerment, I find that labour and economics, and politics, governance, and leadership exhibit positive, significant relationships with the level of financial inclusion in Ghana whereas good-life and health, and the education and skill building dimensions exhibit a positive but insignificant relationship with financial inclusion in Ghana over the study period
Ovine KRT81 variants and their influence on selected wool traits of commercial value
No full textKeratins are the main structural protein components of wool fibres, and variation in them and their genes (KRTs) is thought to influence wool structure and characteristics. The PCR–single strand conformation polymorphism technique has been used previously to investigate genetic variation in selected coding and intron regions of the type II sheep keratin gene KRT81, but no variation was identified. In this study, we used the same technique to explore the 5′ untranslated region of KRT81 and detected three sequence variants (A, B and C) that contain four single nucleotide polymorphisms. Among the 389 Merino × Southdown cross sheep investigated, variant B was linked to a reduction in clean fleece weight, while C was associated with an increase in both greasy fleece weight and clean fleece weight. No discernible effects on staple length or mean-fibre-diameter-related traits were observed. These findings suggest that variation in ovine KRT81 might influence wool growth by changing the density of wool follicles in the skin, the density of individual fibres, or the area of the skin producing fibre, as opposed to changing the rate of extrusion of fibres or their diameter
Characterisation and extractability of tannins in Pinot noir grape skin, seed, and stem: Impact of leaf removal, clone, and rootstock
No full textThis study examined the impact of leaf removal timing, rootstock, and clone selection on Pinot noir grape composition and subsequent impact on tannin extractability. Results showed that leaf removal increased anthocyanin levels in berries and tannins in stems and seeds, while also raising the mean degree of polymerisation (mDP) of skin tannins. Schwarzman rootstock had lower seed tannins but higher mDP in skin and seed tannins compared to own roots. UCD5 clone exhibited higher mDP in skin tannins than AM10/5 clones in acetone extraction. Tannin extractability was determined by the ratio of model wine-extracted tannins and acetone-extracted tannins. For the first time, this study reported that stems had the highest tannin extractability (64%-78%) compared to skins (37–52%) and seeds (26–34%). Compositional differences in grape tissues from different treatments had no impact on tannin extractability except for grape skins from two treatments. This suggests that tannin extractability is mainly influenced by grape ripeness which largely determines the composition of cell wall materials that can interact with tannins and thus influence tannin extractability. The differences in grape skin tannin extractability observed in this study between treatments were likely due to the significantly different galloylation (G%) levels in the extracted tannins
Instream habitat unit additions: If you build it, will they stay?
No full textRiver restoration in New Zealand is often focussed on riparian planting, hoping water quality improvements will improve overall ecosystem health. These interventions are important but successful community recovery requires additional steps to improve aquatic habitat. We trialled the addition of simple, instream habitat units as a practicable restoration tool and opportunity to investigate community recovery mechanisms. Habitat units were designed to be simple to construct using sustainable, readily available materials, and optimised to create heterogeneous habitat and refugia. Here, we present the outcome of three trials: (1) a preliminary trial as a proof of concept that habitat addition can facilitate establishment of drifting invertebrate colonists; (2) a trial in streams with varying physical characteristics to identify methodological constraints; and (3) a project co developed with local iwi (indigenous people) in NZ, demonstrating the value of indigenous knowledge in restoration
Promoting cultural imperialism or a valuable resource? Textbook use in ELT
No full textEnglish as a global language has led to the production of diverse materials to meet English language learner needs. In particular, the textbook has often been central to this learning process. Research on ELT textbook use has focused on the teacher’s role in textbook selection, neoliberal content, and the broader issues of cultural and linguistic imperialism in their production. This presentation aims to present and critique these issues within a global context. Some suggestions will be offered to mitigate these issues to provide a coherent curriculum that is respectful of ELLs cultural and linguistic needs in a localized context
Characterisation of storage proteins and their digesta from oat bran, wheat bran and barley, and identification of bioactive peptides derived from oat bran : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lincoln University
No full textAims: The aims of this thesis were to characterise storage proteins extracted from oat bran, wheat bran and barley and the digesta produced from them in an in vitro digestion model, followed by investigating the antioxidant and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitory activity of the digesta, and finally to identify novel peptides with antioxidant and ACE inhibitory activity in oat bran intestinal digesta.
Method: Storage protein concentrates of oat bran, wheat bran and barley were obtained by alkaline extraction and isoelectric precipitation. In vitro digestion model was adapted to generate their digesta protein where their protein/peptide profiles were analysed using sodium dodecyl-sulfate- polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The digestibility, degree of hydrolysis and the release of the free amino acids (FAAs) were determined on these digesta. Antioxidant assays including 2,2'-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS), total phenolic content (TPC), ferric ion reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay and oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assay were conducted to evaluate the overall antioxidant activity of the crude protein and digesta. The samples were also assessed for ACE inhibitory activity.The storage proteins in oat bran were selected for further analysis by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-D electrophoresis). The small-intestinal digesta of oat bran protein with the molecular weight (MW) of < 3 kDa was purified by anion-exchange chromatography and the selected fractions were subjected to mass spectrometry (MS) to determine the peptide sequences.
Findings: The major storage protein in oat bran protein concentrate were globulin, albumin and avenins, while prolamin, gliadin and albumin predominated in wheat bran protein concentrate, and hordein, albumin and globulin in the barley protein concentrate. These proteins were mostly degraded into polypeptides and smaller protein fractions by the end of intestinal digestion. This process resulted in significantly higher overall antioxidant activity and ACE inhibitory power in digesta. Oat gastric and intestinal digesta showed the highest ABTS scavenging activity of 2 Trolox equivalent mM/g sample. Oat digesta also showed a higher TPC value (200 gallic acid equivalent mg/g sample) compared to wheat bran and barley digesta (150 gallic acid equivalent mg/g sample and 40 gallic acid equivalent mg/g sample). The ACE inhibitory power of all three intestinal digesta was greater than 80%. Because oat digesta showed the highest overall antioxidat and ACE inhibitory activity, oat intestinal digesta was selected for separation by anion exchange chromatography. In all elutes, the highest ABTS scavenging activity reached to 275 Trolox equivalent µM/g sample and the highest ORAC scavenging activity was 170 Trolox equivalent µM/g sample. Four antioxidant anionic fractions and two ACE inhibitory fractions along with the digesta < 3 kDa were subjected to reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (R-HPLC-MS/MS). Peptides with antioxidant and ACE inhibitory potentials were identified.
Conclusion: These investigations have shown that storage proteins derived from oat bran, wheat bran and wholegrain barley are ideal sources to produce bioactive digesta after digestion. The peptides identified in oat bran intestinal digesta displays bioactive nature as an intermediate ACE inhibitor, with the potential of future applications in improving human health
pH dominates the temporal perception of astringency sub-qualities and saliva friction response – A study under iso-pH and iso-titratable acidity conditions in model wine
No full textAstringency is a multidimensional perception comprising sensorily distinct sub-qualities. In wine production, attaining balanced astringency is critical to producing premium products. Although tannin has been viewed as the primary cause of wine astringency through colloidal interactions with salivary proteins and the modification of lubricating salivary film, how acids act in similar roles remains underexplored. This study aimed to address this gap by investigating the impact of acids (malic, lactic or tartaric acids) on the wine astringency profile under iso-pH and iso-titratable acidity (TA) conditions. Samples were sensorily evaluated with a progressive profiling method and tribologically tested to determine their impact on saliva lubrication. The results indicated that acids, independent of tannin, can elicit all astringency sub-qualities, and specifically that the pucker sub-quality is closely associated with low pH. pH had a more dominant impact on the temporal sensory scores than TA. At iso-TA, the score of all astringency sub-qualities was solely dependent on pH; at iso-pH, lowering TA increased the score of drying and roughness. The tribology results demonstrated that the rate of saliva friction increase was significantly correlated with pH but not TA. We propose that, during oral processing, pH dominates the process of saliva protein deformation, removal of lubricating pellicle, increased oral friction and astringency perception. However, high TA encourages saliva flow which neutralises oral pH and restores lubrication, counterbalancing the low pH’s contribution to astringency. Wine production processes could leverage this knowledge by implementing various acid-modification techniques to achieve the desired level of astringency quality of wines
Adaptation and survival of marine-associated spiders (Araneae)
No full textAquatic environments are an unusual habitat for most arthropods. Nevertheless, many arthropod species that were once terrestrial dwelling have transitioned back to marine and freshwater environments, either as semi-aquatic or, more rarely, as fully aquatic inhabitants. Transition to water from land is exceptional, and without respiratory modifications to allow for extended submergence and the associated hypoxic conditions, survival is limited. In this article, we review marine-associated species that have made this rare transition in a generally terrestrial group, spiders. We include several freshwater spider species for comparative purposes. Marine-associated spiders comprise less than 0.3% of spider species worldwide but are found in over 14% of all spider families. As we discuss, these spiders live in environments that, with tidal action, hydraulic forces, and saltwater, are more extreme than freshwater habitats, often requiring physiological and behavioral adaptations to survive. Spiders employ many methods to survive inundation from encroaching tides, such as air bubble respiration, airtight nests, hypoxic comas, and fleeing incoming tides. While airway protection is the primary survival strategy, further survival adaptations include saltwater-induced osmotic regulation, dietary composition, predator avoidance, reproduction, locomotory responses, and adaptation to extreme temperatures and hydrostatic pressures that challenge existence in marine environments