1,721,172 research outputs found
Food production and nature conservation : Conflicts and solutions
No full textFeeding the world's growing human population is increasingly challenging, especially as more people adopt a western diet and lifestyle. Doing so without causing damage to nature poses an even greater challenge. This book argues that in order to create a sustainable food supply whilst conserving nature, agriculture and nature must be reconnected and approached together. The authors demonstrate that while the links between nature and food production have, to some extent, already been recognized, until now the focus has been to protect one from the impacts of the other. Instead, it is argued that nature and agriculture can, and should, work together and ultimately benefit from one another. Chapters describe efforts to protect nature through globally connected protected area systems and illustrate how farming methods are being shaped to protect nature within agricultural systems. The authors also point to many ways in which nature benefits agriculture through the ecosystem services it provides. Overall, the book shows that nature conservation and food production must be considered as equally important components of future solutions to meet the global demand for food in a manner that is sustainable for both the human population and the planet as a whole.</p
Re-engaging agriculture with nature
No full text[Extract] The growing political agenda behind food security will create many challenges for nature conservation. Increasing efforts will be needed to protect vulnerable species within a matrix of agricultural production landscapes and include wildlife species within farming systems. Our science will be needed to inform the integration of conservation and food security goals in land management and to provide insights and innovation in the development of sustainable food-production systems that support animal conservation rather than conflict with it. Addressing the global challenges of food security and protection of nature will not be easy. However, this book demonstrates that we have the knowledge, expertise and skills to meet the challenge. Our civilisation depends upon our reconnecting agriculture and nature and using these resources well
A critique of ecological theory and a salute to natural history
No full textJust as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so it is in science that the testing of hypotheses is at the core of the development of theory. As set out in this book's Introduction (Chapter 1), most ecological theory has been developed outside Australasia; this biogeographical region thus provides an excellent case study for investigating whether the generally accepted hypotheses from ecological theory really are applicable in a different context. Furthermore, many excellent observational studies have been carried out in Australasia; the history of invasions in that region can be viewed as a series of experimental tests of ecological theory. Indeed, the Australian native flora and fauna was so different from that of the rest of the world, that Darwin (before he became an atheist) asked himself in his diaries whether there had been two Creators instead of one (see Chapter 1). In Chapter 1, we explained the reasoning behind the selection of the hypotheses that are reviewed in the main chapters in this book. At the beginning of this project all the authors were asked to formulate hypotheses, to give their feedback on the hypotheses, the way they were formulated and whether the hypotheses could be assessed by them; as a result of this collective effort authors could agree on assessing this present set of hypotheses. The hypotheses are derived from general ecological theory (see Chapter 1) but the material at hand cannot be viewed simply as 'data' such that the hypotheses can be tested as a part of statistical inference. This type of inference is familiar and easy for most scientists to address, and that is where most authors of this book clearly felt more secure than when they had to arrive at judgements from observations or from historical reconstructions. The overall conclusions, based on a meta-analysis of the assessment/testing of the 11 hypotheses by the authors of the chapters on species that moved into or out of Australasia as presented in the following tables, are clear: after weighing up the evidence many of the authors of chapters in this book concluded that there was no support for the individual hypothesis, or that they had to reject the hypothesis
Testing hyptheses about biological invasions and Charles Darwin's two-creator rumination
No full textSome of today's most pressing issues deal with invasions by alien species into natural or man-made ecosystems such as agricultural landscapes. Invasions are not a new phenomenon having been a part of the relationship between man and the environment ever since humans moved out into the savannas; however, they became part of the ecological agenda in the middle of the last century. The foundations of invasion ecology stem from Charles Elton, who, in his book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (published in 1958) attempted to draw together three stands of ecology – faunal history, ecology, particularly population ecology, and conservation. Elton's book had some traction at the time (e.g. Baker and Stebbins 1965), however, few ecologists paid much attention to invasions during the 1960s even though island biogeography theory (MacArthur and Wilson 1967) did provide theoretical frameworks for how new species fitted into the resident species communities on islands. It was not until the 1970s that invasion ecology began to gain traction in the literature (e.g. Baker 1974; Embree 1979) and continues to this day (Richardson 2011). There have been recent attempts to create unified theoretical frameworks for understanding the invasion process (Blackburn et al. 2011) and the traits that determine the degree to which a species can invade a new ecosystem or the degree to which an ecosystem can be invaded by a new species (Richardson and Pysek 2006). These developments provide a foundation upon which to assess the degree to which hypotheses concerning biological invasions relate to real-world case studies that are proliferating in the literature
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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