1,721,268 research outputs found
Agroforestry tree products (AFTPs): targeting poverty reduction and enhanced livelihoods
Full text linkAgroforestry tree domestication emerged as a farmer-driven, market-led process in the early 1990s and became an international initiative. A participatory approach now supplements the more traditional aspects of tree improvement, and is seen as an important strategy towards the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating poverty and hunger, promoting social equity and environmental sustainability. Considerable progress has been made towards the domestication of indigenous fruits and nuts in many villages in Cameroon and Nigeria. Vegetatively-propagated cultivars based on a sound knowledge of 'ideotypes' derived from an understanding of the tree-to-tree variation in many commercially important traits are being developed by farmers. These are being integrated into polycultural farming systems, especially the cocoa agroforests. Markets for Agroforestry Tree Products (AFTPs) are crucial for the adoption of agroforestry on a scale to have meaningful economic, social and environmental impacts. Important lessons have been learned in southern Africa from detailed studies of the commercialisation of AFTPs. These provide support for the wider acceptance of the role of domesticating indigenous trees in the promotion of enhanced livelihoods for poor farmers in the tropics. Policy guidelines have been developed in support of this sustainable rural development as an alternative strategy to those proposed in many other major development and conservation fora. <br/
Stump size and the number of coppice shoots for selected savanna tree species
Full text linkManagement of coppice dynamics of indigenous savanna trees could assist in increasing the regrowth rates or number of coppice shoots produced. This would be useful in natural resource management programmes to promote sustainable resource management. This study examined the influence of cutting height, stem size and surface area on the number of coppice shoots produced for twelve savanna species from a communal land in the Bushbuckndge lowveld. All species exhibited a strong coppicing ability following cutting The number of shoots per stump was most frequently related to cutting height, although this was not always the most significant predictor. There were clear differences between species with respect to the number of shoots per unit surface area, the highest being for Albizia harveyii and the least Piliostlgma thonningii The taller the potential height of a species, the fewer were the coppice shoots per stump surface area
He says, she says: Ecosystem services and gender among indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon
Full text linkAlthough it has been hypothesized that men and women vary in the way they value ecosystem services, research on ecosystem services rarely incorporates a gender dimension. We conducted research with nine indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon to understand which ecosystem services men and women perceive as most important for their wellbeing and to rank them according to locally-defined criteria of importance. Participants identified a total of 26 ecosystem services and 20 different ranking criteria. Ecosystem services such as land for agricultural fields (a supporting service), and provision of fish and medicinal plants were equally important for both men and women. Wild fruits and resources to make handicrafts were more frequently mentioned by women, whereas timber, materials for making tools and coca leaves were more frequently mentioned by men. There were also differences in the criteria used to value ecosystem services, with 11 criteria mentioned by both men and women, five mentioned exclusively by women and another four only by men. Our results suggest that taking gender differences into account in ecosystem services assessments may result in the prioritization of different services in conservation and sustainable development programs, and may lead to different outcomes for ecosystem service provision and local livelihoods
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
- …
