Policy ‘framing’ and evidence-based planning: ‘epistemic communities’ in the multi-jurisdictional environment of an enlarged Europe

The following paper builds on ongoing discussions over the spatial and territorial turns in planning, as it relates to the dynamics of evidence-based planning and knowledge production in the policy process. It brings this knowledge perspective to the organizational and institutional dynamics of transformational challenges implicit in the recent enlargement of the EU. Thus it explores the development of new spatial ideas and planning approaches, and their potential to shape or ‘frame’ spatial policy through the formulation of new institutional arrangements and the de-institutionalization of others. That is, how knowledge is created, contested, mobilized and controlled across governance architectures or territorial knowledge channels. In so doing, the paper elaborates and discusses a theoretical framework through which the interplay of knowledge and policymaking can be conceptualized and analyzed.

An objective, niche-based approach to indicator species selection

1. Species-based indices are frequently employed as surrogates for wider biodiversity health and measures of environmental condition. Species selection is crucial in determining an indicators metric value and hence the validity of the interpretation of ecosystem condition and function it provides, yet an objective process to identify appropriate indicator species is frequently lacking. 2. An effective indicator needs to (i) be representative, reflecting the status of wider biodiversity; (ii) be reactive, acting as early-warning systems for detrimental changes in environmental conditions; (iii) respond to change in a predictable way. We present an objective, niche-based approach for species' selection, founded on a coarse categorisation of species' niche space and key resource requirements, which ensures the resultant indicator has these key attributes. 3. We use UK farmland birds as a case study to demonstrate this approach, identifying an optimal indicator set containing 12 species. In contrast to the 19 species included in the farmland bird index (FBI), a key UK biodiversity indicator that contributes to one of the UK Government's headline indicators of sustainability, the niche space occupied by these species fully encompasses that occupied by the wider community of 62 species. 4. We demonstrate that the response of these 12 species to land-use change is a strong correlate to that of the wider farmland bird community. Furthermore, the temporal dynamics of the index based on their population trends closely matches the population dynamics of the wider community. However, in both analyses, the magnitude of the change in our indicator was significantly greater, allowing this indicator to act as an early-warning system. 5. Ecological indicators are embedded in environmental management, sustainable development and biodiversity conservation policy and practice where they act as metrics against which progress towards national, regional and global targets can be measured. Adopting this niche-based approach for objective selection of indicator species will facilitate the development of sensitive and representative indices for a range of taxonomic groups, habitats and spatial scales.

A spatio-temporal structure-based approach to drought characterisation

Drought characterisation is an intrinsically spatio-temporal problem. A limitation of previous approaches to characterisation is that they discard much of the spatio-temporal information by reducing events to a lower-order subspace. To address this, an explicit 3-dimensional (longitude, latitude, time) structure-based method is described in which drought events are defined by a spatially and temporarily coherent set of points displaying standardised precipitation below a given threshold. Geometric methods can then be used to measure similarity between individual drought structures. Groupings of these similarities provide an alternative to traditional methods for extracting recurrent space-time signals from geophysical data. The explicit consideration of structure encourages the construction of summary statistics which relate to the event geometry. Example measures considered are the event volume, centroid, and aspect ratio. The utility of a 3-dimensional approach is demonstrated by application to the analysis of European droughts (15 °W to 35°E, and 35 °N to 70°N) for the period 1901–2006. Large-scale structure is found to be abundant with 75 events identified lasting for more than 3 months and spanning at least 0.5 × 106 km2. Near-complete dissimilarity is seen between the individual drought structures, and little or no regularity is found in the time evolution of even the most spatially similar drought events. The spatial distribution of the event centroids and the time evolution of the geographic cross-sectional areas strongly suggest that large area, sustained droughts result from the combination of multiple small area (∼106 km2) short duration (∼3 months) events. The small events are not found to occur independently in space. This leads to the hypothesis that local water feedbacks play an important role in the aggregation process.

Identifying key knowledge needs for evidence-based conservation of wild insect pollinators: a collaborative cross-sectoral exercise

In response to evidence of insect pollinator declines, organisations in many sectors, including the food and farming industry, are investing in pollinator conservation. They are keen to ensure that their efforts use the best available science. We convened a group of 32 ‘conservation practitioners’ with an active interest in pollinators and 16 insect pollinator scientists. The conservation practitioners include representatives from UK industry (including retail), environmental non-government organisations and nature conservation agencies. We collaboratively developed a long list of 246 knowledge needs relating to conservation of wild insect pollinators in the UK. We refined and selected the most important knowledge needs, through a three-stage process of voting and scoring, including discussions of each need at a workshop. We present the top 35 knowledge needs as scored by conservation practitioners or scientists. We find general agreement in priorities identified by these two groups. The priority knowledge needs will structure ongoing work to make science accessible to practitioners, and help to guide future science policy and funding. Understanding the economic benefits of crop pollination, basic pollinator ecology and impacts of pesticides on wild pollinators emerge strongly as priorities, as well as a need to monitor floral resources in the landscape.

Mutual dependency grid for stakeholder mapping: a component-based approach to supply chain participant analysis

Stakeholder analysis plays a critical role in business analysis. However, the majority of the stakeholder identification and analysis methods focus on the activities and processes and ignore the artefacts being processed by human beings. By focusing on the outputs of the organisation, an artefact-centric view helps create a network of artefacts, and a component-based structure of the organisation and its supply chain participants. Since the relationship is based on the components, i.e. after the stakeholders are identified, the interdependency between stakeholders and the focal organisation can be measured. Each stakeholder is associated with two types of dependency, namely the stakeholder’s dependency on the focal organisation and the focal organisation’s dependency on the stakeholder. We identify three factors for each type of dependency and propose the equations that calculate the dependency indexes. Once both types of the dependency indexes are calculated, each stakeholder can be placed and categorised into one of the four groups, namely critical stakeholder, mutual benefits stakeholder, replaceable stakeholder, and easy care stakeholder. The mutual dependency grid and the dependency gap analysis, which further investigates the priority of each stakeholder by calculating the weighted dependency gap between the focal organisation and the stakeholder, subsequently help the focal organisation to better understand its stakeholders and manage its stakeholder relationships.

An ontology-based approach for data integration in regionally interoperable healthcare systems

In order to best utilize the limited resource of medical resources, and to reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical treatment, we propose to build an interoperable regional healthcare systems among several levels of medical treatment organizations. In this paper, our approaches are as follows:(1) the ontology based approach is introduced as the methodology and technological solution for information integration; (2) the integration framework of data sharing among different organizations are proposed(3)the virtual database to realize data integration of hospital information system is established. Our methods realize the effective management and integration of the medical workflow and the mass information in the interoperable regional healthcare system. Furthermore, this research provides the interoperable regional healthcare system with characteristic of modularization, expansibility and the stability of the system is enhanced by hierarchy structure.

An event-based approach to understanding decadal fluctuations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation

Many previous studies have shown that unforced climate model simulations exhibit decadal-scale fluctuations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), and that this variability can have impacts on surface climate fields. However, the robustness of these surface fingerprints across different models is less clear. Furthermore, with the potential for coupled feedbacks that may amplify or damp the response, it is not known whether the associated climate signals are linearly related to the strength of the AMOC changes, or if the fluctuation events exhibit nonlinear behaviour with respect to their strength or polarity. To explore these questions, we introduce an objective and flexible method for identifying the largest natural AMOC fluctuation events in multicentennial/multimillennial simulations of a variety of coupled climate models. The characteristics of the events are explored, including their magnitude, meridional coherence and spatial structure, as well as links with ocean heat transport and the horizontal circulation. The surface fingerprints in ocean temperature and salinity are examined, and compared with the results of linear regression analysis. It is found that the regressions generally provide a good indication of the surface changes associated with the largest AMOC events. However, there are some exceptions, including a nonlinear change in the atmospheric pressure signal, particularly at high latitudes, in HadCM3. Some asymmetries are also found between the changes associated with positive and negative AMOC events in the same model. Composite analysis suggests that there are signals that are robust across the largest AMOC events in each model, which provides reassurance that the surface changes associated with one particular event will be similar to those expected from regression analysis. However, large differences are found between the AMOC fingerprints in different models, which may hinder the prediction and attribution of such events in reality.

An evidence-based review on the likely economic and environmental impact of genetically modified cereals and oilseeds for UK agriculture

An evidence-based review of the potential impact that the introduction of genetically-modified (GM) cereal and oilseed crops could have for the UK was carried out. The inter-disciplinary research project addressed the key research questions using scenarios for the uptake, or not, of GM technologies. This was followed by an extensive literature review, stakeholder consultation and financial modelling. The world area of canola, oilseed rape (OSR) low in both erucic acid in the oil and glucosinolates in the meal, was 34M ha in 2012 of which 27% was GM; Canada is the lead producer but it is also grown in the USA, Australia and Chile. Farm level effects of adopting GM OSR include: lower production costs; higher yields and profits; and ease of farm management. Growing GM OSR instead of conventional OSR reduces both herbicide usage and environmental impact. Some 170M ha of maize was grown in the world in 2011 of which 28% was GM; the main producers are the USA, China and Brazil. Spain is the main EU producer of GM maize although it is also grown widely in Portugal. Insect resistant (IR) and herbicide tolerant (HT) are the GM maize traits currently available commercially. Farm level benefits of adopting GM maize are lower costs of production through reduced use of pesticides and higher profits. GM maize adoption results in less pesticide usage than on conventional counterpart crops leading to less residues in food and animal feed and allowing increasing diversity of bees and other pollinators. In the EU, well-tried coexistence measures for growing GM crops in the proximity of conventional crops have avoided gene flow issues. Scientific evidence so far seems to indicate that there has been no environmental damage from growing GM crops. They may possibly even be beneficial to the environment as they result in less pesticides and herbicides being applied and improved carbon sequestration from less tillage. A review of work on GM cereals relevant for the UK found input trait work on: herbicide and pathogen tolerance; abiotic stress such as from drought or salinity; and yield traits under different field conditions. For output traits, work has mainly focussed on modifying the nutritional components of cereals and in connection with various enzymes, diagnostics and vaccines. Scrutiny of applications submitted for field trial testing of GM cereals found around 9000 applications in the USA, 15 in Australia and 10 in the EU since 1996. There have also been many patent applications and granted patents for GM cereals in the USA for both input and output traits;an indication of the scale of such work is the fact that in a 6 week period in the spring of 2013, 12 patents were granted relating to GM cereals. A dynamic financial model has enabled us to better understand and examine the likely performance of Bt maize and HT OSR for the south of the UK, if cultivation is permitted in the future. It was found that for continuous growing of Bt maize and HT OSR, unless there was pest pressure for the former and weed pressure for the latter, the seed premia and likely coexistence costs for a buffer zone between other crops would reduce the financial returns for the GM crops compared with their conventional counterparts. When modelling HT OSR in a four crop rotation, it was found that gross margins increased significantly at the higher levels of such pest or weed pressure, particularly for farm businesses with larger fields where coexistence costs would be scaled down. The impact of the supply of UK-produced GM crops on the wider supply chain was examined through an extensive literature review and widespread stakeholder consultation with the feed supply chain. The animal feed sector would benefit from cheaper supplies of raw materials if GM crops were grown and, in the future, they might also benefit from crops with enhanced nutritional profile (such as having higher protein levels) becoming available. This would also be beneficial to livestock producers enabling lower production costs and higher margins. Whilst coexistence measures would result in increased costs, it is unlikely that these would cause substantial changes in the feed chain structure. Retailers were not concerned about a future increase in the amount of animal feed coming from GM crops. To conclude, we (the project team) feel that the adoption of currently available and appropriate GM crops in the UK in the years ahead would benefit farmers, consumers and the feed chain without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, unless British farmers are allowed to grow GM crops in the future, the competitiveness of farming in the UK is likely to decline relative to that globally.

Evidence from neurolinguistic methodologies: can it actually inform linguistic/ language acquisition theories and translate to evidence-based applications?

This special issue is a testament to the recent burgeoning interest by theoretical linguists, language acquisitionists and teaching practitioners in the neuroscience of language. It offers a highly valuable, state-of-the-art overview of the neurophysiological methods that are currently being applied to questions in the field of second language (L2) acquisition, teaching and processing. Research in the area of neurolinguistics has developed dramatically in the past twenty years, providing a wealth of exciting findings, many of which are discussed in the papers in this volume. The goal of this commentary is twofold. The first is to critically assess the current state of neurolinguistic data from the point of view of language acquisition and processing—informed by the papers that comprise this special issue and the literature as a whole—pondering how the neuroscience of language/processing might inform us with respect to linguistic and language acquisition theories. The second goal is to offer some links from implications of exploring the first goal towards informing language teachers and the creation of linguistically and neurolinguistically-informed evidence-based pedagogies for non-native language teaching.