Resolving the spatial variability of soil N using fractions of soil organic matter

The spatial variability of soil nitrogen (N) mineralisation has not been extensively studied, which limits our capacity to make N fertiliser recommendations. Even less attention has been paid to the scale-dependence of the variation. The objective of this research was to investigate the scale-dependence of variation of mineral N (MinN, N–NO3− plus N–NH4+) at within-field scales. The study was based on the spatial dependence of the labile fractions of SOM, the key fractions for N mineralisation. Soils were sampled in an unbalanced nested design in a 4-ha arable field to examine the distribution of the variation of SOM at 30, 10, 1, and 0.12 m. Organic matter in free and intra-aggregate light fractions (FLF and IALF) was extracted by physical fractionation. The variation occurred entirely within 0.12 m for FLF and at 10 m for IALF. A subsequent sampling on a 5-m grid was undertaken to link the status of the SOM fractions to MinN, which showed uncorrelated spatial dependence. A uniform application of N fertiliser would be suitable in this case. The failure of SOM fractions to identify any spatial dependence of MinN suggests that other soil variables, or crop indicators, should be tested to see if they can identify different N supply areas within the field for a more efficient and environmentally friendly N management.

A comparison of the relative toxicity of bone meal and other P sources used as remedial treatments to the earthworm Eisenia fetida

It has been suggested that sources of P could be used to remediate metal-contaminated soil. The toxicity of four potential P sources, potassium hydrogen phosphate (PHP), triple superphosphate (TSP), rock phosphate (RP) and raw bone meal (RBM) to Eisenia fetida was determined. The concentration of P that is statistically likely to kill 50% of the population (LC50) for PHP, TSP and RBM was determined in OECD acute toxicity tests. 14 day LC50s expressed as bulk P concentration lay in the range 3319–4272 mg kg−1 for PHP, 3107–3590 mg kg−1 for TSP and 1782–2196 mg kg−1 for RBM (ranges present the 95% confidence intervals). For PHP and TSP mortality was significantly impacted by the electrical conductivity of the treated soils. No consistent relationship existed between mortality and electrical conductivity, soil pH and available (Olsen) P across the PHP, TSP and RBM amendment types. In RP toxicity tests mortality was low and it was not possible to determine a LC50 value. Incineration of bone meal at temperatures between 200 and 300 ◦C, pre-washing the bone meal, co-amendment with 5% green waste compost and delaying introduction of earthworms after bone meal amendments by 21 days or more led to significant reductions in the bone meal toxicity. These results are consistent with the toxicity being associated with the release and/or degradation of a soluble organic component present in raw bone meal. Bone meal can be used as an earthworm-friendly remedial amendment in metal-contaminated soils but initial additions may have a negative effect on any earthworms surviving in the contaminated soil before the organic component in the bone meal degrades in the soil.

Suitability of pesticide risk indicators for less developed countries: a comparison

Pesticide risk indicators provide simple support in the assessment of environmental and health risks from pesticide use, and can therefore inform policies to foster a sustainable interaction of agriculture with the environment. For their relative simplicity, indicators may be particularly useful under conditions of limited data availability and resources, such as in Less Developed Countries (LDCs). However, indicator complexity can vary significantly, in particular between those that rely on an exposure–toxicity ratio (ETR) and those that do not. In addition, pesticide risk indicators are usually developed for Western contexts, which might cause incorrect estimation in LDCs. This study investigated the appropriateness of seven pesticide risk indicators for use in LDCs, with reference to smallholding agriculture in Colombia. Seven farm-level indicators, among which 3 relied on an ETR (POCER, EPRIP, PIRI) and 4 on a non-ETR approach (EIQ, PestScreen, OHRI, Dosemeci et al., 2002), were calculated and then compared by means of the Spearman rank correlation test. Indicators were also compared with respect to key indicator characteristics, i.e. user friendliness and ability to represent the system under study. The comparison of the indicators in terms of the total environmental risk suggests that the indicators not relying on an ETR approach cannot be used as a reliable proxy for more complex, i.e. ETR, indicators. ETR indicators, when user-friendly, show a comparative advantage over non-ETR in best combining the need for a relatively simple tool to be used in contexts of limited data availability and resources, and for a reliable estimation of environmental risk. Non-ETR indicators remain useful and accessible tools to discriminate between different pesticides prior to application. Concerning the human health risk, simple algorithms seem more appropriate for assessing human health risk in LDCs. However, further research on health risk indicators and their validation under LDC conditions is needed.

Enhancing habitat to help the plight of the bumblebee

Modern farming has caused considerable declines in UK bumblebee populations, and, while options exist for farmers to increase the quantity of bee-friendly habitat, uptake has been low. Robin Blake explains how existing habitats on farms could be enhanced for the benefit of bumblebees

Public awareness of, and attitude to, Reading's urban gardens: the findings of a questionnaire survey

This paper records and analyses the results of a questionnaire survey, undertaken in Reading in January and February 1994, into the awareness and use of Reading's town centre gardens. The results indicate that although the majority of those interviewed were aware of one or more of the gardens, relatively few visit any of the gardens and, of those who do, the majority visit infrequently. Although the gardens are generally very well liked by those who use them, no clear reasons emerge as to the motivation for visiting, beyond using them as a short cut or as a source of fresh air and tranquillity. Equally, beyond the provision of information and signposting, there appears to be little to turn current non-users into users of the gardens. The report concludes that beyond some managerial issues such as safety and cleanliness, the Borough Council needs to address the extent to which the gardens could play a more central role in the life of the town and, if this is the case, how this might be achieved.

Public Art Commission Rung by Rung, Tina O'Connell

Research based on a significant public art commissions awarded through competition (peer reviewed) – Pearse Street Clinic Public Art Commission (€20K). Research was examining issues of the relationship between sculpture, exchange and communication, health and well-being. The research used an approach to question the aspirations and dreams of those who were visiting the health centre as part of a routine of daily life. Based on the aspirational concerns of individual visitors, and secondary research of positive effects of light, the final output draws on ideas based around the language of physical signage to occupy a space concerned with visitor health and wellbeing – a Health Clinic. The output has had an impact both at the site and more broadly in the context of examining sculpture and fine art as a social catalyst - based on work of socially-engaged historical practices. The installation at Pearse Street work in Dublin in Nov 09 has received critical and local acclaim. Further commissions within the public arena have been forthcoming despite difficult local economic landscape.

Des liaisons dangereuses? Réseaux donnés, réseaux supposés et réseaux déguisés d’une nonne vénitienne au XVIIe siècle

This article deals with Tarabotti's own family, her religious family within her nunnery and her ideal family, the so-called "République des lettres". Despite her permanent denial about her parents and siblings, she has ties with them all: she benifitted from her sister Camilla's and her mother's wills, she had a friendly relationship with one of her brothers-in-law, she took pity of her two sisters who remained spinsters. The same occurred with her religious family, where she developed close friendships with at least two of them. Moreover, her sisters in religion often belonged to patrician, well-off families and it is possible to argue that Tarabotti managed to expand her relationships with very important people via her sisters in religion. But the family she truly cherished, was her family d'election, the one she had been free to choose and to pursue: her literary family. However, this latter one was not a very recomandable family for a nun: therefore she kept silent with the most relevant elements of it, namely with the French priest and astronomer Ismael Boulliau who acted as the go-between for her last book, published abroad two years after her death. The article provides evidence to such connections, ties and knots, explaining at least in part Tarabotti's extraordinary success in life as a proto-feminist and political writer.

CUP Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon

Document design and typeface design: A typographic specification for a new Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon by CUP, accompanied by typefaces modified for the specific typographic requirements of the text. The Lexicon is a substantial (over 1400 pages) publication for HE students and academics intended to complement Liddell-Scott (the standard reference for classical Greek since the 1850s), and has been in preparation for over a decade. The typographic appearance of such works has changed very little since the original editions, largely to the lack of suitable typefaces: early digital proofs of the Lexicon utilised directly digitised versions of historical typefaces, making the entries difficult to navigate, and the document uneven in typographic texture. Close collaboration with the editors of the Lexicon, and discussion of the historical precedents for such documents informed the design at all typographic levels to achieve a highly reader-friendly results that propose a model for this kind of typography. Uniquely for a work of this kind, typeface design decisions were integrated into the wider document design specification. A rethinking of the complex typography for Greek and English based on historical editions as well as equivalent bilingual reference works at this level (from OUP, CUP, Brill, Mondadori, and other publishers) led a redefinition of multi-script typeface pairing for the specific context, taking into account recent developments in typeface design. Specifically, the relevant weighting of elements within each entry were redefined, as well as the typographic texture of type styles across the two scripts. In details, Greek typefaces were modified to emphasise clarity and readability, particularly of diacritics, at very small sizes. The relative weights of typefaces typeset side-by-side were fine-tuned so that the visual hierarchy of the entires was unambiguous despite the dense typesetting.

Ecological intensification: harnessing ecosystem services for food security

Rising demands for agricultural products will increase pressure to further intensify crop production, while negative environmental impacts have to be minimized. Ecological intensification entails the environmentally friendly replacement of anthropogenic inputs and/or enhancement of crop productivity, by including regulating and supporting ecosystem services management in agricultural practices. Effective ecological intensification requires an understanding of the relations between land use at different scales and the community composition of ecosystem service-providing organisms above and below ground, and the flow, stability, contribution to yield, and management costs of the multiple services delivered by these organisms. Research efforts and investments are particularly needed to reduce existing yield gaps by integrating context-appropriate bundles of ecosystem services into crop production systems.

Atmospheric predictability revisited

This article examines the potential to improve numerical weather prediction (NWP) by estimating upper and lower bounds on predictability by re-visiting the original study of Lorenz (1982) but applied to the most recent version of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) forecast system, for both the deterministic and ensemble prediction systems (EPS). These bounds are contrasted with an older version of the same NWP system to see how they have changed with improvements to the NWP system. The computations were performed for the earlier seasons of DJF 1985/1986 and JJA 1986 and the later seasons of DJF 2010/2011 and JJA 2011 using the 500-hPa geopotential height field. Results indicate that for this field, we may be approaching the limit of deterministic forecasting so that further improvements might only be obtained by improving the initial state. The results also show that predictability calculations with earlier versions of the model may overestimate potential forecast skill, which may be due to insufficient internal variability in the model and because recent versions of the model are more realistic in representing the true atmospheric evolution. The same methodology is applied to the EPS to calculate upper and lower bounds of predictability of the ensemble mean forecast in order to explore how ensemble forecasting could extend the limits of the deterministic forecast. The results show that there is a large potential to improve the ensemble predictions, but for the increased predictability of the ensemble mean, there will be a trade-off in information as the forecasts will become increasingly smoothed with time. From around the 10-d forecast time, the ensemble mean begins to converge towards climatology. Until this point, the ensemble mean is able to predict the main features of the large-scale flow accurately and with high consistency from one forecast cycle to the next. By the 15-d forecast time, the ensemble mean has lost information with the anomaly of the flow strongly smoothed out. In contrast, the control forecast is much less consistent from run to run, but provides more detailed (unsmoothed) but less useful information.

Species richness declines and biotic homogenization have slowed down for NW-European pollinators and plants

Concern about biodiversity loss has led to increased public investment in conservation. Whereas there is a widespread perception that such initiatives have been unsuccessful, there are few quantitative tests of this perception. Here, we evaluate whether rates of biodiversity change have altered in recent decades in three European countries (Great Britain, Netherlands and Belgium) for plants and flower visiting insects. We compared four 20-year periods, comparing periods of rapid land-use intensification and natural habitat loss (1930–1990) with a period of increased conservation investment (post-1990). We found that extensive species richness loss and biotic homogenisation occurred before 1990, whereas these negative trends became substantially less accentuated during recent decades, being partially reversed for certain taxa (e.g. bees in Great Britain and Netherlands). These results highlight the potential to maintain or even restore current species assemblages (which despite past extinctions are still of great conservation value), at least in regions where large-scale land-use intensification and natural habitat loss has ceased.

The role of working memory in the processing of reflexives

We report results from two eye-movement experiments that examined how differences in working memory (WM) capacity affect readers' application of structural constraints on reflexive anaphor resolution during sentence comprehension. We examined whether binding Principle A, a syntactic constraint on the interpretation of reflexives, is reducible to a memory friendly “recency” strategy, and whether WM capacity influences the degree to which readers create anaphoric dependencies ruled out by binding theory. Our results indicate that low and high WM span readers applied Principle A early during processing. However, contrary to previous findings, low span readers also showed immediate intrusion effects of a linearly closer but structurally inaccessible competitor antecedent. We interpret these findings as indicating that although the relative prominence of potential antecedents in WM can affect online anaphor resolution, Principle A is not reducible to a processing or linear distance based “least effort” constraint.

Use of batch culture and a two-stage continuous culture system to study the effect of supplemental a-lactalbumin and glycomacropeptide on mixed populations of human gut bacteria

Certain milk factors can promote the growth of a host-friendly gastrointestinal microflora. This may explain why breast-fed infants experience fewer intestinal infections than their formula-fed counterparts. The effect of formula supplementation with two such factors was investigated in this study. Infant faecal specimens were used to ferment formulas supplemented with glycomacropeptide and α-lactalbumin in a two-stage compound continuous culture model. Bacteriology was determined by fluorescence in situ hybridisation. Vessels that contained breast milk as well as α-lactalbumin and glycomacropeptide had stable counts of bifidobacteria while lactobacilli increased significantly only in vessels with breast milk. Bacteroides, clostridia and Escherichia coli decreased significantly in all runs. Acetate was the principal acid found along with high amounts of propionate and lactate. Supplementation of infant formulas with appropriate milk proteins may be useful in simulating the beneficial bacteriological effects of breast milk.

The identity of crop pollinators helps target conservation for improved ecosystem services

Insect pollinated mass flowering crops are becoming more widespread and there is a need to understand which insects are primarily responsible for the pollination of these crops so conservation measures can be appropriately targeted in the face of pollinator declines. This study used field surveys in conjunction with cage manipulations to identify the relative contributions of different pollinator taxa to the pollination of two widespread flowering crops, field beans and oilseed rape. Flower visiting pollinator communities observed in the field were distinct for each crop; while field beans were visited primarily by a few bumblebee species, multiple pollinator taxa visited oilseed, and the composition of this pollinator community was highly variable spatially and temporally. Neither pollinator community, however, appears to be meeting the demands of crops in our study regions. Cage manipulations showed that multiple taxa can effectively pollinate both oilseed and field beans, but bumblebees are particularly effective bean pollinators. Combining field observations and cage manipulations demonstrated that the pollination demands of these two mass flowering crops are highly contrasting, one would benefit from management to increase the abundance of some key taxa, whilst for the other, boosting overall pollinator abundance and diversity would be more appropriate. Our findings highlight the need for crop specific mitigation strategies that are targeted at conserving specific pollinator taxa (or group of taxa) that are both active and capable of crop pollination in order to reduce pollination deficits and meet the demands of future crop production.

Children and adolescents referred for treatment of anxiety disorders: differences in clinical characteristics

Background: Reports of the clinical characteristics of children and adolescents with anxiety disorders are typically based on community populations or from clinical samples with exclusion criterion applied. Little is known about the clinical characteristics of children and adolescents routinely referred for treatment for anxiety disorders. Furthermore, children and adolescents are typically treated as one homogeneous group although they may differ in ways that are clinically meaningful. Methods: A consecutive series of children (n = 100, aged 6-12 years) and adolescents (n = 100, aged 13-18 years), referred to a routine clinical service, were assessed for anxiety and comorbid disorders, school refusal and parental symptoms of psychopathology. Results: Children were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with separation anxiety disorder than adolescents. Adolescents with a primary anxiety disorder had significantly higher self and clinician rated anxiety symptoms and had more frequent primary diagnoses of social anxiety disorder, diagnoses and symptoms of mood disorders, and irregular school attendance. Limitations: Childhood and adolescence were considered categorically as distinct, developmental periods; in reality changes would be unlikely to occur in such a discrete manner. Conclusions: The finding that children and adolescents with anxiety disorders have distinct clinical characteristics has clear implications for treatment. Simply adapting treatments designed for children to make the materials more ‘adolescent-friendly’ is unlikely to sufficiently meet the needs of adolescents.