Planning for compact urban forms: local growth-management approaches and their evolution over time

Urban growth is a key issue for spatial planning as it influences urban patterns and disrupts open landscapes. To effectively steer urban growth towards compact urban forms, many growth-management policies have been developed over recent decades. However, few studies have assessed how municipal policy mixes have evolved over time. In our representative Swiss-wide survey, we evaluated the prevalence and the time of introduction of 18 policies. Our results indicate that large municipalities use a broad range of reinforcing policies over decades. In contrast, small municipalities mostly rely on conventional land-use regulations. The lack of innovative, incentive-based policies casts doubt on small municipalities' ability to effectively manage urban growth. However, our analyses reveal recent efforts by small municipalities to diversify approaches to growth management and adopt innovative policies. These efforts should be supported by guiding small municipalities in their policy choices, and providing support to those lacking planning capacity.     

Predicting the mating system from phenotypic correlations between life-history and sperm quality traits in the Alpine whitefish <Emphasis Type="Italic">Coregonus zugensis</Emphasis>

The mating behavior and reproductive strategies of Alpine whitefish like Coregonus zugensis (Nüsslin) are poorly understood, probably because they spawn in deep water where direct observations are difficult. In this study, we interpret life-history and sperm quality traits of fish that we caught from their spawning place. We found that males invest heavily into gonadal tissue (up to 5.6% of their body weight), which is, in comparison to other fish, consistent with external fertilization, distinct pairing and moderate to high communal spawning, or no pairing and low to moderate communal spawning. Sperm competition theory and recent experimental studies on other salmonids predict that males optimize ejaculate characteristics in relation to the costs of sperm and the level of competition they have to expect: dominant males are predicted to invest less into ejaculate quality and to have slower spermatozoa than subdominant males. We found that spermatozoa of older males are slower than those of younger males. Moreover, older males have larger breeding tubercles, a secondary sexual trait that has, in some previous studies, been found to be linked to good condition and to good genetic quality. Our results suggest that C. zugensis has age-linked reproductive strategies, that multimale spawning is common, i.e., that sperm competition plays a significant role, and that older males are on average dominant over younger males at the spawning place.     

Removal of phosphate from water by a highly selective La(III)-chelex resin

A new polymer ligand exchanger (PLE) has been developed for the removal of phosphate in wastewater. This PLE, consisting of lanthanum(III) bound to chelex-100 resin, was prepared by passing LaCl3 solution through a column of chelex-100. Uptake of phosphate from water by this La-chelex resin was investigated in the column mode. The La-chelex resin was able to remove phosphate efficiently from water, and the uptake of phosphate was not affected by the presence of large amounts of anions (0.1M) such as chloride and sulfate. The La-chelex resin was also able to efficiently remove phosphate from seawater to <0.1mg-Pl(-1), and regenerated for reuse by removing the sorbed phosphate by eluting with 6M HCl.