Screening of a potential leafhopper attractants and their applications in tea plantations

Abstract

Pheromones can be used as leafhopper attractants. However, commercial pheromone products, such as the Ingle lure, have certain limitations, including poor persistence in the field. In this study, (E)-2-hexenal, (Z)-3-hexen-1-ol, (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate, (E)-ocimene, linalool, and geraniol were selected and behaviorally tested as potential leafhopper attractants. Y-tube olfactometer tests showed that the C2 formulation was more effective than other formulations. In tea field trials, the number of leafhoppers caught by sticky board traps baited with C2 lures was greater than that caught by treatment. The number of leafhoppers attracted by the C2 lures was greater than that attracted by the commercial Ingle lures. Additionally, the total amount of active C2 components on lures was greater than that of the active components on the lure after 14 days. Thus, the results indicated that the C2 formulation may attract leafhoppers and have a greater persistence than other formulations in tea field.     

MEASURING IMPACTS OF URBAN WATER DEVELOPMENT1

ABSTRACT The role of water resources in the urban economic and social environment, particularly in the inner city, has never been established to the degree necessary for making informed decisions on investments in urban waterway and shoreline improvements. The basic tools for measuring psychological and social impacts of waterway and shoreline developments in the inner city have not been fully developed and utilized to date. However, through a detailed analysis of the water resources in the urban core area of Cleveland, it appears that deliberate development of water-based recreation and other environmental resources can lead to improvement in some of the social problems of the inner city. In recreation analysis, there is currently a great gap between methodologies that are conceptually sound and those that have been applied by urban and water-resources planning agencies. New tools and methodologies can only be used successfully when public agencies are given the institutional and policy means for using them equitably in light of social needs. Present urban-water planning practices have been found to be biased against the inner city, often unintentionally.     

Designing a conservation reserve network with minimal fragmentation: A linear integer programming approach

In the biological conservation literature, the optimum reserve site selection problem has often been addressed by using the prototype set covering and maximal covering formulations, assuming that representation of species is the only criterion in site selection. This approach usually results in a small but highly fragmented reserve, which is not useful for practical conservation planning. To improve the chances of species' persistence, it may be desirable to reduce habitat fragmentation. This paper presents a linear integer programming formulation to minimize spatial gaps between selected sites in a reserve network, which is applied to a data set on breeding birds. The authors express their willingness to share the database used in this study. Those readers who wish to have access to the data may contact Robert A. Briers at r.briers@napier.ac.uk.     

Mathematical Methods for Spatially Cohesive Reserve Design

The problem of designing spatially cohesive nature reserve systems that meet biodiversity objectives is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem. The multiobjective function minimises a combination of boundary length, area and failed representation of the biological attributes we are trying to conserve. The task is to reserve a subset of sites that best meet this objective. We use data on the distribution of habitats in the Northern Territory, Australia, to show how simulated annealing and a greedy heuristic algorithm can be used to generate good solutions to such large reserve design problems, and to compare the effectiveness of these methods.     

基于重要生态节点独流减河流域生态廊道构建

河道、湿地、湖库和河口等生态节点是区域生物多样性保护的重要景观要素,而生态廊道是连接这些重要生态节点的"桥梁"和"纽带".针对中尺度流域景观破碎化问题,以天津市独流减河流域为例,在景观生态学理论指导下,借助GIS与RS技术,基于"河道-湿地-湖库-河口"等重要生态节点,重点考虑景观类型和人类活动干扰的影响,利用最小累积阻力模型构建生态廊道,识别生态节点与生态断裂点,并对其空间结构进行定量化分析,进而规划设计了研究区的生态框架.结果表明:①45条生态廊道的网络连接度评价指标——α指数（网络环度）、β指数（节点连接率）和γ指数（连接度）分别为0.32、1.56、0.56,说明廊道网络具有较高的连通性和复杂度,有利于生态流的顺畅流动.②共识别26个生态节点和35个生态断裂点,明确了研究区需重点保护建设和修复改善的关键点（区）的地理位置.③廊道最佳宽度为30~60 m,空间配置以草地、林地和水域等重要景观类型为主,约占70.63%~78.97%,能够为物种提供高质量的栖息地和迁移通道.④廊道网络中河流廊道为主要廊道类型,其长度约占廊道总长度的51.19%,具有丰富的水资源和植被种类,所构建的"一轴两心九带"的生态框架具有重要的生态服务功能.研究显示,基于重要生态节点构建生态廊道和生态框架能够提高独流减河流域的景观连接度,对该流域的生态安全格局规划和生态工程建设具有重要参考价值.      

Rain-out investigation: Initial droplet size measurement

Droplet size distribution inside water flashing jets and corresponding rain-out fraction were measured. Mass distribution showed that a few droplets are ‘large’ (d>150 μm) and count for more than 85% of the liquid mass in the jet because of their large individual mass. This could be due to incomplete thermal fragmentation. It could explain the rain-out falling near the orifice or pipe exit.     

Urban Plants as Genetic Reservoirs or Threats to the Integrity of Bushland Plant Populations

Abstract:  Remnant plants in urban fringes and native plants in gardens have the potential to contribute to the conservation of threatened plants by increasing genetic diversity, effective size of populations, and levels of genetic connectedness. But they also pose a threat through the disruption of locally adapted gene pools. At Hyams Beach, New South Wales, Australia, four bushland stands of the rare shrub, Grevillea macleayana McGillivray, surround an urban area containing remnant and cultivated specimens of this species. Numbers of inflorescences per plant, fruits per plant, and visits by pollinators were similar for plants in urban gardens and bushland. Urban plants represented a substantial but complex genetic resource, displaying more genetic diversity than bushland plants judged by H_e , numbers of alleles per locus, and number of private alleles. Of 27 private alleles in urban plants, 17 occurred in a set of 19 exotic plants. Excluding the exotic plants, all five stands displayed a moderate differentiation ( F_ST = 0.14 ± 0.02), although the urban remnants clustered with two of the bushland stands. These patterns may be explained by high levels of selfing and inbreeding in this species and by long-distance dispersal (several seeds in the urban stand were fathered by plants in other stands). Genetic leakage (gene flow) from exotic plants to 321 seeds on surrounding remnant or bushland plants has not occurred. Our results demonstrate the conservation value of this group of urban plants, which are viable, productive, genetically diverse, and interconnected with bushland plants. Gene flow has apparently not yet led to genetic contamination of bushland populations, but high levels of inbreeding would make this a rare event and difficult to detect. Remnant plants in urban gardens could successfully contribute to recovery plans for endangered and vulnerable species.     

Predicting Plant Extinction Based on Species-Area Curves in Prairie Fragments with High Beta Richness

Abstract:  Species-area relationships and island biogeography theory are commonly used to predict how species richness will decline with fragmentation. There are a variety of largely untested assumptions in these approaches, including the assumptions that populations are distributed uniformly before fragmentation, and that local extinctions are due to effects of small population sizes. If populations are not distributed uniformly, then populations can be abundant locally but rare globally. This would cause extinction rates to be smaller than predicted. We tested extinction theory by developing estimates of the number of plant species that should be present in small tallgrass prairie fragments and then testing the uniformity assumption by partitioning species richness into α (within site) and β (among site) components in Iowa prairies. Many more native prairie plant species were present in surveys of prairie fragments (491) than was predicted based on theory (27–207). A large proportion (75%) of the total species richness was β richness. We suggest that the high proportion of β richness was responsible for the shallow species-area slopes and the lower than expected number of species losses and that a better understanding of what determines β diversity will improve predictions of fragmentation effects on richness of plants. We also suggest that plants in prairie remnants may be best conserved by protecting different prairie types rather than by protecting a few large areas containing a single prairie type.     

企业安全文化管理技术体系理论与实践探讨

为推动企业安全文化建设,实现不同群体行为安全整体协同发展,应用协同理论、自适应性管理及行为安全等方法,架构了企业安全文化管理技术体系。该技术体系强调安全文化整体提升需要外部推动力(企业例行的安全管理制度)及内部自驱力(员工安全文化自律提升)协同发展,最终实现由外部推动力向内部自驱力的转化。将构建的技术体系引入试点矿进行有效性验证,并运行2个周期。运行评估结果表明,试点矿不同群体对安全文化意识均呈整体提升,增长幅度比较大的是高层管理者(55.13%),其次是中层管理者(4.74%),一线员工层(4.48%)、培训层(3.69%)。