Biodiversity Management under Cashew Agro-ecosystems in Central Africa: A case study from Cameroon

This article examines the categorical problem that persons of ‘mixed-race’ background presented to British administrations in eastern, central and southern Africa during the late 1920s and 1930s. Tracing a discussion regarding the terms ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ from an obscure court case in Nyasaland (contemporary Malawi) in 1929, to the Colonial Office in London, to colonial governments in eastern, central and southern Africa, this article demonstrates a lack of consensus on how the term ‘native’ was to be defined, despite its ubiquitous use. This complication arrived at a particularly crucial period when indirect rule was being implemented throughout the continent. Debate centered largely around the issue of racial descent versus culture as the determining factor. The ultimate failure of British officials to arrive at a clear definition of the term ‘native’, one of the most fundamental terms in the colonial lexicon, is consequently suggestive of both the potential weaknesses of colonial state formation and the abstraction of colonial policy vis-à-vis local empirical conditions. Furthermore, this case study compels a rethinking of contemporary categories of analysis and their historical origins.

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Beach-Bar Sandstone Reservoir Prediction: A Case Study from Central Africa

10.3997/2214-4609.202010736 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

W. He ◽

B. Chen ◽

J. Li ◽

L. Xue ◽

L. Ma ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Central Africa ◽

Reservoir Prediction ◽

Sandstone Reservoir ◽

Beach Bar

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Social Organization and Agricultural Strategies to Face Climate Variability: A Case Study in Guaraciaba, Southern Brazil

Sustainable Agriculture Research ◽

10.5539/sar.v2n3p118 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2 (3) ◽

pp. 118 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michelle Bonatti ◽

Sandro L. Schlindwein ◽

Ana Carolina F. De Vasconcelos ◽

Stefan Sieber ◽

Luiz Renato D Agostini ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Social Organization ◽

Management Practices ◽

Local Development ◽

Adaptation Strategy ◽

Support Network ◽

Southern Brazil ◽

Biodiversity Management ◽

Crop Species

<p>Climate scenarios and projections have suggested that the impacts of climate change on land use will be noticed particularly by the communities that depend on natural resources for their subsistence. The climate vulnerability of poor communities varies greatly, but in general, climate change combines with other threats and becomes superimposed on existing vulnerabilities. This paper presents a case study that strives to understand the social organization in a vulnerable community of Guaraciaba, in southern Brazil, to investigate aspects of an adaptation strategy to climate change based on the local development and conservation of landraces of a set of crop species. Landraces are varieties better adapted to adversities, especially drought, which is an important threat to the famers in the region. Every farmer receives annually a “kit of biodiversity”, a set of local varieties with the amount of seeds necessary to be cultivated in order to produce enough food for the family. The study had a qualitative approach and was carried out through semi-structured interviews with technicians and 30% of the rural families who farm with landraces. The study concludes that the factors that make this adaptation strategy sustainable are: the ability to undertake actions strongly based on local socio-cultural needs (a social support network), biodiversity management practices designed to reduce external economic dependence, self management of genetic resources, the establishment of priorities based on locally available resources, a work plan for community participation (field days, a community based festival), the establishment of the roles of community in the planning and implementation of programs for biodiversity management.</p>

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The feasibility of applying a cost-effective approach for assigning priorities for threatened species recovery with a case study from New South Wales, Australia

Pacific Conservation Biology ◽

10.1071/pc090238 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 238 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Judit K. Szabo ◽

Sue V. Briggs ◽

Rachel Lonie ◽

Linda Bell ◽

Richard Maloney ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Threatened Species ◽

New South ◽

New South Wales ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Limited Time ◽

Biodiversity Management ◽

South Wales ◽

Cost Effective Approach ◽

Key Terms

May (2002) estimated that the current rate of extinction of species globally is 100?1000 times background rates. Hence a primary goal of biodiversity management is to bring the rate of extinction back to normal levels. Conservation managers face two interrelated problems: limited time and money, and how to allocate the finite available resources (Bottrill et al. 2008, 2009). In this paper we tackle the second of these problems. Definitions of key terms are in Appendix 1.

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Better Word Representation Vectors Using Syllabic Alphabet: A Case Study of Swahili

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app9183648 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (18) ◽

pp. 3648

Author(s):

Casper S. Shikali ◽

Zhou Sijie ◽

Liu Qihe ◽

Refuoe Mokhosi

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Critical Role ◽

Language Model ◽

Central Africa ◽

Spoken Language ◽

Language Models ◽

Word Embeddings ◽

Word Representation

Deep learning has extensively been used in natural language processing with sub-word representation vectors playing a critical role. However, this cannot be said of Swahili, which is a low resource and widely spoken language in East and Central Africa. This study proposed novel word embeddings from syllable embeddings (WEFSE) for Swahili to address the concern of word representation for agglutinative and syllabic-based languages. Inspired by the learning methodology of Swahili in beginner classes, we encoded respective syllables instead of characters, character n-grams or morphemes of words and generated quality word embeddings using a convolutional neural network. The quality of WEFSE was demonstrated by the state-of-art results in the syllable-aware language model on both the small dataset (31.229 perplexity value) and the medium dataset (45.859 perplexity value), outperforming character-aware language models. We further evaluated the word embeddings using word analogy task. To the best of our knowledge, syllabic alphabets have not been used to compose the word representation vectors. Therefore, the main contributions of the study are a syllabic alphabet, WEFSE, a syllabic-aware language model and a word analogy dataset for Swahili.

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Why do Logging Firms Reject Environmental Labeling in Central Africa? A Case Study of Forest Certification in Cameroon

Nile Journal of Business and Economics ◽

10.20321/nilejbe.v6i16.05 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (16) ◽

pp. 59-79

Author(s):

Isaac Bernard NDOUMBE BEROCK ◽

◽

Neba Cletus YAH ◽

Symphorien ONGOLO ◽

◽

...

Keyword(s):

Central Africa ◽

The Other ◽

Forest Certification ◽

Intermediate Case ◽

Environmental Labeling ◽

First Case ◽

Negative Case ◽

Logging Industry ◽

Empirical Case Studies

This article aims to understand why extractive firms in the industrial logging industry in central Africa are reluctant to certify or label their activities. The methodology is based on three empirical case studies of logging companies in Cameroon: one opposed to certification and labeling (the model), the other is in the process of being certified (intermediate case) and the last is certified (negative case). The preferred option followed by this study was to avoid the copying of the first case by prospecting an intermediate case. The "negative" case permitted the model to be saturated. The comparative analysis of data collected highlighted some key obstacles to the commitment to environmental labeling: corruption, low turnover, high certification cost and the source of capital.

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