scholarly journals Variability of Seed Germination and Seedling Growth Potential of Ricinodendron heudelotii (Euphorbiaceae) at Fine Scale in Southern of Benin

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Yves Yatindo Boko-Haya ◽  
Christine A. I. N. Ouinsavi ◽  
Eben-Ezer B. K. Ewédjè ◽  
Yanick Y. Akin ◽  
Thérence Zinkpe ◽  
...  

Ricinodendron heudelotii (Euphorbiaceae) is an oilseed plant with high socio-economic value. Unfortunately, the seed’s tegumentary dormancy causes low germination and severely limits its large-scale spread. Germination and juvenile growth of eleven provenances from Benin and Central African Republics were tested under four different pre-treatments (control, lime scarification, soaking in water for seven days and scarification followed by soaking in water for three days) in order to provide information for use in the reforestation and improvement of R. heudelotii. In a Fischer block with three replicates of ten seeds, the daily and final germination (nine months) was recorded and the cumulative germination rate, average germination time and survival rate were calculated. In addition, total height, diameters at the collar and above the cotyledons, internode length, total number of leaves and seedling internodes were measured quarterly. Germination and growth of juveniles were significantly different between provenances and pre-treatments. The highest germination rate (%) in short duration (d) was recorded with seeds both scarified and soaked for three days in water from Akouho (20%, 42.08 d), CRAPP (36.67%, 18.82 d), Agrimey (33.33%, 18.30 d), Ilikimou (26.67%, 19.94 d) and Woroko (26.67%, 19.25 d) and then lime scarified seeds from Massi (80%, 14.46 d), Itchede (80%, 21.29 d) and Lobaye (60%, 19.11 d). Seedlings from seeds that were scarified and soaked for three days in water showed optimal growth for all traits; Lobaye and CRAPP provenances showed the best height growth (33.22±1.45 and 31.96±1.15 cm) while Massi and Illikimou provenances showed the best growth in collar diameter (1.08±0.06 and 1.11±0.09 cm). Provenances and pre-treatments revealed a discrete variation in germination and growth of R. heudelotii. Scarification on the one hand and scarification coupled with soaking into the water for three days on the other hand, are the best pre-treatments to increase seedling production while the best provenances are Lobaye, Massi and Itchede. These provenances are potential seed sources for Forestation Program in Benin.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Yunjing Zhang

<p>Without any doubts, China has made a remarkable development in various fields in a last decade, and there are no any signs of that the paces of rapid development happened to China will slow down in the next decades. As a result, every city in China are entering into a boom period in term of urbanization and modernization. No matter it is a super metropolis, for instant, Shanghai, Beijing or it is a small city as Yangzhou, the one chosen for this research thesis, they are all a part of this rapid booming trending and progress. Parametric architecture has been playing a significant role in this booming period: avant-garde forms, incredibly large scale, starchitect such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas etc, and extra economic value added, all these features had made parametric architecture to be considered as the symbol of the rapid development. At same time, the voice of critical on this has never stopped: lack of traditions, absence of “Chineseness”, cities identity damaged caused by parametric architecture. Unfortunately, there seems neither nothing going to stop numerous parametric architecture raised up, nor provide a convincible solution to the issues in the contemporary cites in China.  This thesis explores the conflict between Chinese vernacular manner and parametric architecture, and investigate how the parametric architecture is able to well fit in the Chinese environment context and express Chinese vernacular ideas which needs to be redefined.  It argues the so called ‘Chineseness’ is blur and unclear, or most of people ‘s understanding toward ‘Chineseness’ always stay at the iconic level. It further argue the essences of Chinese vernacular ideas which could be merged into parametric architecture and help to deal with the issues which the contemporary city in China has such as inhumanity scale, lack of green space and public space. The aim is not only to find a way to combine the parametric design and Chinese vernacular ideas harmoniously but also via this combination to solve the issues in Yangzhou which is a representative and typical China contemporary city.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Yunjing Zhang

<p>Without any doubts, China has made a remarkable development in various fields in a last decade, and there are no any signs of that the paces of rapid development happened to China will slow down in the next decades. As a result, every city in China are entering into a boom period in term of urbanization and modernization. No matter it is a super metropolis, for instant, Shanghai, Beijing or it is a small city as Yangzhou, the one chosen for this research thesis, they are all a part of this rapid booming trending and progress. Parametric architecture has been playing a significant role in this booming period: avant-garde forms, incredibly large scale, starchitect such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas etc, and extra economic value added, all these features had made parametric architecture to be considered as the symbol of the rapid development. At same time, the voice of critical on this has never stopped: lack of traditions, absence of “Chineseness”, cities identity damaged caused by parametric architecture. Unfortunately, there seems neither nothing going to stop numerous parametric architecture raised up, nor provide a convincible solution to the issues in the contemporary cites in China.  This thesis explores the conflict between Chinese vernacular manner and parametric architecture, and investigate how the parametric architecture is able to well fit in the Chinese environment context and express Chinese vernacular ideas which needs to be redefined.  It argues the so called ‘Chineseness’ is blur and unclear, or most of people ‘s understanding toward ‘Chineseness’ always stay at the iconic level. It further argue the essences of Chinese vernacular ideas which could be merged into parametric architecture and help to deal with the issues which the contemporary city in China has such as inhumanity scale, lack of green space and public space. The aim is not only to find a way to combine the parametric design and Chinese vernacular ideas harmoniously but also via this combination to solve the issues in Yangzhou which is a representative and typical China contemporary city.</p>


Author(s):  
Olga V. Khavanova ◽  

The second half of the eighteenth century in the lands under the sceptre of the House of Austria was a period of development of a language policy addressing the ethno-linguistic diversity of the monarchy’s subjects. On the one hand, the sphere of use of the German language was becoming wider, embracing more and more segments of administration, education, and culture. On the other hand, the authorities were perfectly aware of the fact that communication in the languages and vernaculars of the nationalities living in the Austrian Monarchy was one of the principal instruments of spreading decrees and announcements from the central and local authorities to the less-educated strata of the population. Consequently, a large-scale reform of primary education was launched, aimed at making the whole population literate, regardless of social status, nationality (mother tongue), or confession. In parallel with the centrally coordinated state policy of education and language-use, subjects-both language experts and amateur polyglots-joined the process of writing grammar books, which were intended to ease communication between the different nationalities of the Habsburg lands. This article considers some examples of such editions with primary attention given to the correlation between private initiative and governmental policies, mechanisms of verifying the textbooks to be published, their content, and their potential readers. This paper demonstrates that for grammar-book authors, it was very important to be integrated into the patronage networks at the court and in administrative bodies and stresses that the Vienna court controlled the process of selection and financing of grammar books to be published depending on their quality and ability to satisfy the aims and goals of state policy.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Hockett

This white paper lays out the guiding vision behind the Green New Deal Resolution proposed to the U.S. Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bill Markey in February of 2019. It explains the senses in which the Green New Deal is 'green' on the one hand, and a new 'New Deal' on the other hand. It also 'makes the case' for a shamelessly ambitious, not a low-ball or slow-walked, Green New Deal agenda. At the core of the paper's argument lies the observation that only a true national mobilization on the scale of those associated with the original New Deal and the Second World War will be up to the task of comprehensively revitalizing the nation's economy, justly growing our middle class, and expeditiously achieving carbon-neutrality within the twelve-year time-frame that climate science tells us we have before reaching an environmental 'tipping point.' But this is actually good news, the paper argues. For, paradoxically, an ambitious Green New Deal also will be the most 'affordable' Green New Deal, in virtue of the enormous productivity, widespread prosperity, and attendant public revenue benefits that large-scale public investment will bring. In effect, the Green New Deal will amount to that very transformative stimulus which the nation has awaited since the crash of 2008 and its debt-deflationary sequel.


Author(s):  
С. Л. Подвальный ◽  
О. А. Сотникова ◽  
Я. А. Золотухина

Постановка задачи. В настоящее время формирование современной комфортной городской среды приобретает особое социально-экономическое значение и выдвигается в число приоритетных государственных масштабных программ. В связи с этим необходимо разработать концепцию благоустройства ключевого общественного пространства, а именно: определить основные и сопутствующие функции данной территории, создать эскизное предложение проекта благоустройства с учетом всех необходимых норм и стандартов, внедрить современные технологии. Результаты. Выполнен эскизный дизайн-проект «Аллеи архитекторов» по ул. Орджоникидзе г. Воронеж, включающий в себя основные элементы по зонированию территории, проектированию акцентных объектов и внедрению инновационных технологий «умного города», позволяющих повысить уровень комфорта горожан. Выводы. Благоустройство населенных мест приобретает особое значение в условиях дискомфорта среды. С выполнением комплекса мероприятий, направленных на благоустройство, и с внедрением современных технологий значительно улучшается экологическое состояние, внешний облик города. Оздоровление и модернизация среды, которая окружает человека в городе, благотворно влияет на психофизическое состояние, что особенно важно в период интенсивного роста городов. Statement of the problem. Currently the formation of the modern comfortable urban environment is gaining a special social and economic value and moving forward in the priorities of state large-scale programs. The purpose of development of the concept of improvement of public space is definition of the main and accompanying functions of this territory, design of the outline offer of the project of improvement considering all necessary norms and standards and implementation of modern technologies. Results. The conceptual project of “Alley of Architects” includes the basic elements of territory zoning, design of accent objects and implementation of technologies of a “smart-city”. These elements allow one to increase the level of comfort of inhabitants. Conclusions. Improvement of the inhabited places is of particular importance in the conditions of discomfort of the environment. Carrying out a complex of the actions directed to gardening and improvement, introducing modern technologies, the ecological condition, the physical appearance of the city considerably improves. Improvement and modernization of the environment which surrounds the person in the city influences a psychophysical state well that especially important during intensive growth of the cities.


Author(s):  
Jochen von Bernstorff

The chapter explores the notion of “community interests” with regard to the global “land-grab” phenomenon. Over the last decade, a dramatic increase of foreign investment in agricultural land could be observed. Bilateral investment treaties protect around 75 per cent of these large-scale land acquisitions, many of which came with associated social problems, such as displaced local populations and negative consequences for food security in Third World countries receiving these large-scale foreign investments. Hence, two potentially conflicting areas of international law are relevant in this context: Economic, social, and cultural rights and the principles of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and “food sovereignty” challenging large-scale investments on the one hand, and specific norms of international economic law stabilizing them on the other. The contribution discusses the usefulness of the concept of “community interests” in cases where the two colliding sets of norms are both considered to protect such interests.


Author(s):  
Paola Sangiorgio ◽  
Alessandra Verardi ◽  
Salvatore Dimatteo ◽  
Anna Spagnoletta ◽  
Stefania Moliterni ◽  
...  

AbstractThe increase in the world population leads to rising demand and consumption of plastic raw materials; only a small percentage of plastics is recovered and recycled, increasing the quantity of waste released into the environment and losing its economic value. The plastics represent a great opportunity in the circular perspective of their reuse and recycling. Research is moving, on the one hand, to implement sustainable systems for plastic waste management and on the other to find new non-fossil-based plastics such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). In this review, we focus our attention on Tenebrio molitor (TM) as a valuable solution for plastic biodegradation and biological recovery of new biopolymers (e.g. PHA) from plastic-producing microorganisms, exploiting its highly diversified gut microbiota. TM’s use for plastic pollution management is controversial. However, TM microbiota is recognised as a source of plastic-degrading microorganisms. TM-based plastic degradation is improved by co-feeding with food loss and waste as a dietary energy source, thus valorising these low-value substrates in a circular economy perspective. TM as a bioreactor is a valid alternative to traditional PHA recovery systems with the advantage of obtaining, in addition to highly pure PHA, protein biomass and rearing waste from which to produce fertilisers, chitin/chitosan, biochar and biodiesel. Finally, we describe the critical aspects of these TM-based approaches, mainly related to TM mass production, eventual food safety problems, possible release of microplastics and lack of dedicated legislation.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 423
Author(s):  
Márk Szalay ◽  
Péter Mátray ◽  
László Toka

The stateless cloud-native design improves the elasticity and reliability of applications running in the cloud. The design decouples the life-cycle of application states from that of application instances; states are written to and read from cloud databases, and deployed close to the application code to ensure low latency bounds on state access. However, the scalability of applications brings the well-known limitations of distributed databases, in which the states are stored. In this paper, we propose a full-fledged state layer that supports the stateless cloud application design. In order to minimize the inter-host communication due to state externalization, we propose, on the one hand, a system design jointly with a data placement algorithm that places functions’ states across the hosts of a data center. On the other hand, we design a dynamic replication module that decides the proper number of copies for each state to ensure a sweet spot in short state-access time and low network traffic. We evaluate the proposed methods across realistic scenarios. We show that our solution yields state-access delays close to the optimal, and ensures fast replica placement decisions in large-scale settings.


Genetics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 165 (4) ◽  
pp. 2269-2282
Author(s):  
D Mester ◽  
Y Ronin ◽  
D Minkov ◽  
E Nevo ◽  
A Korol

Abstract This article is devoted to the problem of ordering in linkage groups with many dozens or even hundreds of markers. The ordering problem belongs to the field of discrete optimization on a set of all possible orders, amounting to n!/2 for n loci; hence it is considered an NP-hard problem. Several authors attempted to employ the methods developed in the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP) for multilocus ordering, using the assumption that for a set of linked loci the true order will be the one that minimizes the total length of the linkage group. A novel, fast, and reliable algorithm developed for the TSP and based on evolution-strategy discrete optimization was applied in this study for multilocus ordering on the basis of pairwise recombination frequencies. The quality of derived maps under various complications (dominant vs. codominant markers, marker misclassification, negative and positive interference, and missing data) was analyzed using simulated data with ∼50-400 markers. High performance of the employed algorithm allows systematic treatment of the problem of verification of the obtained multilocus orders on the basis of computing-intensive bootstrap and/or jackknife approaches for detecting and removing questionable marker scores, thereby stabilizing the resulting maps. Parallel calculation technology can easily be adopted for further acceleration of the proposed algorithm. Real data analysis (on maize chromosome 1 with 230 markers) is provided to illustrate the proposed methodology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 899 ◽  
pp. 173-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronydes Batista Jr. ◽  
Bruna Sene Alves Araújo ◽  
Pedro Ivo Brandão e Melo Franco ◽  
Beatriz Cristina Silvério ◽  
Sandra Cristina Danta ◽  
...  

In view of the constant search for new sources of renewable energy, the particulate agro-industrial waste reuse emerges as an advantageous alternative. However, despite the advantages of using the biomass as an energy source, there is still strong resistance as the large-scale replacement of petroleum products due to the lack of scientifically proven efficient conversion technologies. In this context, the pyrolysis is presented as one of the most widely used thermal decomposition processes. The knowledge of aspects of chemical kinetics, thermodynamics these will, heat and mass transfer, are so important, since influence the quality of the product. This paper presents a kinetic study of slow pyrolysis of coffee grounds waste from dynamic thermogravimetric experiments (TG), using different powder catalysts. The primary thermal decomposition was described by the one-step reaction model, which considers a single global reaction. The kinetic parameters were estimated using nonlinear regression and the differential evolution method. The coffee ground waste was dried at 105°C for 24 hours. The sample in nature was analyzed at different heating rates, being 10, 15, 20, 30 and 50 K/min. In the catalytic pyrolysis, about 5% (w/w) of catalyst were added to the sample, at a heating rate of 30 K/min. The results show that the one-step model does not accurately represent the data of weight loss (TG) and its derivative (DTG), but can do an estimative of the activation energy reaction, and can show the differences caused by the catalysts. Although no one can say anything about the products formed with the addition of the catalyst, it would be necessary to micro-pyrolysis analysis, we can say the influence of the catalyst in the samples, based on the data obtained in thermogravimetric tests.


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