Balancing ecology and human development has been a long and wide concern. The upper Yangtze River Basin (UYRB) of China has implemented large important ecological restoration projects since the last century. These restoration practices have changed land use patterns within the UYRB, consequently impacting the local carbon cycle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncreased climate variability and extremes are unequivocal with unprecedented impacts on water resources and agriculture production systems. However, little is known about the impacts of climate extremes at the intra-seasonal level which remained largely unexplored. We investigated the coincidence of climate extremes with sensitive crop growth phases of wheat and rice in the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra (IGB) river basins of South Asia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe know little to what extent peer feedback strategies can be applied on a large scale in higher education for complex tasks. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate an online-supported peer feedback module for large-scale use to enhance higher education students' argumentative essay writing performance. To do this, 330 students from five different courses at bachelor and master levels followed the online supported peer feedback module.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were forced to move their teaching completely online. While some seized the opportunity to learn and innovate, others experienced difficulties. This study provides insights into the differences between university teachers during the COVID-19 crisis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSiloed-approaches may fuel the misguided development of hydropower and subsequent target-setting under the sustainable development goals (SDGs). While hydropower development in the Indus basin is vital to ensure energy security (SDG7), it needs to be balanced with water use for fulfilling food (SDG2) and water (SDG6) security. Existing methods to estimate hydropower potential generally focus on: only one class of potential, a methodological advance for either of hydropower siting, sizing, or costing of one site, or the ranking of a portfolio of projects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMountains are the water towers of the world, supplying a substantial part of both natural and anthropogenic water demands. They are highly sensitive and prone to climate change, yet their importance and vulnerability have not been quantified at the global scale. Here we present a global water tower index (WTI), which ranks all water towers in terms of their water-supplying role and the downstream dependence of ecosystems and society.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSafeguarding river ecosystems is a precondition for attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to water and the environment, while rigid implementation of such policies may hamper achievement of food security. River ecosystems provide life-supporting functions that depend on maintaining environmental flow requirements (EFRs). Here we establish gridded process-based estimates of EFRs and their violation through human water withdrawals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe performed a twofold intercomparison of river discharge regulated by dams under multiple meteorological forcings among multiple global hydrological models for a historical period by simulation. Paper II provides an intercomparison of river discharge simulated by five hydrological models under four meteorological forcings. This is the first global multimodel intercomparison study on dam-regulated river flow.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne of the main manifestations of climate change will be increased rainfall variability. How to deal with this in agriculture will be a major societal challenge. In this paper we explore flexibility in land use, through deliberate seasonal adjustments in cropped area, as a specific strategy for coping with rainfall variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrawing upon the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), we developed and tested a conceptual model which integrates both internal personality factors and external contextual factors to determine their associations with motivational factors and entrepreneurial intentions (EIs). We then investigated if the model of EI applies in a developing country, namely Iran. We also set out to identify the most relevant factors for EI within this developing country context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Although routine outcome monitoring (ROM) has been developed and widely used in the course of patient centered outcome research in the Netherlands, so far the technique has hardly ever been used to improve the treatment of individual patients.
Aim: To describe how a rom technique based on the principles of shared decision-making (SDM) was developed and evaluated at the Center for Body, Mind and Health at GGz Breburg, a specialised mental health institution in the Netherlands.
Method: We have developed a conceptual model for SDM that involves patient participation and the use of evidence-based decision-aids with cut-off scores.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
March 2014
Humans directly change the dynamics of the water cycle through dams constructed for water storage, and through water withdrawals for industrial, agricultural, or domestic purposes. Climate change is expected to additionally affect water supply and demand. Here, analyses of climate change and direct human impacts on the terrestrial water cycle are presented and compared using a multimodel approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Indian subcontinent faces a population increase from 1.6 billion in 2000 towards 2 billion around 2050. Therefore, expansion of agricultural area combined with increases in productivity will be necessary to produce the food needed in the future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHimalayan headwaters supply large quantities of runoff derived from snowmelt and monsoon rainfall to the Ganges River. Actual snowmelt contribution to discharge in the Ganges remains conjectural under both present and future climatic conditions. As snowmelt is likely to be perturbed through climatic warming, four hydrological models, VIC, JULES, LPJmL and SWAT, appropriate for coupling with regional climate models, were used to provide a baseline estimate of snowmelt contribution to flow at seasonal and annual timescales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Auditory hallucinations are generally considered to be a psychotic symptom. However, they do occur without other psychotic symptoms in a substantive number of cases in the general population and can cause a lot of individual distress because of the supposed association with schizophrenia. We describe a case of nonpsychotic auditory hallucinations occurring in the context of migraine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommun Agric Appl Biol Sci
July 2010
Interdisciplinary thinking as a skill appears to be of value to higher education students and those in employment. This idea is explored with reference to the agricultural and life sciences. The need for further understanding of the development of interdisciplinary thinking is acknowledged.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchools are held more responsible for evaluating, quality assuring and improving their student assessments. Teachers' lack of understanding of new, competence-based assessments as well as the lack of key stakeholders' involvement, hamper effective and efficient self-evaluations by teachers of innovative, competence-based assessments (CBAs). While evaluating two CBAs in Agricultural Vocational Education and Training institutions, two interventions in the evaluation process aimed to tackle these problems were examined: (1) starting with explicating the CBA in the teacher team using a concrete explication format and (2) qualitatively involving key stakeholders (i.
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