Identifying Where REDD+ Financially Out-Competes Oil Palm in Floodplain Landscapes Using a Fine-Scale Approach.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) aims to avoid forest conversion to alternative land-uses through financial incentives. Oil-palm has high opportunity costs, which according to current literature questions the financial competitiveness of REDD+ in tropical lowlands. To understand this more, we undertook regional fine-scale and coarse-scale analyses (through carbon mapping and economic modelling) to assess the financial viability of REDD+ in safeguarding unprotected forest (30,173 ha) in the Lower Kinabatangan floodplain in Malaysian Borneo.

Synergies for improving oil palm production and forest conservation in floodplain landscapes.

Lowland tropical forests are increasingly threatened with conversion to oil palm as global demand and high profit drives crop expansion throughout the world's tropical regions. Yet, landscapes are not homogeneous and regional constraints dictate land suitability for this crop. We conducted a regional study to investigate spatial and economic components of forest conversion to oil palm within a tropical floodplain in the Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

An electrostatic shielding-based coupled electrodialysis/electrodeionization process for removal of cobalt ions from aqueous solutions.

Electrode graphite powder beds were interposed between anode and cathode as intermediate electrodes inside an electrolytic setup. Due to electrostatic shielding they eliminate the applied electric field and therefore stop the electromigration of ions within their mass. It was found that the intermediate electrodes can act as ionic current sinks-ion concentrating compartments and therefore cause a new type of a membrane-less electrodialysis/electrodeionization process.

Mechanical behaviour of pine wood chemically modified with a homologous series of linear chain carboxylic acid anhydrides.

The work described in this paper demonstrated that acetylation of pine wood up to 16.4 weight percent gain has a positive effect on the compression strength. Higher modification levels resulted in a reduction of the compression strength of wood, compared to the untreated wood.

Kernel-based self-organized maps trained with supervised bias for gene expression data analysis.

Self-Organized Maps (SOMs) are a popular approach for analyzing genome-wide expression data. However, most SOM based approaches ignore prior knowledge about functional gene categories. Also, Self Organized Map (SOM) based approaches usually develop topographic maps with disjoint and uniform activation regions that correspond to a hard clustering of the patterns at their nodes.