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Extrapolation Domain Analysis
Extrapolation domain analysis (EDA) is a methodology for identifying geographical areas that seem suitable for adoption of innovative ecosystem management practices on the basis of sites exhibiting similarity in conditions such as climatic, land use and socioeconomic indicators. Whilst it has been applied to water research projects in nine pilot basins, the concept is generic and can be applied to any project where accelerating change being considered as a central development objective. The outputs of the method thus far have been used to quantify the global economic impact of implementing particular innovations together with its effect on water resources. The research has stimulated members of several of the Challenge Program for Water and Food projects to explore potential areas for scaling out. Such is the case of the Quesungual agroforestry system in Honduras, which is moving towards new areas in parallel with areas identified by the EDA method. EDA is a combined approach that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Methodology
In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal. In the context of research, this goal is usually to discover new knowledge or to verify pre-existing knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting this data. The study of methods involves a detailed description and analysis of these processes. It includes evaluative aspects by comparing different methods to assess their advantages and disadvantages relative to different research goals and situations. This way, a methodology can help make the research process efficient and reliable by guiding researchers on which method to employ at each step. These descriptions and evaluations of methods often depend on philosophical background ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecosystem Management
Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystems function and ecosystem service, services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs. Although Indigenous peoples, indigenous communities have employed sustainable ecosystem management approaches for millennia, ecosystem management emerged formally as a concept in the 1990s from a growing appreciation of the complexity of ecosystems, as well as humans' reliance and influence on natural systems (e.g., Disturbance (ecology), disturbance, ecological resilience). Building upon traditional natural resource management, ecosystem management integrates ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional knowledge and priorities through diverse stakeholder participation. In contrast to command and control approaches to natural resource management, which often lead to declines in ecological resilience, ecosystem management is a holistic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Land Use
Land use involves the management and modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as settlements and semi-natural habitats such as arable fields, pastures, and managed woods. Land use by humans has a long history, first emerging more than 10,000 years ago. It has been defined as "the purposes and activities through which people interact with land and terrestrial ecosystems" and as "the total of arrangements, activities, and inputs that people undertake in a certain land type." Land use is one of the most important drivers of global environmental change. History Human tribes since prehistory have segregated land into territories to control the use of land. Today, the total arable land is 10.7% of the land surface, with 1.3% being permanent cropland. Regulation Land use practices vary considerably across the world. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization Water Development Division explains that "Land use concerns the produ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socioeconomic
Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their local or regional economy, or the global economy. Overview “Socioeconomics” is sometimes used as an umbrella term for various areas of inquiry. The term “social economics” may refer broadly to the "use of economics in the study of society". More narrowly, contemporary practice considers behavioral interactions of individuals and groups through social capital and social "markets" (not excluding, for example, sorting by marriage) and the formation of social norms. In the relation of economics to social values. A distinct supplemental usage describes social economics as "a discipline studying the reciprocal relationship between economic science on the one hand and social philosophy, ethics, and human dignity on the other" toward social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Impact Evaluation
Impact evaluation assesses the changes that can be attributed to a particular intervention, such as a project, program or policy, both the intended ones, as well as ideally the unintended ones. In contrast to outcome monitoring, which examines whether targets have been achieved, impact evaluation is structured to answer the question: how would outcomes such as participants' well-being have changed if the intervention had not been undertaken? This involves counterfactual analysis, that is, "a comparison between what actually happened and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention." Impact evaluations seek to answer cause-and-effect questions. In other words, they look for the changes in outcome that are directly attributable to a program. Impact evaluation helps people answer key questions for evidence-based policy making: what works, what doesn't, where, why and for how much? It has received increasing attention in policy making in recent years in the context of bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Water Resources
Water resources are natural resources of water that are potentially useful for humans, for example as a source of drinking water supply or irrigation water. 97% of the water on the Earth is salt water and only three percent is fresh water; slightly over two thirds of this is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. The remaining unfrozen freshwater is found mainly as groundwater, with only a small fraction present above ground or in the air. Natural sources of fresh water include surface water, under river flow, groundwater and frozen water. Artificial sources of fresh water can include treated wastewater (wastewater reuse) and desalinated seawater. Human uses of water resources include agricultural, industrial, household, recreational and environmental activities. Water resources are under threat from water scarcity, water pollution, water conflict and climate change. Fresh water is a renewable resource, yet the world's supply of groundwater is steadily decreasing, with deplet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agroforestry
Agroforestry is a land use management system in which trees or shrubs are grown around or among crops or pastureland. Trees produce a wide range of useful and marketable products from fruits/nuts, medicines, wood products, etc. This intentional combination of agriculture and forestry has multiple benefits, such as greatly enhanced yields from staple food crops, enhanced farmer livelihoods from income generation, increased biodiversity, improved soil structure and health, reduced erosion, and carbon sequestration. Agroforestry practices are highly beneficial in the tropics, especially in subsistence smallholdings in sub-Saharan Africa and have been found to be beneficial in Europe and the United States. Agroforestry shares principles with intercropping but can also involve much more complex multi-strata agroforests containing hundreds of species. Agroforestry can also utilise nitrogen-fixing plants such as legumes to restore soil nitrogen fertility. The nitrogen-fixing plants can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Honduras
Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Fonseca, and to the north by the Gulf of Honduras, a large inlet of the Caribbean Sea. Its capital and largest city is Tegucigalpa. Honduras was home to several important Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya, before the Spanish Colonization in the sixteenth century. The Spanish introduced Catholicism and the now predominant Spanish language, along with numerous customs that have blended with the indigenous culture. Honduras became independent in 1821 and has since been a republic, although it has consistently endured much social strife and political instability, and remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. In 1960, the northern part of what was the Mosquito Coast was transferred from Nicara ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spatial Analysis
Spatial analysis or spatial statistics includes any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques, many still in their early development, using different analytic approaches and applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data or transcriptomics data. Complex issues arise in spatial analysis, many of which are neither clearly defined nor completely resolved, but form the basis for current research. The most fundamental of these is the problem of defining the spatial location of the entities being studied. Classification of the techniques of spatial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis
Participatory impact pathways analysis (PIPA) is a project management approach in which the participants in a project (project and program are used synonymously from now on), including project staff, key stakeholders, and the ultimate beneficiaries, together co-construct their program theory. Overview The PIPA theory describes plausible impact pathways by which project outputs are used by others to achieve a chain of outcomes leading to a contribution to eventual impact on social, environmental or economic conditions. Impact pathways are a type of logic model, that is, they constitute a model that describes the logic of what the project will do, is doing, or what it did. PIPA helps workshop participants identify, discuss, and write down assumptions and theories about how the project activities and outputs could contribute to project goals. The description of these assumptions and theories is a description of the project’s impact pathways. PIPA has helped workshop participants ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bayesian Probability
Bayesian probability is an Probability interpretations, interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequentist probability, frequency or propensity probability, propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of propositional logic that enables reasoning with Hypothesis, hypotheses; that is, with propositions whose truth value, truth or falsity is unknown. In the Bayesian view, a probability is assigned to a hypothesis, whereas under frequentist inference, a hypothesis is typically tested without being assigned a probability. Bayesian probability belongs to the category of evidential probabilities; to evaluate the probability of a hypothesis, the Bayesian probabilist specifies a prior probability. This, in turn, is then updated to a posterior probability in the light of new, re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecosystems
An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the system through photosynthesis and is incorporated into plant tissue. By feeding on plants and on one another, animals play an important role in the movement of matter and energy through the system. They also influence the quantity of plant and microbial biomass present. By breaking down dead organic matter, decomposers release carbon back to the atmosphere and facilitate nutrient cycling by converting nutrients stored in dead biomass back to a form that can be readily used by plants and microbes. Ecosystems are controlled by external and internal factors. External factors such as climate, parent material which forms the soil and topography, control the overall structure of an ecosystem but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem. Interna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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