This book provides standards and guidelines for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions and removals in smallholder agricultural systems and comparing options for climate change mitigation based on emission reductions and livelihood trade-offs. Globally, agriculture is directly responsible for about 11% of annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and induces an additional 17% through land use change,…
The Annual Report objectively reflects the year’s developments in terms of politics, the economy, society, culture, the environment, innovation and reform, and describes the problems, challenges and countermeasures in both traditional and new special economic zones. It provides an analysis of China’s special economic zones, including a review of the year’s developments in the form of expe…
This book focuses on China’s urban development. In China, the process of allowing more rural migrants to become registered city residents in urban areas remains stagnant despite its importance to the Chinese government and the existence of a national consensus about it. Cities can compulsorily purchase land from farmers at low or even no costs, and most farmers, whose families have relied on …
This open access book provides methods for the estimation of Biomass Water Equivalent (BEW), an essential step for improving the accuracy of area-wide soil moisture by cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNS). Three techniques are explained in detail: (i) traditional in-situ destructive sampling, (ii) satellite based remote sensing of plant surfaces, and (iii) biomass estimation via the use of the CRN…
This book offers effective, low-cost and user-friendly protocols for the pre-field selection of salt-tolerant mutants in cereal crops. It presents simple methods for measuring soil salinity, including soil sampling and the analysis of water-soluble salts, and describes a detailed, but simple, screening test for salt tolerance in rice, wheat and barley seedlings, which uses hydroponics. The prot…
This book probes into China's economic growth in 2013 and predicts China's development prospects. China’s GDP growth in 2014 continues to slow down, and is expected to be 7.6%, with the CPI stable at a level of 2.5%. With the pressures of structural slowdown, 2014 will be a year of adjustment, and there will be a slowdown in new initiatives to minimize risk. Against a background of policies t…
In this book anisotropic one-dimensional and two-dimensional nanoscale building blocks and their assembly into fascinating and qualitatively new functional structures embracing both hard and soft components are explained. Contributions from leading experts regarding important aspects like synthesis, assembly, properties and applications of the above materials are compiled into a reference book.…
Pop-up shops are temporary stores that “pop up” for a few days or months. They are a new form of retail operations that have gained popularity in the past decade. Retailers and brands of all sizes have implemented pop-up shops – from global and national retail chains, to small independent stores and even e-commerce pure players – that have positioned these initiatives as a marketing & c…
The aim of this book is to highlight the latest findings in Aniridia research. Aniridia, meaning “without iris”, is a rare genetic disorder affecting vision, characterized by the incomplete formation of the iris (the coloured part of the eye that surrounds the black pupil). It may also cause other segments of the eye to be under-developed such as the optic nerve and the macula (the central …
This book presents these important facts: a) The mechanism of anionic polymerization, a more than 50-year challenge in polymer chemistry, has now become better understood; b) Precise synthesis of many polymers with novel architectures (triblock, multi-block, graft, exact graft, comb, cyclic, many armed stars with multi-components, dendrimer-like hyper-branched, and their structural mixed (co)po…