Accurate and reliable on-farm protocols are essential in sheep welfare evaluation. However, protocols with a high number of measures are demanding in terms of time. The aim of this trial was to use a few already validated, reliable, feasible, rapid and non-invasive animal-based indicators to evaluate and compare welfare on dairy and mixed purpose sheep farms. Indicators included prevalence of leanness, fleece condition, fleece cleanliness, skin lesions, tail docking, lameness, hoof overgrowth and mastitis. Farmers were asked to rank the relevance of the animal welfare indicators. Nine farms with dairy and nine farms with dual-purpose breeds were tested. The relevance given by eighteen farmers was affected by the type of indicators. Farmers scored mastitis as the most relevant welfare indicator, followed by leanness and lameness. The least relevant indicator was docked tail. The prevalence of poor fleece condition was lower in dairy sheep, whereas dual-purpose farms had higher prevalences of tail-docked animals. Farms showing a higher prevalence of skin lesions had animals with lower body condition and higher longevity. Hoof overgrowth was positively correlated with fleece dirtiness. No differences between dairy and dual-purpose farms were found in terms of the final score, which ranged from 33 (best welfare score) to 187 (worst welfare score). The final score was highly variable among farms. Identification of indicators showing higher prevalences allow the farmers to identify the main areas for intervention at farm level.

Despite its importance little is known about the attitudes of different stakeholder categories towards issues that impact the welfare of sheep. This study determined the relevance attributed by various stakeholders to different sheep welfare indicators and assessed which demographic characteristics can influence their scores. Data were collected through a questionnaire presented on paper face-to-face to 15 sheep farmers in Italy during farm visits in June and July 2020 and the same questionnaire was transferred online to a Google Form and an announcement was sent by email and on social platforms to consumers, with a total of 311 respondents completed the questionnaire. The survey was composed of two parts. In the first part respondents were asked to declare their demographic characteristics. In the second part they rated the relevance attributed to eleven indicators of sheep welfare (eight animal-based: leanness, fleece condition, fleece cleanliness, skin lesions, tail docking, lameness, hoof overgrowth, occurrence of mastitis; and three resource-based: insufficient clean drinking water availability, thermal discomfort, access to pasture) using a ten-point Likert scale. An ordinal logistic regression descending function with stepwise selection was used to analyze the effects within demographic data and the distribution of the Likert scale for each indicator. The number of respondents (n = 311) was quite small, nevertheless, the differences that are reported give some guidance on the relative importance accorded to each of these groups of stakeholders to each of the welfare indicators. Female respondents gave higher relevance to most of the indicators compared with male respondents (P<0.05), whereas respondents with a lower education level gave more relevance to four out of the eleven welfare indicators compared with stakeholders with a higher education level (P<0.05). As for respondent categories, non-farmer experts attributed more relevance to lameness, whereas farmers gave a lower relevance to tail docking, while expressing a higher level of concern for leanness compared with the other categories (P<0.05). Finally, more frequent consumers of sheep products considered leanness to be most important (P<0.05). No significant difference was found based on the nationality or the work declared. This study provides information about how different stakeholder categories perceive different aspects of sheep welfare and whether this perception is affected by demographic characteristics, thus promoting informed dialogue between society and the scientific community about the relevance to be attributed to different sheep welfare indicators.

International audience

According to a new urban paradigm using new innovative systems like crating ubiquitous city with smart convergent systems is a way to solve urban problems. The ubiquitous city is a future city in which physical spaces and electronic spaces are convergent. In terms of structural view ubiquitous city consists of space, ICT, and human. This research method is applied and descriptive analytic one. By reviewing the literature on 15 aspects and 77 indices are gathered and selected. Required data for research gathered through field study. Research result indicates that the distribution of indicators of Ubiquitous city in Tehran metropolitan is very inappropriate. The most significant shortage (More than 50 %) in Tehran metropolitan are in U-Health and care U-Governance, U-culture, and sports, U-education, U-housing, U-transportation, infrastructure, citizens, trade and finance aspects. In turn, U-facilities, U-environment, U-energy network, and U-water network are the only aspects that the distribution of indicators (More than 50 %) are appropriate. In general, dimensional classification showed that 13.33 percent of the dimensions were in an excellent condition, 13.33 percent in good condition, 20 percent in moderate condition, 40 percent in poor condition and 13.33 percent in deplorable condition. The existence of indicators also showed that 33.76 percent of the index is not available at all85% of the indicators are incomplete, and only 23.37% of the indicators are fully exhaustive — finally, the priority of indicators propose to the development of U-city in Tehran metropolis. the results of this research applicable for furthor transformation of Tehran to ubiquitous city. <link href="moz-extension://e82f9c05-bf9c-4e25-87b0-684d37ab5915/skin/s3gt_tooltip_mini.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" > #s3gt_translate_tooltip_mini { display: none !important; }

Introduction In the modern world, there is interdependence between the economies of different countries and it is difficult to find a country that has a closed economy. In other words, all the economies of the world are interconnected, but the degree of openness of the economy varies from country to country. One of the ways to reach global markets in transition countries is to develop the export of non-oil products, especially agricultural products, which cannot be achieved without considering the market structure of exportable commodities. Due to the high share of the country in the production of this product versus its small share in the export of this product and on the other hand the lack of comprehensive research on determining appropriate target markets and active presence in it, the present study seeks to examine the comparative advantage , The structure of the export market and finally the prioritization of the target countries of Iranian tomato export using numerical taxonomy (by prioritizing the target countries of Iran based on a set of indicators) to provide scientific solutions to producers of this product to identify and select the appropriate target market.Materials and Methods Considering the high potential of the country in the field of tomato production and export, the present study was conducted with the aim of examining the comparative advantage, determining the structure of the export market and prioritizing the export target markets of this product in Iran. The study period of this research is 2001-2018. For this purpose, the present study has examined the business model and structure of the export market of tomatoes in Iran and the world using the revealed comparative advantage, symmetric revealed comparative advantage, concentration ratios and Herfindahl-Hirschman index. After introducing the indicators of comparative advantage, the market structure index will be examined. Market structure reflects the organizational characteristics of the market, including the concentration of sellers, buyers' concentration, entry conditions and the degree of homogeneity of goods, which can be identified by identifying the nature of pricing, market competition and market type between competition and complete monopoly. Then, in order to prioritize the target markets of Iranian tomatoes, the method of numerical taxonomy analysis was used, which can be used to rank the regions in terms of comparative advantages and potentials and capacities. In this method, first each set is transformed into a homogeneous set based on the desired indicators and then prioritization will be done based on the expressed indicators.Results and Discussion The study of tomato export trends in recent years shows that there is a growth in the export value of this product, but in contrast to the export advantage of Iranian tomatoes during the period under review has been accompanied by many fluctuations and this indicates a competitive risk for tomato exporters in the country. Therefore, adopting policies for permanent monitoring and policy-making to improve the level of competitiveness of Iranian exporters, such as raising the quality of packaging, advertising to introduce the product in new and developed markets, as well as setting preferential tariffs with other countries seems necessary. The study of the structure of the Iranian tomato market showed that during the period under review, the structure of the Iranian tomato export market was not diverse and focused on a few specific countries, which caused instability and a decrease in foreign currency income from tomato exports. The bargaining power of Iran in the world market of this product has decreased, which has ultimately been to the detriment of Iran and the benefit of importing countries. Therefore, it is recommended in the field of trade of this product by identifying new and emerging export target markets and shipping commodities to these countries, as well as increasing the number of export target markets and bringing Iran's export market closer to a competitive state, to prevent Iran's tomato exports to concentrate on a few limited and traditional markets (dominant firm).Conclusion In this study, using the method of numerical taxonomy analysis as an efficient method, we tried to identify Iran's export target markets during the period 2001-2009. Finally, according to the ten indicators of market attractiveness, potential target markets for future exports of Iranian tomatoes were selected. The results of prioritizing the target markets of Iranian tomatoes showed that out of 25 countries importing Iranian tomatoes, 23 countries were among the target markets for exporting Iranian tomatoes. Among the major actual markets of Iranian tomatoes, which account for the largest imports of this product from Iran, only 4 countries, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, UAE and Armenia are among the 10 countries with high priority, and the rest of the importers of tomatoes from Iran is considered as a target market with low priority. Therefore, in the export of tomatoes, a policy should be adopted that shifts the main focus to high-priority countries to penetrate them with full awareness of all the conditions of the target markets, especially the tastes of customers.

The application of enzyme-inorganic hybrid nanoflowers in time-temperature indicators (TTIs) was studied for the first time. Lipase@Cu₃(PO₄)₂ hybrid nanoflowers were prepared by the interaction between lipase and copper ions. Compared with free lipase, the activity of lipase in the nanoflowers was increased by 137%, and the storage stability was also improved significantly. Based on the enzymatic reaction between lipase and glycerol triacetate, six TTI prototypes with different concentrations of lipase@Cu₃(PO₄)₂ hybrid nanoflowers were investigated. The color of the six TTIs changed from purple to yellow, and finally to green, and the activation energies were 46.86 kJ/mol, 51.17 kJ/mol, 54.99 kJ/mol, 60.00 kJ/mol, 62.17 kJ/mol, and 65.63 kJ/mol, respectively. The shelf life of TTIs can be determined by changing the ratio of lipase@Cu₃(PO₄)₂ hybrid nanoflowers to glycerol triacetate, therefore the TTIs can be easily applied to real-time safety evaluation of many perishable foods.

[Purpose/Significance] There are many evaluation indicators and methods for journal evaluation, and it is of great significance to study the importance of evaluation indicators of journals. This paper proposed an analysis framework for "post-event" analysis of the importance or weight of evaluation indicators. [Method/Process] This paper divides the journal evaluation indicators into "before" importance and "after" importance, and focuses on the "after" importance, that is, the determination of key indicators after objective cluster analysis. Taking the bibliometric indicators of JCR 2019 economics journals as the research object, K-means clustering was first used to obtain the classification of evaluation results, and then the key indicators of journal evaluation were calculated based on principal component analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis, and the importance of each indicator was analyzed. Starting from the objective results and the meaning of the indicators themselves, this study expounded the reasons why indicators are important. [Results/Conclusions] Compared with the importance of "before", the importance of "after the fact" is to determine the evaluation results first, without involving weights, and completely based on data evaluation. There is relatively little controversy in the selection of methods. The indicator is more scientific and objective; the use of multi-factor evaluation can comprehensively reflect the common influence of each variable, and the use of the "dimension reduction" idea can better retain the information of the original variables and reduce the multicollinearity of the evaluation indicator; K-means cluster analysis methods, both the PLS-DA and PLS-DA models, are capable of evaluating and classifying journals. According to the results of PLS-DA, the VIP value of five indicators is greater than 1; the three most important indicators that affect the evaluation results of journals obtained by the PLS-DA method are the journal impact factor(IF), the other citation IF and the five-year IF, and the meaning of the indicators is the IF of other citations and the five-year IF make up for the shortcomings of the IF; the importance of the journal IF, the IF of other citations and the five-year IF is not much different, and the importance of the journal IF is relatively greater. In the quantitative evaluation of journals, it is necessary to use multi-index evaluation to make the evaluation more comprehensive and scientific; PLS-DA has a good effect on general journals, but the better journals have a general effect, and cannot effectively distinguish Class A journals.

International audience

More diversified crop rotations are a key factor in reducing weed, disease and pest pressure while reducing the use of phytosanitary products. The increase in available data calls for the development of new methods and indicators to characterize crop rotations. This paper presents an application of network analysis to assess the diversity of crop rotations from the Land Parcel Identification System, which now provides field boundaries and type of crops grown in a given year for farmers receiving subsidies from the European Common Agricultural Policy. Different indicators are presented to compare the diversity of crop rotations for the 22 regions of mainland France (corresponding to the boundaries of former administrative regions) and the influence of some methodological choices are discussed. Using LPIS data, previous-following crop pairs have been identified for two thirds of the French fields for three crop successions (from 2017 to 2018, from 2018 to 2019 and from 2019 to 2020). These data were used to build crop rotation networks for each region. Crop rotations were simulated from those networks in order to estimate the return time of soft winter wheat, which is the most cultivated crop in the country. Crop rotation networks were similar between the three crop successions compared, but differed among regions. Ignoring the most uncommon previous-following crop pairs, the mean number of precedents per crop ranged from three to nine depending on the region. The estimated return times for winter wheat increase when taking into account grasslands in crop rotation networks, but in any case the use of phytosanitary products was negatively correlated with the return time. The methodology developed in this article provides some initial guidelines for developing relevant agronomic indicators from crop rotation network analysis. It has been shown that the estimated return time could be an indicator of the intensity of use of phytosanitary products, and could therefore be used to guide public policies aimed at reducing the use of these products.

In a context of marine biodiversity erosion, the need to better understand the effects of overfishing stands out. New genetic techniques such as environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding have emerged and allow the detection of a wider range of species compared to conventional methods, but still fall short of providing reliable abundance estimations and subsequent ecological indicators. In this paper, we propose a combination of metabarcoding and quantitative polymerase chain reaction to obtain the quantity of eDNA molecules per species. This method was used inside and outside six no-take Mediterranean marine reserves to measure the effect of the protection on fish species and build a new indicator. Even if the total quantity of fish eDNA molecules was not different between the inside and outside of the reserves, we detected that cryptobenthic fish eDNA was significantly associated to the outside of reserves. Based on this observation, we propose a novel ecological indicator, the Demerso-pelagic to Benthic fish eDNA Ratio (DeBRa), taking advantage of the eDNA capacity to detect cryptobenthic reef fishes which are often missed by classical surveys. The DeBRa was significantly higher inside reserves, reflecting a higher relative quantity of eDNA molecules belonging to pelagic and demersal fishes under protection against fishing, therefore it appears to be a reliable eDNA-based indicator of human pressure. Furthermore, the DeBRa was not sensitive to habitat or environmental variations and does not require a complete reference database of eDNA sequences since it can rely on sequences assigned at the genus or family scale if possible and necessary.