A method for extracting plant roots from soil which facilitates rapid sample processing without compromising measurement accuracy

This study evaluates a novel method for extracting roots from soil samples and applies it to estimate standing crop root mass (+/- confidence intervals) in an eastern Amazon rainforest. Roots were manually extracted from soil cores over a period of 40 min, which was split into 10 min time intervals. The pattern of cumulative extraction over time was used to predict root extraction beyond 40 min. A maximum-likelihood approach was used to calculate confidence intervals. The temporal prediction method added 21-32% to initial estimates of standing crop root mass. According to predictions, complete manual root extraction from 18 samples would have taken c. 239 h, compared with 12 h using the prediction method. Uncertainties (percentage difference between mean, and 10th and 90th percentiles) introduced by the prediction method were small (12-15%), compared with uncertainties caused by spatial variation in root mass (72-191%, for nine samples per plot surveyed). This method provides a way of increasing the number of root samples processed per unit time, without compromising measurement accuracy.     

Of cows and men: Nationalism and Australian cow making

This article explores why cows were identified as Australian in a public debate over the treatment of cattle in Indonesian abattoirs. Using a discursive approach applied to data extracted from media coverage, the article traces the debate, beginning with the ways Australian‐ness was constructed before moving on to consider the implications of this construction in relation to nationalism and rights. The article argues that making the cows Australian had two functions. By being treated as autochthonous they were presumed to hold a certain set of rights which justified interference in practices occurring in an independent sovereign nation. Second, the nationalism implicit in the rendering of animals as Australian functioned to contrast Australia's ‘civilisation’ with Indonesian (and Islam's) ‘barbarism’, allowing Australia to re‐assert a sense of itself as humanitarian. This was particularly relevant in a context where that humanity was in question due to Australia's treatment of asylum seekers.     

How to ‘catch’ floating populations? Research and the fixing of migration in space and time

Abstract

The recent ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences suggests that research always fixes mobility somehow in time and space, in order to understand it. Migration, being a form of mobility, has to be fixed on certain times and spaces in order to make it possible to define and research it. Being a geographer, I build on this insight in the first part of the article to re-read the critiques on post-war methodological nationalism. Reflecting on my own past research practice, I argue in the second part that leaving behind the methodological nationalism paradigm does not mean leaving behind the necessity to fix migration in time and space, on either the ontological or the practical methodological level. New ways of fixing are chosen and, out of recurring ontological and methodological choices, new migration stereotypes are developing such as what might be called ‘methodological ruralism’ in the case of Romanian migration.     

The zooplankton: its community structure,food and feeding,and role in the ecosystem of Lake Vechten

The structure, feeding and metabolism of the filterfeeders community of Lake Vechten (The Netherlands) were investigated for seven years in relation to the functioning of the lake's ecosystem. The ¹⁴C-technique used in the grazing and assimilation study is discussed in detail with a critical analysis of the methodological errors.The three major species which contributed to the annual density, biomass and grazing maxima in spring are: Bosmina longirostris, Daphnia spp. and Eudiaptomus gracilis. The rise in grazing pressure in recent years, particularly in May, was accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the seston (<33 µm) biomass, and in increase of inedible algae, especially Ceratium hirudinella, in late summer. The means of daily grazing ranged from 3% in March to 34% in June. The mean annual ratio ingestion: phytoplankton production varied from 70 to 230%. The specific filtering rate, SFR (ml · day^–1 · mg^–1 · zoop · C), was related directly to water temperature but inversely to the food concentrations.The main errors in the ingestion and assimilation rates were related to the leaching of the isotope from the animals in the preservation fluid. The loss of tracer was 42 and 26%, respectively, for the two rates.In spring, the food removed by the grazers per day was equivalent to 125–400% of the daily primary production. This caused a sharp decrease in the seston concentrations and a recurring clear water phase because of a sharp increase in the Secchi depth. The zooplankton assimilatory removal of carbon and the sedimentation loss rates to the hypolimnion exceeded the primary production rates. The inconsistencies in the carbon budget are possibly due to our lack of knowledge of the horizontal transport of material from the littoral, bacteria as an alternative food source for zooplankton, and the DOC dynamics.The grazers' activity as SFR in deep, stratifying lakes like Vechten is 3 to 4 times that in the shallow, mixed and more eutrophic Dutch lakes. In the former category of lakes the crustacean herbivores serve as an important link in the food chain in the limnetic region.     

Zooplankton grazing methods using radioactive tracers: Technical problems

Some of the technical problems specific to the application of radiotracer techniques for measuring grazing of zooplankton are highlighted and, in some cases, the corrective measures suggested.The major drawbacks of measuring zooplankton grazing in the laboratory, for studying the role of zooplankton in nature, namely, changes in water temperature and light and heavy mortality of some cladocerans, are overcome by the use ofin situ grazing chambers. However, at present there are no suitable techniques available to measure short-term assimilation rates which usually suffer from the respiratory loss during the experiment of the assimilated radiotracer.In the ecosystem research in which zooplankton grazing is an integral part of the studies, the radiotracer food manufactured fromin situ lake seston is preferred to labelled monoculture of algae, bacteria or yeast. The specific activities of the different tracer components and size fractions of the seston comprising the tracer may considerably differ in short-term labelling. On the other hand, long labelling periods,i.e. exceeding a day for example, may lead to shifts in size spectra of and composition of the different phytoplankton species. Changes during the incubation in the size spectra of the tracerfood are probably of greater importance than those in species composition, especially because a size-selective feeding may often exist.Simultaneous use of different radiotracers for labelling phytoplankton and bacteria or for mixtures of algae that differ in sizes offers some promising applications. More work in this field is needed, particularly because of the overlapping energy spectra of the radiotracers, and differential loss rates of these tracers from the preserved animals before the radioactivity counting. Such losses of the tracer from the experimental animals may lead to significant errors, especially in the short-term grazing measurements. This problem can be, nevertheless, prevented to a large extent by a rapid freeze-drying of the animals immediately on concluding the experiment.Self absorption may be a problem in radioactivity counting, more so if the animals are large. Use of sample oxidizers offers a good solution if the tracer can be trapped in its oxidized, gaseous form (e.g. ¹⁴CO₂) before further processing for counting. Modern solubilizing agents, like Soluene 350, with their relatively high water-holding capacity are quite effective in dissolving the different tissues, except the exoskeletal material.dedicated to Prof. H.F. Linskens, chairman of the Managing Committee of the Limnological Institute, in honour of his 65th birthday.     

Charles Mills for and against liberalism

Charles Mills both severely criticizes and reluctantly accepts liberal political theory’s approach to race and racism. In this new book, he develops contract theory’s understanding of race and racism in the effort to resuscitate liberalism from the racist deathbed on which it lies. To do this he must wrestle with political forms of black resistance that comport uneasily with liberalism, at best: nationalism notably, but also other types of racially oriented collective subjectivity, for example, identity politics. The book represents a major advance in Mills’s thought, but his work remains uneasy about the instability of race and the flexibility of racism.     

Definitions of national identity,nationalism and ethnicity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1990s

This article examines the major political debates in post-Soviet Azerbaijan vis à vis the very assumptions of individual autonomy, equality, national culture and citizenship, and universalism upon which modern nation-states have historically been based. The information presented in this article is based on personal interviews conducted with the leading and influential members of the Azerbaijani political elite in 1998. The interviews were based on two broad themes. The first relates to the perceptions of the Soviet period and on what grounds the Azerbaijanis differentiate the new Republic of Azerbaijan from the former Soviet Azerbaijan. The second relates to their perceptions of both the outside world and themselves with regards to differing understandings of nationalism, national culture, and national/ethnic or local identities. The study of the Azerbaijani example of post-Soviet political culture may help us to understand the dynamics of nation-building on the basis of the major political debates and of conflicting national, ethnic and local identities in Azerbaijan.     

Patriotic Appetites and Gnawing Hungers: Food and the Paradox of Nation-building in Uzbekistan

Nations reverberate with the conundrums of unity and difference. Studies of food provide an effective way to understand this paradox as food indexes both rituals of the nation as national cuisine yet links with myriad and variable performances as it is grown, cooked and eaten. National foods enhance ethnic nationality in newly independent, increasingly authoritarian Uzbekistan where the focus is on national cuisine in part because of deprivation, rather than abundance. National cuisine is vulnerable to differences within a nation, because in the shared and embodied practices surrounding food, people make emotion-based evaluations of the nation-state. Uzbek governmental policies result in poverty, limited food production, little global food, and repression of pure Islamic practices, regions, and minority ethnic groups.     

Immigrants and the Basque nation: diversity as a new marker of identity

Basque nationalism is singled out in the literature as a case of minority nationalism that faces an ongoing struggle between those in support of a liberal-inclusive definition of the nation and those favouring an exclusive-racialist one. Nevertheless, Basque nationalist parties have been welcoming of immigration and have legislated to create a regional citizenship based on residence rather than ethnicity. This article argues that, at least in part, the ‘positive’ response of Basque nationalists to the immigration wave that began in the early 2000s is an attempt to strengthen national solidarity by contrasting Basque values of openness and tolerance against the restrictive nature of the reforms to the immigration law in Spain that were initiated in 2000. This argument challenges the notion that sub-state nationalists are hostile to immigration because of the threat diversity poses to the nationalist project.     

Alt-Right with the Hindu-right: long-distance nationalism and the perfection of Hindutva

In the 2016 US Presidential election, a small but vocal group of Hindu supporters of Donald Trump drew international media attention in India and the US for their political mobilizing for the Republican candidate. In this paper, I examine the political campaigns of “Hindus for Trump” and its affiliated groups to analyse the diverse ways in which these diasporic activists engage in and advance a number of distinct nationalist projects simultaneously. Tracing links between the “Hindus for Trump” platform, Hindutva ideology that seeks to redefine India as a Hindu nation, and the racist “alt-right” movement that forms the political base for President Trump in the US, I argue these diasporic activists enact a synergetic nationalism that has productive effects in both “home” and “host” countries. The result is the perfection of Hindutva on the global stage through the very activities that legitimize the isolationist xenophobia associated with the Trump administration.