Background Sperm DNA fragmentation is known as an important cause of male infertility. The influence of sperm DNA damage on reproductive potential has been subject of many studies indicating various results and remaining the subject controversial. In this study, we investigated differences of the semen parameters and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) outcome according to sperm DNA fragmen...

In the past two decades, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs China (MARA) has issued a series strict cultivated land protection policies to prevent spread farmland abandonment maintain dynamic balance between quantity quality arable land. However, high-speed economic development, policies, ecological security sustainable development strategies interacting with human activities have brough...

Food Security and Food Sovereignty are two of the most important issues facing Food Policy. Maintaining productive farmland and sustainable farms as well as providing adequate volumes of foodstuffs have led to measures to protect farmland and farm activities in many countries. These include land use planning with agricultural zones and in some jurisdictions legislation to ‘protect’ agriculture ...

Land use planning practices have been economically justified as an efficient means of producing and distributing valuable information relevant to property markets and further reducing the intrinsic uncertainties and transaction costs involved in land development processes. However, although this method of justification, in addition to traditional welfare-economics-based rationales, has been ado...

The aim of this paper is to define and quantify environmental indicators for farmland habitat in Italy. Based on OECD works and recent developments by the Joint Working Party in the area of agrienvironmental indicators, we classify agricultural habitat in three main categories: intensive, semi-natural and uncultivated (natural or man-made) habitats located within, at the border and adjacent of ...

Understanding reproductive performance in ecologically impoverished vs. more sustained anthropogenic habitats is critical to assess population health status and to develop land use and conservation management strategies. We compared resourcebased maternal effects, reproductive performance, and offspring quality in a model migratory passerine bird, the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). We as...

We calculate the exact fragmentation functions for c and b quark fragmentation taking into account the spin orientation of the initial heavy quark in the form of analytical and rather simple expressions. Our calculations show that spin orientation may have an important effect on the fragmentation spectrum. This effect is more striking in the cases of c ?D, D*; c? ? , ? , and ?B , B *.

A common approach to the conservation of farmland biodiversity and the promotion of multifunctional landscapes, particularly in landscapes containing only small remnants of non-crop habitats, has been to maintain landscape heterogeneity and reduce land-use intensity. In contrast, it has recently been shown that devoting specific areas of non-crop habitats to conservation, segregated from high-y...