Agricultural drainage ditches are ubiquitous features in lowland agricultural landscapes, built primarily to facilitate land drainage, irrigate agricultural crops and alleviate flood risk. Most drainage ditches are considered artificial waterbodies and are not typically included in routine monitoring programmes, and as a result the faunal and floral communities they support are poorly quantified. This paper characterises the aquatic macroinvertebrate diversity (alpha, beta and gamma) of agricultural drainage ditches managed by an internal drainage board in Lincolnshire, UK. The drainage ditches support very diverse macroinvertebrate communities at both the site (alpha diversity) and landscape scale (gamma diversity) with the main arterial drainage ditches supporting greater numbers of taxa when compared to smaller side ditches. Examination of the between site community heterogeneity (beta diversity) indicated that differences among ditches were high spatially and temporally. The results illustrate that both main arterial and side ditches make a unique contribution to aquatic biodiversity of the agricultural landscape. Given the need to maintain drainage ditches to support agriculture and flood defence measures, we advocate the application of principles from 'reconciliation ecology' to inform the future management and conservation of drainage ditches.
An analysis of the leadership challenges discussed in modern leadership studies suggests that a holistic Daoist model, based upon the five fundamental virtues of an ethical leader, offers a practical approach to ethical leadership in organizations. The Daoist model, potentially a complementary tool to the more positivist analytical approaches commonly taken in the Western leadership literature, provides a framework that helps to explain the dynamics of the ethical virtues required of adaptive leaders confronting change.
A study is reported in which two components of alienation, social isolation, and powerlessness, were measured in Negro and white mothers who were medically indigent. The findings are reported and their implications for a more active, "reaching out" type of delivery of well-child services are discussed.
Financial regulators are challenged to respond to the innovation opportunities presented by financial technology (fintech). Current rules are not necessarily sufficient or effective to adequately regulate new business models and new products relating to innovations such as crypto assets or digital financial services. Regulators that fail to respond in a timely manner may drive innovation offshore and deprive their markets and consumers of appropriate, new services. To respond to new financial innovation, regulators have been establishing innovation hubs and regulatory sandboxes. Innovation hubs enable them to engage innovators more effectively. Sandboxes allow the products to be tested in a controlled environment and enable to regulator to consider whether existing laws are appropriate to regulate such products and, of not, what measures may be required. Sandboxes are however resource intensive and they hold a number of risks. Financial regulators are, of course, not alone in having to address the regulatory challenges of innovation. This article therefore also considers other non-financial regulatory experiences of innovative products and services, namely automated vehicles; emissions trading in China; and Uber and its clones, to consider whether those experiences hold lessons for financial regulators.
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