Operationalising coastal resilience to flood and erosion hazard: A demonstration for England.

Resilience is widely seen as an important attribute of coastal systems and, as a concept, is increasingly prominent in policy documents. However, there are conflicting ideas on what constitutes resilience and its operationalisation as an overarching principle of coastal management remains limited. In this paper, we show how resilience to coastal flood and erosion hazard could be measured and applied within policy processes, using England as a case study. We define resilience pragmatically, integrating what is presently a disparate set of policy objectives for coastal areas. Our definition uses the concepts of resistance, recovery and adaptation, to consider how the economic, social and environmental dimensions of coastal systems respond to change. We develop a set of composite indicators for each dimension, grounded empirically with reference to national geospatial datasets. A prototype Coastal Resilience Model (CRM) has been developed, which combines the dimensions and generates a quantitative resilience index. We apply it to England's coastal hazard zone, capturing a range of different stakeholder perspectives using relative indicator weightings. The illustrative results demonstrate the practicality of formalising and quantifying resilience. To re-focus national policy around the stated desire of enhancing resilience to coastal flooding and erosion would require firm commitment from government to monitor progress towards resilience, requiring extension of the present risk-based approach, and a consensus methodology in which multiple (and sometimes conflicting) stakeholder values are explicitly considered. Such a transition may also challenge existing governance arrangements at national and local levels, requiring incentives for coastal managers to engage with and apply this new approach, more departmental integration and inter-agency cooperation. The proposed Coastal Resilience Model, with the tools to support planning and measure progress, has the potential to help enable this transition.

Short communication: effect of stocking density on indices of cow comfort.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of increasing stocking density on indices of cow comfort measured over a 24-h period, during peak lying time (0000 to 0400 h), and 1 h after the afternoon milking. Holstein cows (n = 136) were assigned to 1 of 4 pens, and stocking densities of 100, 113, 131, and 142% were applied in a 4 x 4 Latin square. Video data were recorded continuously for 2 d after 5 d of acclimation to stocking density and analyzed with 10-min scan samples for the percentage of cows lying in a stall, standing in a stall, standing in the alley, and eating at the manger. Percentage of cows standing idly in the alley increased as stocking density increased above 113% (10.9, 12.0, 14.4, and 16.5% for 100, 113, 131, and 142% stocking density, respectively). Cow comfort index (CCI; cows lying down/cows contacting stalls) and stall standing index (SSI; cows standing in stall/cows contacting stalls) differed little as stocking density increased, but stall use index (SUI; cows lying in stall/cows in pen not eating) decreased beyond 113% stocking density (70.1, 70.2, 68.6, and 66.3 for 100, 113, 131, and 142% stocking density, respectively). During peak lying time, SUI decreased with increasing (80.3, 79.5, 74.8, and 69.6 for 100, 113, 131, and 142% stocking density, respectively) stocking density above 113%, whereas CCI and SSI showed little response. None of the indices varied by stocking density when they were assessed at 1 h after milking. These results suggest that more than 1 index of cow comfort may be needed at higher stocking densities to assess both stall usage and cows standing idly in an alley. At higher stocking densities, SUI was reduced, because it reflected not only stall usage but the number of cows standing idly in an alley and not actively feeding and unable to access a stall. The CCI and SSI appear to assess actual stall usage (% cows lying or standing) across the range of stocking densities evaluated in this study.

Implications of a possible clustering of highest-energy cosmic rays.

Recently, a possible clustering of a subset of observed ultra-high energy cosmic rays above approximately 40 EeV (4 x 10(19) eV) in pairs near the supergalactic plane was reported. We show that a confirmation of this effect would provide information on the origin and nature of these events and, in case of charged primaries, imply interesting constraints on the extragalactic magnetic field. Possible implications for the most common models of ultra-high energy cosmic ray production in the literature are discussed.