Hydrological Services by Mountain Ecosystems in Qilian Mountain of China: A Review

Hydrological service is a hot issue in the current researches of ecosystem service, particularly in the upper reaches of mountain rivers in dry land areas, where the Qilian Mountain is a representative one. The Qilian Mountain, where forest, shrubland and grassland consist of its main ecosystems, can provide fresh water and many other ecosystem services, through a series of eco-hydrological process such as precipitation interception, soil water storage, and fresh water provision. Thus, monitoring water regulation and assessing the hydrological service of the Qilian Mountain are meaningful and helpful for the healthy development of the lower reaches of arid and semi-arid areas. In recent 10 years, hydrological services have been widely researched in terms of scale and landscape pattern, including water conservation, hydrological responses to afforestation and their ecological effects. This study, after analyzing lots of current models and applications of geographical information system（GIS） in hydrological services, gave a scientific and reasonable evaluation of mountain ecosystem in eco-hydrological services, by employing the combination of international forefronts and contentious issues into the Qilian Mountain. Assessments of hydrological services at regional or larger scales are limited compared with studies within watershed scale in the Qilian Mountain. In our evaluation results of forest ecosystems, it is concluded that long-term observation and dynamic monitoring of different types of ecosystem are indispensable, and the hydrological services and the potential variation in water supplement on regional and large scales should be central issues in the future research.v

Participatory approach to design social accountability interventions to improve maternal health services:a case study from the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Background:Social accountability(SA)comprises a set of mechanisms aiming to,on the one hand,enable users to raise their concerns about the health services provided to them(voice),and to hold health providers(HPs)accountable for actions and decisions related to the health service provision.On the other hand,they aim to facilitate HPs to take into account users’needs and expectations in providing care.This article describes the development of a SA intervention that aims to improve health services responsiveness in two health zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Methods:Beneficiaries including men,women,community health workers(CHWs),representatives of the health sector and local authorities were purposively selected and involved in an advisory process using the Dialogue Model in the two health zones:(1)Eight focus group discussions(FGDs)were organized separately during consultation aimed at sharing and discussing results from the situation analysis,and collecting suggestions for improvement,(2)Representatives of participants in previous FGDs were involved in dialogue meetings for prioritizing and integrating suggestions from FGDs,and(3)the integrated suggestions were discussed by research partners and set as intervention components.All the processes were audio-taped,transcribed and analysed using inductive content analysis.Results:Overall there were 121 participants involved in the process,51 were female.They provided 48 suggestions.Their suggestions were integrated into six intervention components during dialogue meetings:(1)use CHWs and a health committee for collecting and transmitting community concerns about health services,(2)build the capacity of the community in terms of knowledge and information,(3)involve community leaders through dialogue meetings,(4)improve the attitude of HPs towards voice and the management of voice at health facility level,(5)involve the health service supervisors in community participation and;(6)use other existing interventions.These components were then articulated into three intervention components during programming to:create a formal voice system,introduce dialogue meetings improving enforceability and answerability,and enhance the health providers’responsiveness.Conclusions:The use of the Dialogue Model,a participatory process,allowed beneficiaries to be involved with other community stakeholders having different perspectives and types of knowledge in an advisory process and to articulate their suggestions on a combination of SA intervention components,specific for the two health zones contexts.

Overbooking-Enabled Task Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Mobile Edge Computing Environments

Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)is proposed to solve the needs of Inter-net of Things(IoT)users for high resource utilization,high reliability and low latency of service requests.However,the backup virtual machine is idle when its primary virtual machine is running normally,which will waste resources.Overbooking the backup virtual machine under the above circumstances can effectively improve resource utilization.First,these virtual machines are deployed into slots randomly,and then some tasks with cooperative relationship are off-loaded to virtual machines for processing.Different deployment locations have different resource utilization and average service response time.We want tofind a balanced solution that minimizes the average service response time of the IoT application while maximizing resource utilization.In this paper,we propose a task scheduler and exploit a Task Deployment Algorithm(TDA)to obtain an optimal virtual machine deployment scheme.Finally,the simulation results show that the TDA can significantly increase the resource utilization of the system,while redu-cing the average service response time of the application by comparing TDA with the other two classical methods.The experimental results confirm that the perfor-mance of TDA is better than that of other two methods.