Search Results (3)

Aquaculture has become the fastest-growing food production sector worldwide, recently surpassing wild-capture fisheries in total output. This rapid expansion underscores the need to ensure sustainability through robust animal welfare standards. Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) are increasingly adopted due to their advantages in biosecurity, water efficiency, and production control. However, these systems often expose fish to highly artificial and environmentally impoverished conditions, which may negatively affect their welfare. This article examines fish welfare in RAS through the lens of environmental enrichment (EE), arguing that its implementation is essential to address behavioral, cognitive, and physiological needs. By integrating EE into RAS design and management, it is possible to move beyond traditional homeostatic welfare models focused solely on stress reduction toward an allostatic framework that emphasizes adaptability, agency, and positive experiences. Such an approach supports the concept of providing farmed fish with a “life worth living.” The paper highlights the ethical and practical implications of enrichment strategies and emphasizes their potential role in promoting sustainable and welfare-oriented aquaculture practices. Full article

African Swine Fever (ASF) is a highly infectious disease, severely affecting domestic pigs and wild boar. It has significantly contributed to economic losses within the pig farming industry. As a critical component of biosecurity measures, the selection of cleaning and disinfection (C&D) procedures is a dynamic and long-term decision that demands a deeper knowledge base among pig farmers. This study uses a binary logit model to explore the effect of epidemic prevention training on the adoption of C&D procedures among pig farmers with irregular and regular C&D procedures based on micro-survey data obtained from 333 pig farmers from Sichuan. The endogeneity issue was handled using propensity score matching, resulting in solid conclusions. In addition, the critical mediating impact of biosecurity cognition was investigated using a bootstrap analysis. The empirical study demonstrated that epidemic prevention training encourages pig farmers to adopt C&D procedures, with biosecurity cognition significantly mediating. Furthermore, epidemic prevention training was more likely to promote the adoption of C&D procedures among pig farmers with shorter breeding experiences and those having breeding insurance. Our study emphasized the importance of implementing epidemic prevention training to improving pig farmers’ biosecurity cognition and promoting the adoption of C&D procedures. The results included suggested references for preventing ASF and the next epidemic of animal diseases. Full article

Recent advances in autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have increased their use in remote sensing applications, such as precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring, and surveillance. However, onboard UAV cognition capabilities for understanding and interacting in environments with imprecise or partial observations, for objects of interest within complex scenes, are limited, and have not yet been fully investigated. This limitation of onboard decision-making under uncertainty has delegated the motion planning strategy in complex environments to human pilots, which rely on communication subsystems and real-time telemetry from ground control stations. This paper presents a UAV-based autonomous motion planning and object finding system under uncertainty and partial observability in outdoor environments. The proposed system architecture follows a modular design, which allocates most of the computationally intensive tasks to a companion computer onboard the UAV to achieve high-fidelity results in simulated environments. We demonstrate the system with a search and rescue (SAR) case study, where a lost person (victim) in bushland needs to be found using a sub-2 kg quadrotor UAV. The navigation problem is mathematically formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). A motion strategy (or policy) is obtained once a POMDP is solved mid-flight and in real time using augmented belief trees (ABT) and the TAPIR toolkit. The system’s performance was assessed using three flight modes: (1) mission mode, which follows a survey plan and used here as the baseline motion planner; (2) offboard mode, which runs the POMDP-based planner across the flying area; and (3) hybrid mode, which combines mission and offboard modes for improved coverage in outdoor scenarios. Results suggest the increased cognitive power added by the proposed motion planner and flight modes allow UAVs to collect more accurate victim coordinates compared to the baseline planner. Adding the proposed system to UAVs results in improved robustness against potential false positive readings of detected objects caused by data noise, inaccurate detections, and elevated complexity to navigate in time-critical applications, such as SAR. Full article