Supply chain partners for local organic food face uncertainties such as poor collaboration and communication that cannot be reduced through the application of traditional supply chain design and management techniques. Such techniques are known to improve supply chain coordination, but they do not adequately consider major aspects of local organic food supply chains such as ethics, sustainabilit...

A fuzzy logic (FL) based food security risk level assessment system is design in this paper. Three inputs – yield, production and economic growth, were used to predict the level of risk associated with food supply. A number of previous studies have related food supply with risk assessment for particular types of food, but none the work was specifically concerned with how the wider food chain mi...

Evidence from the Food Supply chain suggests that food retailers often exhibit a reluctance to share information with their suppliers even when this benefits both parties. For example, inventory coordination and reduced costs may be realized by adopting appropriate supply chain management technologies such as cooperative planning, forecasting, and replenishment. This behavior is explained by vi...

Understanding which species are most vulnerable to human impacts is a prerequisite for designing effective conservation strategies. Surveys of terrestrial species have suggested that large-bodied species and top predators are the most at risk, and it is commonly assumed that such patterns also apply in the ocean. However, there has been no global test of this hypothesis in the sea. We analyzed ...

Reproductive rates and survival of young in animal populations figure centrally in generating management and conservation strategies. Model systems suggest that food supply can drive these often highly variable properties, yet for many wild species, quantifying such effects and assessing their implications have been challenging. We used spatially explicit time series of a well-studied marine re...

This paper seeks to design food supply chain structures that can provide food security for every person in the world while supporting long-term environmental sustainability. In particular, we provide alternatives to the current food supply chain structure and analyze their potential for providing food security, in terms of productive capacity and long-term environmental sustainability. Given th...

Cattle evolved as plain-grazing herbivores gathering together into herds to aid in the defense against predators. In non-domesticated species, matriarchal social groups of mothers and offspring exist separately from groups of male animals in various stages of maturity. The size of the group varies depending on the availability of basic resources such as food supply and access to mates for repro...

Please cite this article in press as: Dabben Engineering (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1

The optimal amount of reserves that a small bird should carry depends upon a number of factors, including the availability of food and environmental predation risk levels. Theory predicts that, if predation risk increases, then a bird should maintain a lower level of reserves. Previous experiments have given mixed results: some have shown reduced reserves and some, increased reserves. However, ...