Search

Determining how mountain communities in conservation priority areas can benefit from rich local biodiversity through sustainable development has been a challenge to governments throughout the world. The village of Hanlong in western Yunnan China has been developing bird photography tourism to capitalize on the extremely rich avifaunal diversity of the area. In this study, we analyzed the impact of the emerging tourism on local communities' livelihoods and identified the key areas of improvements for wider dissemination of the experiences. Bird photography tourism in Hanlong has contributed significantly to the sustainable livelihoods of local communities by providing a major new source of income, creating local employment opportunities, and reducing local people's dependence on the extractive use of forest resources. In the process, local communities have acquired new knowledge, skills, and social networks. They have also developed new institutions and governance mechanisms, which enable them to better adapt to the changing socioeconomic environment. Bird photography tourism offers new opportunities and hope for sustaining local livelihoods and biodiversity in conservation priority areas. Experiences in Hanlong offer an excellent heuristic example for sustainable community development, adaptation, and transformational change in conservation priority areas. They also contribute to the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals and Aichi targets and thus have value for wider upscaling. Geographical location, local leadership, and external support are all important for the success of bird photography in Hanlong. We recommend that a landscape (including transboundary landscape) approach be adopted to integrate farming practices, other economic activities, and photography tourism. Farming practices and land uses that sustain bird diversity should be encouraged.

Cognitive engagement involves mental and physical involvement, with observable behaviors as indicators. Automatically measuring cognitive engagement can offer valuable insights for instructors. However, object occlusion, inter-class similarity, and intra-class variance make designing an effective detection method challenging. To deal with these problems, we propose the Object-Enhanced–You Only Look Once version 8 nano (OE-YOLOv8n) model. This model employs the YOLOv8n framework with an improved Inner Minimum Point Distance Intersection over Union (IMPDIoU) Loss to detect cognitive engagement. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we construct a real-world Students' Cognitive Engagement (SCE) dataset. Extensive experiments on the self-built dataset show the superior performance of the proposed model, which improves the detection performance of the five distinct classes with a precision of 92.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Video conferencing learning offers a more accessible and flexible learning mode for students who cannot attend face‐to‐face class in person. However, research about the video conferencing learning is still lacked, especially for students' engagement in this setting. Objectives: This study adopts the self‐system model of motivational development to uncover effects of the video conferencing learning environment (VCLE) to students' engagement. Methods: Two hundred and ninety‐eight primary school students involved in the VCLE were surveyed. The partial least square structural equation modelling was employed to explore the link between the VCLE and students' engagement with a mediating role of basic psychological needs satisfaction (BPNS). Results and Conclusions: Results showed that the BPNS played a mediating role in the processes from the VCLE to engagement. Both pedagogical and social affordance had a significant effect on the BPNS. However, their influences were different. Specifically, pedagogical affordance yielded a stronger effect on the BPNS for autonomy than social affordance. The predicting power of social affordance on BPNS for relatedness and competence was stronger than pedagogical affordance. Generally, social affordance yielded more contributions to behavioral and emotional engagement than pedagogical affordance. Moreover, BPNS for competence was the only significant mediator between the VCLE and behavioral engagement, and it owned the strongest mediating power on the relationship between the VCLE and emotional engagement, followed by autonomy, and the smallest of relatedness. This study suggests that practitioners and researchers should give more consideration to improve social affordance of the VCLE and to meet students' BPNS especially for competence in order to design and implement an engaged video conferencing course. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Video conferencing learning provides an accessible and flexible learning mode.Mechanism from learning environment to engagement is helpful to design an engaged video conferencing course.Less is known about how video conferencing learning affects students' engagement. What the paper adds: This study uncovered the functioning process of video conferencing learning to students' engagement.PLS‐SEM was employed to verify the mediating role of BPNS in this process.BPNS for autonomy, competence, and relatedness played mediating roles and their powers were different. Implications for practice and/or policy: More attention is needed to improve to social affordance to enhance students' emotional engagement.BPNS especially for competence deserves special consideration to improve students' behavioral and emotional engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]