This research investigates how entrepreneurs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with inadequate capabilities and limited resources drove digital transformation in their companies, a phenomenon that remains under-researched in the extant literature. We conduct qualitative research on digital transformation to cross-border e-commerce undergone by 7 SMEs on the Alibaba digital platform. We inductively derive a process model that aims to describe and explain how SME entrepreneurs, with support from the digital platform service provider, drive digital transformation through managerial cognition renewal, managerial social capital development, business team building, and organizational capability building. This model expands our understanding of both digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation. It also presents new insights into how digital platform service providers can help SMEs transform and compete.

With regard to measuring nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions from biological sources, there are three most widely adopted methods that use gas chromatograph with an electron capture detector (GC-ECD). They use: (a) nitrogen (N 2 ) as the carrier gas (DN); (b) ascarite as a carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) trap with DN (DN-Ascarite); and (c) a mixture gas of argon and methane as the carrier (AM). Additional methods that use either a mixture of argon and methane (or of CO 2 and N 2 ) as a make-up gas with the carrier nitrogen or soda lime (or ascarite) as a CO 2 trap with the carrier helium have also been adopted in a few studies. To test the hypothesis that the use of DN sometimes considerably biases measurements of N 2 O emissions from plants, soils or soil-plant systems, experiments were conducted involving DN, AM and DN-Ascarite. When using DN, a significant relationship appeared between CO 2 concentrations and the apparent N 2 O concentrations in air samples. The use of DN led to significantly overestimated N 2 O emissions from detached fresh plants in static chamber enclosures. Meanwhile, comparably lower emissions were found when using either the DN-Ascarite or AM methods. When an N 2 O flux (from a soil or a soil-plant system), measured by DN in combination with sampling from the enclosure of a static opaque chamber, was greater than 200 μg N m −2 h −1 , no significant difference was found between DN and DN-Ascarite. When the DN-measured fluxes were within the ranges of <−30, −30-0, 0-30, 30-100 and 100-200 μg N m −2 h −1 , significant differences that amounted to −72, −22, 5, 38 and 64 μg N m −2 h −1 , respectively, appeared in comparison to DN-Ascarite. As a result, the DN measurements in rice-wheat and Plant Soil (vegetable fields overestimated both annual total N 2 O emissions (by 7-62%, p<0.05) and direct emission factors for applied nitrogen (by 6-65%). These results suggest the necessity of reassessing the available data determined from DN measurements before they are applied to inventory estimation. Further studies are required to explore appropriate approaches for the necessary reassessment. Our results also imply that the DN method should not be adopted for measuring N 2 O emissions from weak sources (e.g., with intensities less than 200 μg N m −2 h −1 ). In addition, we especially do not recommend the use of DN to simultaneously measure N 2 O and CO 2 with the same ECD.

Abstract. The relative contributions of C3 and C4 plants to vegetation at a given locality may be estimated by means of δ13C of soil organic matter. This approach holds a great potential for paleoecological reconstruction using paleosols. However, two main uncertainties exist, which limits the accuracy of this application. One is δ13C-enrichment as the plant carbon becomes incorporated into soil organic matter. The other is due to environmental influences on δ13C of plants. Two types of data were collected and analyzed with an objective of narrowing the error of paleovegetation reconstruction. First, we investigated δ13C variations of 557 C3 and 136 C4 plants along a precipitation gradient in North China. A strong negative correlation is found between the δ13C value of C3 plants averaged for each site and the annual precipitation with a coefficient of −0.40‰/100mm, while no significant coefficients were found for C4 plants. Second, we measured δ13C of soil organic matters for 14 soil profiles at three sites. The isotopic difference between vegetation and soil organic matter are evaluated to be 1.8‰ for the surface soil and 2.8‰ for the soil at the bottom of soil profiles. We conducted a sample reconstruction of paleovegetation at the central Chinese Loess Plateau during the Holocene and the Last Glacial (LG), and conclude that, without corrections for δ13C-enrichment by decomposition, the C4 abundance would be overestimated. The importance and uncertainties of other corrections are also discussed.

An automated system for continuous measurement of N₂O fluxes on an hourly basis was employed to study N₂O emissions in an intensively managed low carbon calcareous soil under sub-humid temperate monsoon conditions. N₂O emissions occurred mainly within two weeks of application of NH₄(+) based fertilizer and total N₂O emissions in wheat (average 0.35 or 0.21 kg N ha⁻¹ season⁻¹) and maize (average 1.47 or 0.49 kg N ha⁻¹ season⁻¹) under conventional and optimum N fertilization (300 and 50-122 kg N ha⁻¹, respectively) were lower than previously reported from low frequency measurements. Results from closed static chamber showed that N₂O was produced mainly from nitrification of NH₄(+)-based fertilizer, with little denitrification occurring due to limited readily oxidizable carbon and low soil moisture despite consistently high soil nitrate-N concentrations. Significant reductions in N₂O emissions can be achieved by optimizing fertilizer N rates, using nitrification inhibitors, or changing from NH₄(+)- to NO₃(-)-based fertilizers.

No abstract