As climate change intensifies extreme heat, heat-health policies increasingly use alerts, forecasts, and behavioral guidance to encourage individual self-protection. Evaluations of such policies often track survey-based intermediate outcomes, including warning awareness, perceived heat risk or vulnerability, and protective behavior, in addition to health outcomes. Yet routine self-protection can make reported risk perceptions difficult to interpret: perceived risk may motivate prevention, while reported risk may already reflect the protection that respondents have adopted. In a web-based survey of residents of Tokyo's 23 wards, we elicit subjective probabilities of heatstroke under realized and counterfactual prevention scenarios. Respondents are randomly assigned to evaluate either a no-prevention scenario or a full-prevention scenario. Reported risk changes systematically with the assumed level of prevention, suggesting that reported risk perceptions may reflect both perceived susceptibility and behavior-conditioned reappraisal and may be misleading as stand-alone indicators in adaptation monitoring and evaluation. We also find that perceived risk under the no-prevention scenario is positively associated with realized preventive effort, suggesting that this counterfactual belief provides a more interpretable basis than realized-prevention risk for examining how perceived susceptibility relates to preventive effort.
Relay intercropping legume cover crops with cash crops can protect soil while enhancing nutrient cycling. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of relay-intercropping hairy vetch (HV; Vicia villosa Roth) with broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var. italica) and its subsequent fertilizer effect on sweet corn (Zea mays L.) production. A 2-year field experiment was conducted in a Gleysol field in Osaka, Japan. Three HV varieties (Namoi, Savane, and Massa) were interseeded into broccoli 1 month after planting. Upon broccoli harvest, the HV biomass was incorporated into the soil. Subsequent sweet corn growth and yield were compared between the HV-incorporated treatments and a conventional chemical fertilizer treatment. HV was successfully established without reducing broccoli yields. The average aboveground biomass of HV was 3400 kg dry weight ha-1, providing nutrient inputs of 125 kg N, 27 kg P2O5, and 88 kg K2O ha-1. Significant varietal differences were observed in the C:N ratio; Massa and Namoi exhibited higher ratios, while Savane consistently showed the lowest ratio. In the first year, sweet corn ear weights in all HV treatments were comparable to the conventional treatment. In the second year, however, the conventional treatment significantly outperformed the Massa treatment. Namoi and Savane showed superior fertilizer effects compared to Massa, likely due to their lower C:N ratios. Although the fertilizer effect of HV was slightly inferior to chemical fertilizers in the long term, relay intercropping HV can significantly reduce chemical fertilizer requirements in broccoli-sweet corn cropping systems without compromising the primary crop yield.
The HSV color space is generally used for color image enhancement. However, since the HSV color space does not take into account human visual perception, it fails to adequately represent perceived differences in brightness, making it less effective for contrast enhancement. In this paper, we propose a method for color image enhancement using the CIELAB color space, which is one of the uniform color spaces that quantitatively represent the differences in colors perceived by humans. Each pixel in the CIELAB color space is represented by a convex combination of four colors, white, black, bright pure color, and dark pure color. The image brightness contrast and colorfulness are enhanced by transforming the coefficients so that their distribution approximates the target histograms, each of which is derived from a uniform distribution in the CIELAB color space.
