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Concern over excess phosphorus (P) input and loading in some soils of the Canadian prairie region has led to a need for a better understanding of the fate of added manure and fertilizer P. Information on the effects of manure application over long term (i.e., years) and short term (i.e., weeks, months) as related to management practices and manure form is still lacking. Knowledge of the P forms and species present in soil following application of manure and inorganic P fertilizers, and linking this to potential P availability and mobility is needed to make sound P management recommendations. The objective of this thesis project was to assess the speciation of soil P in different manures and inorganic fertilizer-amended Saskatchewan soils as affected by time, presence and absence of plants, landscape position, soil type, and management practices including rate and placement. Three studies were conducted (growth chamber and field-based experiments) to study P behavior in soils. These studies closely followed a time scale, beginning with speciation and fate followed over the very short-term (i.e., days to weeks) to a short-term period (i.e., months to a year) following amendment application, and finally the effects of repeated annual manure additions made over the long term (i.e., 11 years). Soils used in this study were loamy textured Brown and Black Chernozems. Solid cattle manure (SCM) and liquid hog manure (LHM) were applied at low and high rates in the very short-term and long-term studies. The low rate of SCM and LHM application was 7.6 T ha-1 yr-1 (dry weight) and 37,000 L ha-1 yr-1, respectively which was equivalent to approximately 100 kg total N ha-1 yr-1 application (agronomic N rate). The high rate was four times this amount. Inorganic fertilizer (mono-ammonium phosphate blended with urea) at rate of 54 kg N ha-1 and 12 kg P ha-1 and SCM at rate of 60 T ha-1 were applied in the short-term study. A sequential chemical extraction procedure was used to fractionate P in very short-term and short-term studies and different soil test phosphorus (STP) methods were used to determine effects on the labile P in the long-term study. Changes in P speciation with time and their relative proportions in fertilizered soils were also assessed using the synchrotron-based X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy in all studies. This study has revealed that manure, especially SCM elevates labile P over all time frames examined. Over the very short-term (i.e., weeks to a month), P was added as manure tends to remain in labile forms like brushite and adsorbed P that is accessible to plants for uptake. In the manure band (months to a year), manure P was relatively unchanged over a period of months while in the mono-ammonium phosphate (MAP) fertilizer band, adsorbed and Ca-P was readily formed from fertilizer P. Aging over several years (one to eleven years), along with high soil pH and high Ca:P ratio enhanced formation of more stable Ca-P minerals like apatite, especially in SCM amended soil. Overall, the unique combined use of wet chemical analysis and synchrotron-based techniques in this thesis research has improved our understanding of fate and transformation of P added to prairie soils. It is suggested that future studies of fate of applied P in soil also utilize a combination of wet chemical and spectroscopic techniques, as this was shown to be a rewarding approach.

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, is bedevilled with various conflicts which have been exacerbated by the multiplicity and diversity which characterize the nation. The country is a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multiregional and multi-religious society. And while such arrays of features are not peculiar to Nigeria, managing them has greatly propped up various conflicts, with religious conflict emerging as one of the most devastating of all. It would appear as though, more than any other single issue, religious conflict has become a threat to national cohesion, stability and development. It has led to fears, suspicions, unrest; mass displacement of people, destruction of lives and property; consequently leading to major set-backs for nation building. The three main religions of Nigeria are the Indigenous Religions, Islam and Christianity, with Islam and Christianity having almost equal strength of adherence. While the indigenous religions have generally been tolerant and accommodating of the two “guest” religions, contestations and incessant violent clashes have characterized the relationship between Muslims and Christians, particularly in Northern Nigeria, and this has been on the increase in frequency, intensity and sophistication. This situation has led to the emergence and deployment of numerous approaches towards transforming conflicts in order to ensure peaceful co-existence of all the people. The task of this thesis is to contribute practical, theological reflections to the ongoing search for how Nigeria will end the undesired religious conflict between Muslims and Christians and build a peaceful and harmonious society. To do this, John Paul Lederach’s conceptual framework for conflict transformation was adopted and explained in chapter one; and two religious conflicts which took place in the Northern Nigerian cities of Jos and Maduguri were empirically investigated through intensive fieldwork. A review of relevant literature was carried out in chapter two and an elaborate explanation of the socio-scientific and theological methodologies adopted for the research was presented in the third chapter. In order to establish the causes, manifestations and consequences of the conflicts, chapter four and five explored their remote and root causes. Because this research is grounded on the assumption that religion is not just a source of conflict, but a resource for peace, and on the contribution of faiths to contemporary public debates, it provides a new approach which challenges the religious institutions, particularly the Church, through its pastoral ministry, to become actively involved in the transformation of conflict in the nation. The research holds that the greatest contribution of religion to the quest to transform religious conflict in Nigeria is through a practical theology which should be demonstrated in both spirituality and strategy. As such, and based on empirical findings from the zones of conflict, a theology of hospitality is suggested in chapter six, as a gradual but effective method of transforming relationships between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. While the approach does not preclude other approaches, it offers the enormous resources, possibilities and opportunities, ingrained within the religious domain for conflict transformation in contemporary Nigerian society. The strategies for achieving the desired transformation of the situation of conflict on short and long-term basis through the theology of hospitality are suggested in the seventh chapter.

Les entreprises collaborent pour saisir des opportunités, échanger des documents et ressources, cela en suivant des processus métier pouvant évoluer. Les portails collaboratifs sont une solution orientée web à ce besoin de collaboration. Cependant, la conception et la maintenance d'un portail collaboratif métier n'est pas trivial et reste peu accessible aux acteurs de l'entreprise. Cela a comme conséquence la difficulté de maintenir et faire évoluer le portail collaboratif sans que cela ne soit trop coûteux en temps et financièrement. Afin de répondre à cette problématique, une solution consiste à capter les besoins métier de la collaboration dans un modèle, puis générer automatiquement le portail collaboratif correspondant. Le modèle, dans ce cas, doit être accessible aux acteurs métier et expressif décrivant ainsi les aspects les plus complexes d'une collaboration. C'est dans ce contexte que se situent nos travaux. À défaut d'avoir une solution toute faite, nous avons mis en place une approche de conception de portail collaboratif fondée sur l’Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles. Pour la description de nos portails, nous avons choisi de privilégier la modélisation des entreprises centrée sur les processus métier comme point de départ. Notre solution repose sur notre métamodèle MACoP (Modeling and Analysis of Collaborative Portal). Dans ce métamodèle nous avons fait cohabiter l'accessibilité et l'expressivité. Cela en proposant de nouveaux concepts permettant ainsi la génération complète des portails collaboratifs. Le métamodèle MACoP est accompagné d'une chaîne de transformations permettant de passer directement d'un modèle MACoP au code Python du portail collaboratif. / Companies collaborate to seize opportunities as well as exchange documents and other types of resources. This is achieved by following business processes that are subject to evolution. Collaborative portals are web oriented solutions aimed at this need of collaboration. However, the development and maintenance of a collaborative portal is non-trivial and remains hardly accessible for many companies. As a consequence, the challenge is controlling the costs of maintenance and implementing new features. To circumvent these issues, it is possible to collect business requirements of the collaboration in a model and then generate automatically the corresponding collaborative portal. The model, in this case, must be accessible by the business actors and must express even the most complex aspects of the collaboration needs. This is the context of our work. Having not found a solution which corresponded to our requirements, we have developed a design approach of collaborative portals founded on the Model Driven Engineering. As for the description of our portals, we have chosen to focus on the business modeling based on the business processes like starting point. Our solution relies on our meta-model MACoP (Modeling and Analysis of Collaborative Portal). In this meta-model we have joined together accessibility and the expressivity, by proposing new concepts allowing the complete generation of collaborative portals. The meta-model MACoP is accompanied by a transformations chain that makes it possible to pass directly from a MACoP model to the Python code of the collaborative portal.

L'objectif de la thèse est d'explorer les comportements mécaniques effectifs des matériaux poreux impliqués dans les problèmes de pores ou d'inclusion, avec pour objectif principal d'homogénéiser un matériau aussi hétérogène que possible, plus d'informations de géométrie physique à une échelle donnée. Nous examinons séparément ici quatre microstructures typiques de matériaux ressemblant à des roches couvrant différents constituants: nous avons cherché à déterminer comment la présence de pores et une inclusion de morphologies différentes influent sur les comportements macroscopiques élastiques, débit plastique et dépendant du temps. Un modèle d'homogénéisation par étapes pour les comportements élastoplastiques et viscoplastiques est proposé, basé sur une méthode d'homogénéisation par transformée de Fourier rapide, afin d'améliorer le comportement local depuis la transition à la micro-échelle vers la méso-échelle, puis vers la macroscopie. Une série de simulations est calculée et comparée. Nous portons une attention particulière au comportement anisotrope des matériaux à la fois pore et inclusion configurée à la même échelle et à différentes échelles Nous fournissons une solution de référence pour ce type de matériaux couvrant l’effet des géométries de pores et d’inclusion en raison de la limitation à l’obtention d’un critère analytique. En plus nous proposons un modèle d’endommagement plastique multi-échelle. les comparaisons entre les résultats numériques et les données expérimentales montrent que ce modèle peut bien caractériser son comportement en défaillance avec des micro-structures complexes. / The objective of this thesis aims to explore the effective mechanical behaviors of porous materials involved with pore or inclusion problem. The key point to this problem is to homogenize such a highly heterogeneous material incorporating more physical geometry information at a given scale. In this work, four typical microstructure of rock-like materials are respectively considered here covering different constituents. We sought to determine how the presence of pores and inclusion with different morphologies influence the macroscopic elastic, plastic flow and time-dependent behaviors. For this propose, a two-step homogenization model for elastoplastic and viscoplastic behaviors is proposed based on a Fast Fourier Transform homogenization method to upscale the local behavior from the micro-scale transition to meso-scale and then to macroscale. A series of simulations are computed and compared. Particular attentions are focused on the anisotropic behavior for the materials with both pore and inclusion configured at same and different scales. We provide a reference solution for this kinds of materials covering the effect of pore and inclusion geometries due to a limitation to obtain an analytical criterion. Moreover, we proposed a damage plastic model with multi-scale characters. Comparisons between numerical results and experimental data show that this model can well characterize its failure behavior with complex micro-structures.