Forest landscape restoration in the drylands of Latin America

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) involves the ecological restoration of degraded forest landscapes, with the aim of benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being. We first identify four fundamental principles of FLR, based on previous definitions. We then critically evaluate the application of these principles in practice, based on the experience gained during an international, collaborative research project conducted in six dry forest landscapes of Latin America. Research highlighted the potential for FLR; tree species of high socioeconomic value were identified in all study areas, and strong dependence of local communities on forest resources was widely encountered, particularly for fuelwood. We demonstrated that FLR can be achieved through both passive and active restoration approaches, and can be cost-effective if the increased provision of ecosystem services is taken into account. These results therefore highlight the potential for FLR, and the positive contribution that it could make to sustainable development. However, we also encountered a number of challenges to FLR implementation, including the difficulty of achieving strong engagement in FLR activities among local stakeholders, lack of capacity for community-led initiatives, and the lack of an appropriate institutional and regulatory environment to support restoration activities. Successful implementation of FLR will require new collaborative alliances among stakeholders, empowerment and capacity building of local communities to enable them to fully engage with restoration activities, and an enabling public policy context to enable local people to be active participants in the decision making process. © 2012 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance

Finite Larmor radius effects on non-diffusive tracer transport in a zonal flow

Finite Larmor radius (FLR) effects on non-diffusive transport in a prototypical zonal flow with drift waves are studied in the context of a simplified chaotic transport model. The model consists of a superposition of drift waves of the linearized Hasegawa-Mima equation and a zonal shear flow perpendicular to the density gradient. High frequency FLR effects are incorporated by gyroaveraging the ExB velocity. Transport in the direction of the density gradient is negligible and we therefore focus on transport parallel to the zonal flows. A prescribed asymmetry produces strongly asymmetric non- Gaussian PDFs of particle displacements, with L\'evy flights in one direction but not the other. For zero Larmor radius, a transition is observed in the scaling of the second moment of particle displacements. However, FLR effects seem to eliminate this transition. The PDFs of trapping and flight events show clear evidence of algebraic scaling with decay exponents depending on the value of the Larmor radii. The shape and spatio-temporal self-similar anomalous scaling of the PDFs of particle displacements are reproduced accurately with a neutral, asymmetric effective fractional diffusion model.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Physics of Plasma

Role of electron inertia and electron/ion finite Larmor radius effects in low-beta, magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instability

The magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability has been investigated in great detail in previous work using magnetohydrodynamic and kinetic models for low-beta plasmas. The work presented here extends previous studies of this instability to regimes where finite-Larmor-Radius (FLR) effects may be important. Comparisons of the MRT instability are made using a 5-moment and a 10-moment two-fluid model, the two fluids being ions and electrons. The 5-moment model includes Hall stabilization whereas the 10-moment model includes Hall and FLR stabilization. Results are presented for these two models using different electron mass to understand the role of electron inertia in the late-time nonlinear evolution of the MRT instability. For the 5-moment model, the late-time nonlinear MRT evolution does not significantly depend on the electron inertia. However, when FLR stabilization is important, the 10-moment results show that a lower ion-to-electron mass ratio (i.e. larger electron inertia) under-predicts the energy in high-wavenumber modes due to larger FLR stabilization

Fuzzy Lattice Reasoning for Pattern Classification Using a New Positive Valuation Function

This paper describes an enhancement of fuzzy lattice reasoning (FLR) classifier for pattern classification based on a positive valuation function. Fuzzy lattice reasoning (FLR) was described lately as a lattice data domain extension of fuzzy ARTMAP neural classifier based on a lattice inclusion measure function. In this work, we improve the performance of FLR classifier by defining a new nonlinear positive valuation function. As a consequence, the modified algorithm achieves better classification results. The effectiveness of the modified FLR is demonstrated by examples on several well-known pattern recognition benchmarks

High values of disorder-generated multifractals and logarithmically correlated processes

In the introductory section of the article we give a brief account of recent insights into statistics of high and extreme values of disorder-generated multifractals following a recent work by the first author with P. Le Doussal and A. Rosso (FLR) employing a close relation between multifractality and logarithmically correlated random fields. We then substantiate some aspects of the FLR approach analytically for multifractal eigenvectors in the Ruijsenaars-Schneider ensemble (RSE) of random matrices introduced by E. Bogomolny and the second author by providing an ab initio calculation that reveals hidden logarithmic correlations at the background of the disorder-generated multifractality. In the rest we investigate numerically a few representative models of that class, including the study of the highest component of multifractal eigenvectors in the Ruijsenaars-Schneider ensemble

Xing-Ling Codes, Duals of their Subcodes, and Good Asymmetric Quantum Codes

A class of powerful $q$-ary linear polynomial codes originally proposed by Xing and Ling is deployed to construct good asymmetric quantum codes via the standard CSS construction. Our quantum codes are $q$-ary block codes that encode $k$ qudits of quantum information into $n$ qudits and correct up to \flr{(d_{x}-1)/2} bit-flip errors and up to \flr{(d_{z}-1)/2} phase-flip errors.. In many cases where the length $(q^{2}-q)/2 \leq n \leq (q^{2}+q)/2$ and the field size $q$ are fixed and for chosen values of $d_{x} \in \{2,3,4,5\}$ and $d_{z} \ge \delta$, where $\delta$ is the designed distance of the Xing-Ling (XL) codes, the derived pure $q$-ary asymmetric quantum CSS codes possess the best possible size given the current state of the art knowledge on the best classical linear block codes.Comment: To appear in Designs, Codes and Cryptography (accepted Sep. 27, 2013