A GIS ASSESSMENT OF ECOREGION REPRESENTATION IN CHILE\u27S EXISTING AND PROPOSED INTEGRATED NETWORK OF PROTECTED AREAS

Chile\u27s state designated protected areas are reported to show representation bias and to be unable to meet conservation goals. Private protected areas are considered an important tool to resolve these issues, which has led to support for increasing the role of private protected areas in Chile and creating an integrated public-private protected area network. But the validity of the capacity of private protected areas to fix Chile\u27s state protected area network bias, and the advantage of creating an integrated protected area network, have not been assessed. This study uses the most recent data on Chile\u27s state, private, and international protected areas to conduct a GIS gap analysis to measure the representativeness of Chile\u27s terrestrial ecoregions under four scenarios. Scenario 1 assesses state protected areas including SNASPE and public and private nature sanctuaries. Scenario 2 assesses Scenario 1 and private protected areas. Scenario 3 assesses Scenario 1 and international protected areas. Scenario 4 assesses state, private, and international protected areas. All scenarios show representation bias and failure to protect the most threatened Chilean matorral and Atacama Desert ecoregions. State protected areas are heavily biased toward southern Chile. Private protected areas show representation bias similar to state protected areas. Both private and international protected areas do little to fix state representation bias or help Chile reach conservation goals. Based on the findings of this study and an assessment of other private protected area limitations, an integrated protected area network may not be the most appropriate method of fixing state protected area network representation bias, protecting priority conservation areas, meeting conservation goals, enhancing the overall effectiveness of Chile\u27s protected area networks. Rather, this study points to other interventions that would be appropriate for the Chilean context, including finding a new best fit for private protected areas, creating a private protected area institute, and expanding the state protected area network through the increased and systematic designation of private nature sanctuaries

Extraction of objects from legacy systems: an example using cobol legacy systems

In the last few years the interest in legacy information system has increased because of the escalating resources spent on their maintenance. On the other hand, the importance of extracting knowledge from business rules is becoming a crucial issue for modern business: sometime, because of inappropriate documentation, this knowledge is essentially only stored in the code. A way to improve their use and maintainability in the present environment is to migrate them into a new hardware / software platform reusing as much of their experience as possible during this process. This migration process promotes the population of a repository of reusable software components for their reuse in the development of a new system in that application domain or in the later maintenance processes. The actual trend in the migration of a legacy information system, is to exploit the potentialities of object oriented technology as a natural extension of earlier structured programming techniques. This is done by decomposing the program into several agent-like modules communicating via message passing, and providing to this system some object oriented key features. The key step is the "object isolation", i.e. the isolation of .groups of routines and related data items : to candidates in order to implement an abstraction in the application domain. The main idea of the object isolation method presented here is to extract information from the data flow, to cluster all the procedures on the base of their data accesses. It will examine "how" a procedure accesses the data in order to distinguish several types of accesses and to permit a better understanding of the functionality of the candidate objects. These candidate modules support the population of a repository of reusable software components that might be used as a basis of the process of evolution leading to a new object oriented system reusing the extracted objects

Quantifying the spatio-temporal dynamics of woody plant encroachment using an integrative remote sensing, GIS, and spatial modeling approach.

Despite a longstanding universal concern about and intensive research into woody plant encroachment (WPE)---the replacement of grasslands by shrub- and woodlands---our accumulated understanding of the process has either not been translated into sustainable rangeland management strategies or with only limited success. In order to increase our scientific insights into WPE, move us one step closer toward the sustainable management of rangelands affected by or vulnerable to the process, and identify needs for a future global research agenda, this dissertation presents an unprecedented critical, qualitative and quantitative assessment of the existing literature on the topic and evaluates the utility of an integrative remote sensing, GIS, and spatial modeling approach for quantifying the spatio-temporal dynamics of WPE.In sum, this dissertation demonstrates that integrative remote sensing, GIS, and spatial modeling approaches have enormous potential for addressing questions relevant to both rangelands research and management. However, it also suggests that much work remains to be done before we can translate our understanding of WPE into sustainable rangeland management strategies. In particular, we need to more fully explore the limitations and potentials of currently available data and techniques for quantifying WPE; build structures for data sharing and integration; develop a set of relevant standards; more actively engage in collaborative research efforts; and foster cross-cutting dialogues among researchers, managers, and communities.Specifically, this research demonstrates that the application of cutting-edge remote sensing techniques (Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis, fuzzy logic-based change detection) to conventional medium spatial and spectral resolution imagery (Landsat Thematic Mapper, Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus, ASTER) can be used to generate spatially explicit estimates of temporal changes in the abundance of woody plants and other surface materials. The research also shows that spatial models (Geographically Weighted Regression, Weights of Evidence, Weighted Logistic Regression) integrating this timely remotely sensed information with readily available GIS data can yield reasonably accurate estimates of an area's relative vulnerability to WPE and of the importance of anthropogenic and geoecological variables influencing the process. Such models may also be used for the testing of existing and generation of new scientific hypotheses about WPE, for evaluating the impact of natural or human-induced modifications of a landscape on the landscape's vulnerability to WPE, and for identifying target areas for conservation, restoration, or other management objectives.Findings from this research suggest that gaps in our current understanding of WPE and difficulties in devising sustainable rangeland management strategies are in part due to the complex spatio-temporal web of interactions between geoecological and anthropogenic variables involved in the process as well as limitations of presently available data and techniques. However, an in-depth analysis of the published literature also reveals that aforementioned problems are caused by two further crucial factors: the absence of information acquisition and reporting standards and the relative lack of long-term, large-scale, multi-disciplinary research efforts. The methodological framework proposed in this dissertation yields data that are easily standardized according to various criteria and facilitates the integration of spatially explicit data generated by a variety of studies. This framework may thus provide one common ground for scientists from a diversity of fields. Also, it has utility for both research and management