FARM BENEFITS AND NATURAL RESOURCE PROJECTS IN HONDURAS AND EL SALVADOR

A model of conservation adoption, diversification and household income, including farm and off-farm sources was formalized, wherein households simultaneously allocate assets to different activities. The mapping of assets to household income through both off and on farm activities can conceptually be considered as a production process, with assets corresponding to factors of production and income as the output. Either adoption of conservation technologies and farm output diversification are influenced by participation in natural resource management programs. Therefore, these technological improvements should foster farm production and productivity and, consequently, should be reflected in a greater household income,. Finally, household income improvement is considered a necessary condition for sustainability of the changes introduced by the projects. Overall, the results indicate that the variables more directly reflecting land allocation, such as area with staples and cash crops, output diversification and conservation practices are associated with the greatest gains in household income. Output diversification significantly decreases income from staple crops and greatly increases cash crop income. These results reaffirm the strategic role of diversification in fighting rural poverty. However, gains stemming from a more diversified income portfolio do not occur without cost, since an extra item added to the farm plan implies a reduction in the production of corn and beans (staples). This trade-off between diversification and subsistence food production suggests that switching to a more market-oriented production pattern may increase household food insecurity.Consumer/Household Economics,

Smoothing of land use maps for trend and change detection in urbanization

Urban sprawl and its evolution over relatively short periods of time demands that we develop statistical tools to make best use of the routinely produced land use data from satellites. An efficient smoothing framework to estimate spatial patterns in binary raster maps derived from land use datasets is developed and presented in this paper. The framework is motivated by the need to model urbanization, specifically urban sprawl, and also its temporal evolution. We frame the problem as estimation of a probability of urbanization surface and use Bayesian P-splines as the tool of choice. Once such a probability map is produced, with associated uncertainty, we develop exploratory tools to identify regions of significant change across space and time. The proposal is used to study urbanisation and its development around the city of Bologna, Emilia Romagna, Italy, using land use data from the Cartography Archive of Emilia Romagna Region for the period 1976–2008

A new bursting X-ray transient: SAX J1750.8-2900

We have analysed in detail the discovery measurements of the X-ray burster SAX J1750.8-2900 by the Wide Field Cameras on board BeppoSAX in spring 1997, at a position ~1.2 degrees off the Galactic Centre. The source was in outburst on March 13th when the first observation started and showed X-ray emission for ~ 2 weeks. A total of 9 bursts were detected, with peak intensities varying from ~ 0.4 to 1.0 Crab in the 2-10 keV range. Most bursts showed a fast rise time (~ 1s), an exponential decay profile with e-folding time of ~ 5s, spectral softening during decay, and a spectrum which is consistent with few keV blackbody radiation. These features identify them as type-I X-ray bursts of thermonuclear origin. The presence of type-I bursts and the source position close to the Galactic Centre favours the classification of this object as a neutron star low mass X-ray binary. X-ray emission from SAX J1750.8-2900 was not detected in the previous and subsequent Galactic bulge monitoring, and the source was never seen bursting again.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Postscript figures, aaspp4 styl

Bright X-ray bursts from 1E 1724-3045 in Terzan 2

During about 3 years wide field monitoring of the Galactic Center region by the WFC telescopes on board the BeppoSAX satellite, a total of 14 type-I X-ray bursts were detected from the burster 1E 1724-3045 located in the globular cluster Terzan 2. All the observed events showed evidence for photospheric radius expansion due to Eddington-limit burst luminosity, thus leading to an estimate of the source distance (~7.2 kpc). Preliminary results of the analysis of the bursts are presented.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Proc. 5th Compton Symp., Portsmouth 199