Transbasin water transfers

Presented at the 2001 USCID water management conference, Transbasin water transfers on June 27-30, 2001 in Denver, Colorado.It too often is the case that transbasin water transfer projects, worldwide, could be beneficial to an entire region and are well engineered and yet will never be constructed. This paper reviews social, political, financial, economic, and environmental factors that were dealt with in an effective manner by strong project advocates to realize the construction of the Laja Diguillin Irrigation Project. The Project is located in Region VIII of southern Chile. It stretches across nearly 100 kilometers of stream-dissected terrain to the south of the City of Chillan. The newly built primary transmission canal was designed to convey 1400 cusecs (40 cumecs) of diverted river flow from the Laja River, across six intermediate streams, to discharge some 28 miles (45 kilometers) distant into a pool created by a rubber dam on the Diguillin River. From this pool at the town of Bulnes the water is to be further diverted, along with flow of the Diguillin River, into a system of large primary irrigation canals. This transbasin diversion project was designed to provide economic uplift to the farmers of the region who had not participated in the near countrywide economic boom of the 199Os. Thus the Chilean Government chose to plan, design, and build the project while still maintaining the principle that the private sector should own, operate, and maintain irrigation projects. Additionally, the Directorate of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works was empowered, after some 50 years without designing a major irrigation project, to carry out with government financing the Laja Diguillin Project. The coalescence of factors that the Ministry recognized and made effective accommodations for may be grouped into four categories. They were: 1) advocacy, which was strongly provided by Directorate personnel; 2) social, characterized by the challenge to integrate newly enfranchised irrigators with existing water users and their organizations; 3) government, which as a dynamic emergent democracy with an established bureaucracy of skilled technocrats and economists was flexible and able to adopt new or innovative approaches; and 4) competing interests for water and land, embodied in three groups who actively opposed the project for environmental and commercial reasons

Traceability of the PGI product "Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale" by SNP markers

AbstractTraceability of meat has become a key aspect of food-quality assurance and a priority for EU countries, to meet consumer demand for comprehensive and integrated food safety policies. In this context, the traceability of animals and animal products at the breed level might play a key role as it would enable the certification of regional products linked to particular breeds. Technologies based on DNA analysis have the potential to achieve this goal bypassing the large scale and systematic biological sampling necessary for individual fingerprinting.The objective of this work was to test the power of a SNP panel to trace PGI "Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale", a product linked to three breeds: Chianina, Marchigiana and Romagnola.A total of 180 unrelated animals belonging to PGI-allowed breeds (Chianina n=22; Romagnola n=22; and Marchigiana n=22) and PGI-not allowed breeds (Piemontese n=22, Maremmana n=24, Italian Red Pied n=24, Italian Brown n=22, Italian Friesian n=22) were sampled and genoty..

Bovine SLC11A1 3´ UTR SSCP genotype evaluated by a macrophage in vitro killing assay employing a Brucella abortus strain

The 3¢ untranslated region (3¢ UTR) of the bovine natural resistanceassociated macrophage gene (NRAMP1 or SLC11A1) was genotyped in Colombian Creole Blanco Orejinegro (BON) (Bos taurus) (n = 140) and Zebu Brahman (Bos indicus) (Z) (n = 20) cattle and their crosses (BON · Zebu Brahman [B · Z] [n = 10]; Zebu Brahman · BON [Z · B] [n = 10]), and in animals from a Holstein · BON (H · B) (n = 10) cross. Direct sequencing and single-strand conformation polymorphism analysis (SSCP) helped in detecting the polymorphic behaviour. The association between resistance to brucellosis infection and SSCP genotype was evaluated using a macrophage in vitro killing assay employing a virulent Brucella abortus strain. The 3¢ UTR (GT) repeated polymorphism was gentoyped and its association with resistance to brucellosis was evaluated. When all breeds were grouped, a high frequency in the homozygote GT12 (AA genotype) (0.823) and a very low frequency in the homozygote GT10 (BB genotype) (0.047) were detected. The BON (0.963), Z · B (0.60) and H · B (1.00) cattle showed high GT12 allele frequencies, unlike that seen for the B · Z and Zebu cattle (0.3002 and 0.218, respectively). The GT10 allele was only found in the Zebu cattle (0.391). A significant association (p < 0.001) was found between the B. abortus macrophage in vitro killing assay phenotypes and the bovine SLC11A1 3¢ UTR genotypes, which suggests that the A allele may be associated with resistance. Because only nine animals had the BB genotype, the results require some confirmation in more extensive populations.Ganadería bovin

Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy for predicting the phospholipid fraction and the total fatty acid composition of freeze-dried beef

Peer reviewe

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei in the Southern Survey

We present a catalog of 191 extragalactic sources detected by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) at 148 GHz and/or 218 GHz in the 2008 Southern survey. Flux densities span 14-1700 mJy, and we use source spectral indices derived using ACT-only data to divide our sources into two sub-populations: 167 radio galaxies powered by central active galactic nuclei (AGN), and 24 dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs). We cross-identify 97% of our sources (166 of the AGN and 19 of the DSFGs) with those in currently available catalogs. When combined with flux densities from the Australian Telescope 20 GHz survey and follow-up observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array, the synchrotron-dominated population is seen to exhibit a steepening of the slope of the spectral energy distribution from 20 to 148 GHz, with the trend continuing to 218 GHz. The ACT dust-dominated source population has a median spectral index of 3.7+0.62-0.86, and includes both local galaxies and sources with redshifts as great as 5.6. Dusty sources with no counterpart in existing catalogs likely belong to a recently discovered subpopulation of DSFGs lensed by foreground galaxies or galaxy groups.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 4 table

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Selected Galaxy Clusters at 148 GHz from Three Seasons of Data

[Abridged] We present a catalog of 68 galaxy clusters, of which 19 are new discoveries, detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZ) at 148 GHz in the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) survey of 504 square degrees on the celestial equator. A subsample of 48 clusters within the 270 square degree region overlapping SDSS Stripe 82 is estimated to be 90% complete for M_500c > 4.5e14 Msun and 0.15 < z < 0.8. While matched filters are used to detect the clusters, the sample is studied further through a "Profile Based Amplitude Analysis" using a single filter at a fixed \theta_500 = 5.9' angular scale. This new approach takes advantage of the "Universal Pressure Profile" (UPP) to fix the relationship between the cluster characteristic size (R_500) and the integrated Compton parameter (Y_500). The UPP scalings are found to be nearly identical to an adiabatic model, while a model incorporating non-thermal pressure better matches dynamical mass measurements and masses from the South Pole Telescope. A high signal to noise ratio subsample of 15 ACT clusters is used to obtain cosmological constraints. We first confirm that constraints from SZ data are limited by uncertainty in the scaling relation parameters rather than sample size or measurement uncertainty. We next add in seven clusters from the ACT Southern survey, including their dynamical mass measurements based on galaxy velocity dispersions. In combination with WMAP7 these data simultaneously constrain the scaling relation and cosmological parameters, yielding \sigma_8 = 0.829 \pm 0.024 and \Omega_m = 0.292 \pm 0.025. The results include marginalization over a 15% bias in dynamical mass relative to the true halo mass. In an extension to LCDM that incorporates non-zero neutrino mass density, we combine our data with WMAP7+BAO+Hubble constant measurements to constrain \Sigma m_\nu < 0.29 eV (95% C. L.).Comment: 32 pages, 21 figures To appear in J. Cosmology and Astroparticle Physic