Models for a Better Management of Linear Parks

This project provides a strategy to improve the quality of linear parks. It is based on recognizing the type of linear park in question through the activities carried out by users and the structural and functional characteristics of the green area. With this information we can establish or check the existence of essential elements to guarantee benefits to users. Three conceptual models were defined from four linear parks in the metropolis of Buenos Aires and the city of Formosa according to the supply and demand of the services they offer. For which it was necessary to consider the infrastructures and vegetation they present, uses and benefits of the linear parks and the activities that are carried out

Ground-based monitoring of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko gas activity throughout the <i>Rosetta</i> mission

Simultaneously to the ESA Rosetta mission, a world-wide ground-based campaign provided measurements of the large scale activity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through measurement of optically active gas species and imaging of the overall dust coma. We present more than two years of observations performed with the FORS2 low resolution spectrograph at the VLT, TRAPPIST, and ACAM at the WHT. We focus on the evolution of the CN production, as a tracer of the comet activity. We find that it is asymmetric with respect to perihelion and different from that of the dust. The CN emission is detected for the first time at 1.34 au pre-perihelion and production rates then increase steeply to peak about two weeks after perihelion at (1.00±0.10) ×1025 molecules s−1, while the post-perihelion decrease is more shallow. The evolution of the comet activity is strongly influenced by seasonal effects, with enhanced CN production when the Southern hemisphere is illuminated

A Dendrogeomorphological Study of the Local Effect of Climate Change

The climatic and environmental conditions of Patagonia changed substantially after 1850 and after the mid-1970s decade. The impact of these changes is being observed in the new configuration of rivers and their riverine vegetation. The objective of this work is to integrate dendrogeomorphological techniques to the mapping and modeling of the recent distribution of vegetation of the riverine landscape, as an indicator of the local effect of climate change.The hydrological regime and the evolution of riparian vegetation at the confluence of the Cuyin Manzano and Traful Rivers were synchronized using the data obtained from 34 samples of plots of 6x6 meters. The plots were adjusted to the pixel resolution of two SPOT 7 satellite images (flood and dryness), concentric to an area of 18x18 meters, in order to validate a supervised classification of vegetation, belonging to different fluvial geoforms. In the plots with woody vegetation two trees corresponding to one or two age classes characteristic of the stands were drilled. The results indicate that, in agreement with global and Patagonia climate change estimates, there is a slight tendency of change in the flood and drought regime, with decreases in mean annual minimum flows and a period of drought in the last six years. The most outstanding result of our study indicates that the change of the hydrological regime implies a slight reduction of the average minimum flows, without this entailing a modification of the regime of flood pulses that in some cases are very extreme. This situation has a marked incidence in the fact that the woody vegetation colonizes new substrates and emerged landforms, while it is affected by frequent and intense flood events, with a change of the compositions and distribution of the vegetation

Constructed Images of Iguazú National Park (Argentina) Related to Visitors’ Origins

We analyzed the perceptions of tourists visiting the famous waterfalls in Iguazú National Park to define how they envisaged the park with their constructed images. Nine hundred and seventy six questionnaires were completed by personally interviewing visitors in February and April 2011. They were asked to describe the park by choosing between 17 fixed features (tranquility, grandiosity, water, harmony, beauty, horizon, sound of nature, colors, rainforest, extension, green, maintenance, animals, diversity, nature, peace and wilderness) and also an open option. The constructed images were classified in categories of Beauty, Sublime, Picturesque and Spiritual and explored with SPSS and multivariate analyses. Results showed that the appeal of the waterfalls is multidimensional, combining different elements of the Picturesque, Sublime, Beauty, and also Spiritual, categories in different proportions. We identified associations between visitors’ origins and the constructed images among groups of visitors from North America, Latin-America, Europe, Australia, South Africa and East Asia. We confirmed the widespread election of picturesque and sublime features as visions with which to describe the national park. Water, beauty and grandiosity were the main features mentioned. Peace, tranquility and horizon were found as possible explanations for the divergence in visions between the six groups studied, especially segregating East Asians and South Africans from the other groups. The observed similarities and differences in the constructed images of Iguazú National Park of visitors coming from different parts of the world could be explained by both evolutionary and cultural frameworks. Some recommendations for park management and city planning are given

Espacios verdes urbanos, fortalezas, amenazas y oportunidades de mejora

En términos de sustentabilidad es preciso entender, diseñar y manejar el verde urbano adecuadamente desde una perspectiva ecológica, estética y recreativa (FTL-HSR & ZSA 2006). Se presentan aquí a modo de ejemplos resultados de investigaciones realizadas en Buenos Aires, Salzburgo y Munich, que aportan ideas sobre el valor de los espacios verdes y de las problemáticas a los cuales se enfrentan.Fil: Breuste, Juergen. Lodron-Paris University; AustriaFil: Artmann, A..Fil: Wurster, D..Fil: Voigt, Annette. University of Salzburg. Department of Geography and Geology; AustriaFil: Faggi, Ana Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales; Argentin

Stochastic Coherence Over Attention Trajectory For Continuous Learning In Video Streams

Devising intelligent agents able to live in an environment and learn by observing the surroundings is a longstanding goal of Artificial Intelligence. From a bare Machine Learning perspective, challenges arise when the agent is prevented from leveraging large fully-annotated dataset, but rather the interactions with supervisory signals are sparsely distributed over space and time. This paper proposes a novel neural-network-based approach to progressively and autonomously develop pixel-wise representations in a video stream. The proposed method is based on a human-like attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn by observing what is moving in the attended locations. Spatio-temporal stochastic coherence along the attention trajectory, paired with a contrastive term, leads to an unsupervised learning criterion that naturally copes with the considered setting. Differently from most existing works, the learned representations are used in open-set class-incremental classification of each frame pixel, relying on few supervisions. Our experiments leverage 3D virtual environments and they show that the proposed agents can learn to distinguish objects just by observing the video stream. Inheriting features from state-of-the art models is not as powerful as one might expect