AQUACOAST: A Simulation Tool to Explore Coastal Groundwater and Irrigation Farming Interactions

In the framework of coastal groundwater-dependent irrigation agriculture, modelling becomes indispensable to know how this renewable resource responds to complex (usually not conceptualized nor monitored) biophysical, social, and economic interactions. Friendly user interfaces are essential to involve nonmodeling experts in exploiting and improving models. Decision support systems (DSS) are software systems that integrate models, databases, or other decision aids and package them in a way that decision makers can use. This paper addresses these two issues: firstly with the implementation of a System Dynamics (SD) model in Vensim software that considers the integration of hydrological, agronomic, and economic drivers and secondly with the design of a Venapp, push-button interfaces that allow users access to a Vensim model without going through the Vensim modelling environment. The prototype designed, the AQUACOAST tool, gives an idea of the possibilities of this type of models to identify and analyze the impact of apparently unrelated factors such as the prices of cultivated products, subsidies or exploitation costs on the advance of saltwater intrusion, and the great threat to coastal groundwater-dependent irrigation agriculture systems.This study was funded by the European Research Council grant agreement no. 647038 (BIODESERT)

La punta de muesca de tipo mediterráneo: análisis tecnológico y funcional

This paper deals with the study of the shouldered point of mediterranean type, coming from the Upper Evolved Solutrean levels of "La Cueva de Ambrosio” (Almería, Spain). This type of proyectile points are characterized from morphological and typometrical parameters. A theoretical model is also proposed to explain the manufacturing processes and their effect on the archaeological record. Finally, the exhaustive analysis of these arrowheads makes it possible to establish some hypotheses on the functioning of their set systems and propulsion systems.En este trabajo se aborda el estudio de las puntas de muesca de tipo mediterráneo, procedentes del yacimiento solutrense de La Cueva de Ambrosio (Vélez Blanco, Almería) y que se encuadran en el Solutrense Superior Evolucionado. Este tipo de proyectiles se caracterizan a partir de parámetros morfológicos y tipométricos. Asimismo, se propone un modelo teórico sobre los procesos de fabricación y su repercusión en el registro arqueológico. Por último, el análisis exhaustivo de estas puntas de proyectil permite establecer algunas hipótesis sobre su funcionalidad en relación a los sistemas de engaste y de propulsión

The Importance of Prevention in Tackling Desertification: An Approach to Anticipate Risks of Degradation in Coastal Aquifers

Groundwater degradation is a major issue on an increasingly hot and thirsty planet. The problem is critical in drylands, where recharge rates are low and groundwater is the only reliable resource in a context of water scarcity and stress. Aquifer depletion and contamination is a process of desertification. Land Degradation Neutrality is regarded as the main initiative to tackle land degradation and desertification. It is embedded in target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals and focused on preventing these dynamics. Within this framework, we present an approach to assess risks of degradation and desertification in coastal basins with aquifers threatened by seawater intrusion. The approach utilizes an integrated system dynamics model representing the main relationships between the aquifer and an intensively irrigated area (greenhouses) driven by short- and medium-term profitability. The study area is located in a semi-arid region in Southern Spain, the Gualchos stream basin, which contains the Castell de Ferro aquifer. We found that the risk of salinization of the aquifer is 73%, while there is a 70% risk that the system would increases its demand for surface water in the future, and the chance of doubling the current demand is almost 50%. If the current system of reservoirs in the area were not able to satisfy such an increase in demand because of climate change, the basin would be at a serious risk of desertification.This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC grant agreement 647038 (BIODESERT)) and by the project 101086497 funded by European Union’s Horizon-CL6-2022-Governance-01-07 research and innovation program

SAT: A Software for Assessing the Risk of Desertification in Spain

Desertification is a major global environmental issue exacerbated by climate change. Strategies to combat desertification include prevention which seeks to reverse the process before the system reaches the stable desertified state. One of these initiatives is to implement early warning tools. This paper presents SAT (the Spanish acronym for Early Warning System), a decision support system (DSS), for assessing the risk of desertification in Spain, where 20% of the land has already been desertified and 1% is in active degradation. SAT relies on three versions of a Generic Desertification Model (GDM) that integrates economics and ecology under the predator-prey paradigm. The models have been programmed using Vensim, a type of software used to build and simulate System Dynamics (SD) models. Through Visual Basic programming, these models are operated from the Excel environment. In addition to the basic simulation exercises, specially designed tools have been coupled to assess the risk of desertification and determine the ranking of the most influential factors of the process. The users targeted by SAT are government land-use planners as well as desertification experts. SAT tool is implemented for five case studies, each one of them representing a desertification syndrome identified in Spain. Given the general nature of the tool and the fact that all United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) signatory countries are committed to developing their National Plans to Combat Desertification (NPCD), SAT could be exported to regions threatened by desertification and expanded to cover more case studies.This work was funded by TRAGSATEC Public Enterprise on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Environment under Contract 23.674. The generic desertification model was developed under the umbrella of DeSurvey IP (European Commission FP6 Contract no. 003950). The paper was written within the framework of the project BIODESERT, funded by the European Research Council (ERC Grant agreement no. 647038)

Cognitive and pragmatic aspects of metonymy

Metonymy has been described by Lakoff and his co-workers as a conceptual mapping within a domain which involves a brand for' relationship between entities. In this article this conception is revised in order to draw clearer dividing lines between metonymy and metaphor, on the one hand, and between metonymy and related polysemy phenomena, on the other. Considerations of mapping types and of the status of source-target relationships are brought to bear for the understanding of metonymy; also, an analysis of how metonymies are used referentially and predicatively is provided, which introduces the pragmatic dimension into the account. Finally, it is stressed that a sound understanding of the cognitive processes underlying metonymic expressions allows us to understand berrer their communicative potential. Then, it is proposed that the actual communicative impon of metonymy (and of metaphor, for that matter) can be best studied with the help of some of the conceptual tools provided in pragmatics by Relevance Theory.La metonimia ha sido descrita por Lakoff y sus colaboradores como una proyección conceptual interna a un dominio en la que una entidad se usa para representar a otra. En este artículo se revisa esta concepción con el fin de trazar, de la forma más clara posible, los límites entre metonimia y metáfora, por una parte, y entre metonimia y otros fenómenos polisémicos relacionados, por otra. Se estudia la importancia de los distintos tipos de proyección y de la naturaleza de la relación entre los dominios fuente y mera para la comprensión del fenómeno metonímico. Asimismo se estudian los usos referencia1 y predicativo de la metonimia, lo que introduce la perspectiva pragmática en nuestro estudio. Como conclusión. se hace hincapié en que una buena comprensión de los procesos cognitivos que subyacen al uso de expresiones metonímicas nos permite entender mejor su potencial comunicativo. Finalmente, se defienden las ventajas de la aplicación al estudio del valor comunicativo de la metonimia de algunas de las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas en pragmática por la Teoría de la Relevancia, aplicación que se puede hacer extensible al caso de la metáfora

Principios cognitivos y pragmáticos del procesamiento y la comprensión

En Lingüística Cognitiva se sostiene como fundamental lo que Lakoff (1990) ha denominado el compromiso cognitivo, según el cual el lingüista debe incorporar en su descripción cuantas categorías empíricas, procedentes de las ciencias cognitivas, sea posible. Sin embargo, este compromiso, llevado a su extremo lógico, puede llegar a dejar en un segundo plano el potencial explicativo de las propias herramientas de análisis puramente lingüístico. En este trabajo se explora el problema de la comprensión lingüística del lenguaje (especialmente el figurado) mediante métodos puramente lingüísticos, pero cuyos resultados son compatibles con los fundamentos de la teoría de los modelos cognitivos idealizados, de inspiración empírica.

Assessing the sensitivity of a Mediterranean commercial rangeland to droughts under climate change scenarios by means of a multidisciplinary integrated model

Rangeland productivity is strongly conditioned by the amount and temporal distribution of precipitation. Thus, the worsening of droughts with climate change could be a serious threat to their existence. This paper presents a modelling study aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of a valuable type of commercial rangelands, namely Spanish dehesas, to increases in the frequency and intensity of droughts driven by climate change. The assessment consisted in a multi-way ANOVA carried out on the basis of 5400 simulations of a multidisciplinary integrated model. It included two blocking factors linked to climate change scenarios, namely Representative Concentration Pathway and downscaling method, and two treatment factors, namely return period and severity of droughts. The levels of all factors were included as part of the simulation scenarios. The response variables constituted a summary of model's behaviour throughout one simulation. They were average profits per farmer and average stocking rate, both calculated over the entire simulation period, and remaining soil depth at the end of the simulation. The effects of the treatment factors on the response variables were small for all blocks, thereby suggesting that the sensitivity, and thus the vulnerability, of Spanish dehesas to the worsening of droughts would be low under climate change. Farmers were defined as conservative in all model simulations, that is, they minimized changes in the size of their herds and bought supplementary feed to meet shortfalls in livestock feed unless it was excessively expensive. Thus, we conclude that this group strategy could explain the adaptive capacity of Spanish dehesas to droughts. This paper shows that multidisciplinary integrated models are valuable learning tools to acquire insights into the relationships between climate, ecologic and socio-economic factors. Although there is a recurrent call for holistic studies, they are still rare in the rangeland literature. Hopefully, this paper will motivate some researchers to consider this approach.This paper was written within the framework of Junta de Andalucía Research Project ‘Mesotopos: Habitat Conservation and Land Degradation in Andalucía’ P08 RNM-4023. The partial support of the Chilean FONDECYT Research Project 1161105 is also acknowledged. The authors are funded by the European Research Council grant agreement n◦ 647038 (BIODESERT)

Pulsating emission of droplets from an electrified meniscus.

A numerical description is given for the pulsating emission of droplets from an electrified meniscus of an inviscid liquid of infinite electrical conductivity which is injected at a constant flow rate into a region of uniform, continuous or time periodic, electric field. Under a continuous field, the meniscus attains a periodic regime in which bursts of tiny droplets are emitted from its tip. At low electric fields this regime consists of sequences of emission bursts interspersed with sequences of meniscus oscillations without droplet emission, while at higher fields the bursts occur periodically. These results are in qualitative agreement with experimental results in the literature. Under a time periodic electric field with square waveform, the electric stress that acts on the surface of the liquid while the field is on may generate a tip that emits tiny droplets or may accelerate part of the meniscus and lead to a second emission mode in which a few large droplets are emitted after the electric field is turned off. Conditions under which each emission mode or a combination of the two are realized are discussed for low frequency oscillatory fields. A simplified model is proposed for high electric field frequencies, of the order of the capillary frequency of the meniscus. This model allows computing the average emission rate as a function of the amplitude, duration and bias of the electric field square wave, and shows that droplet emission fails to follow the applied field above a certain frequenc

Regímenes cambiarios de iure y de facto. El caso de la peseta/dólar, 1965-1998

En este trabajo se aplican tres procedimientos estadísticos alternativos al tipo de cambio peseta/dólar norteamericano, con el objetivo de conocer el verdadero régimen cambiario al que estuvo sujeto durante el período 1965-1998. El estudio toma la perspectiva que señala la divergencia entre regímenes cambiario de facto y de iure. Los resultados indican que la peseta, al igual que otras monedas, no exhibió el régimen flotante que de iure tenía en relación al dólar durante las tres últimas décadas de su existencia. Por el contrario, el tipo de cambio peseta/dólar se movió dentro de un corredor más bien estrecho en dichos años.In this paper we apply three different statistical procedures to the peseta/dollar exchange rate with the aim of discovering the true foreign exchange regime followed by the monetary authorities during the 1965-1998 period. The study´s perspective emphasizes the divergence between de jure and de facto exchange regimes. The results seem to imply that the peseta, as well as other currencies, did not exhibit the floating regime that de jure had in relation to the US dollar in the last three decades of its existence. On the contrary, the peseta/dollar exchange rate moved within rather narrow fluctuation bands during those years.Apoyo financiero del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Plan Nacional I+D: SEJ-2005 09094/ECON)Publicad

Entanglement of excited states in critical spin chians

Renyi and von Neumann entropies quantifying the amount of entanglement in ground states of critical spin chains are known to satisfy a universal law which is given by the Conformal Field Theory (CFT) describing their scaling regime. This law can be generalized to excitations described by primary fields in CFT, as was done in reference (Alcaraz et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 201601 (2011)), of which this work is a completion. An alternative derivation is presented, together with numerical verifications of our results in different models belonging to the c=1,1/2 universality classes. Oscillations of the Renyi entropy in excited states and descendant fields are also discussed.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure