Linking farm management and ecosystem service provision: Challenges and opportunities for soil erosion prevention in Mediterranean silvo-pastoral systems

At both local and landscape levels, farm management is the main driver of land cover change influencing ecosystem functions, processes and traits. In Mediterranean large-scale silvo-pastoral systems these changes can have serious implications in the provision of valuable ecosystem services (ES). Current ES assessment, mapping and valuation are still focused in representing the state and trends of ES provision, often missing the link to actual farm management and farm management systems. We propose an approach that, at the farm level, combines the classification of farm management systems with indicators of ES provision. This is illustrated for soil erosion prevention, a key ES in mitigating current and future impacts in Mediterranean regions and the proposed approach is tested in Southern Portugal. We characterize thirty-eight large-scale farm management units (FMU) regarding their management system and environmental traits. Each FMU was then classified according to their management system and a set of ES indicators was calculated. To classify the FMU, data on livestock composition and grazing density, pastures, and soil mobilization practices were object of a cluster analysis and the result was tested against a set of ES indicators. The results highlight the implications and challenges for the provision of soil erosion prevention under different farm management systems and draw a clear relation between more intensive management practices and the degradation of service provision. Our results can also be used to support land management and policy design through the definition of intensity thresholds that consider the local environmental and ecological condition

Policy impacts on regulating ecosystem services: looking at the implications of 60 years of landscape change on soil erosion prevention in a Mediterranean silvo-pastoral system

Context: Policy decisions form a major driver of land use change, with important implications for socially and environmentally susceptible regions. It is well known that there can be major unintended consequences, especially where policies are not tailored to regionally specific contexts. Objectives: In this paper we assess the implications of 60 years of agricultural policies on soil erosion prevention (SEP) by vegetation, an essential regulating ecosystem service in Mediterranean Europe. Methods: To assess these implications we produced and analysed a time series of land cover/use and environmental conditions datasets (from 1951 to 2012) in relation to changing agricultural policies for a specific region in the southern Portugal. A set of indicators related to SEP allowed us to identify that land use intensification as increased soil erosion in the last 60 years. Results: Particularly in the last 35 years, as a consequence of headage payments for cattle, the agricultural policy had a significant effect in the density and renewal of the tree cover, resulting in drastic effects for the provision of the SEP service. These are more significant after 1986, coinciding with the implementation of several Common Agricultural Policy instruments focused on increasing the modernization and productivity capacity of farm systems. Conclusions: The results show some unintended effects of agricultural policy mechanisms on ecosystem service provision and highlight the need for context-based policies, tailored to the environmental constrains and potentials of each region

Assessing the ability of rural areas to fulfill multiple societal demands

Rural areas are changing through a process of multifunctional transition. New societal expectations, including countryside consumption and protection, increasingly determine the way rural space is used. There is a pressing need to grasp the new relative balance between these drivers of the rural space, in each particular area, in order to target public intervention. Tackling differentiation within rural space will definitely contribute to developing the potential and vocation of each area while supporting territorial cohesion. In this context, sound analytical knowledge that reveals and characterizes this differentiation is required and novel analytical approaches are needed for this knowledge to be obtained. Based on the conceptual framework proposed by Holmes (2006, 2012), this paper presents two methodological pathways for defining a typology of European regions that considers the multifunctionality of rural areas today and the relative weight of the dimensions of production, protection and consumption. The classification is produced at Nomenclature Territorial Unit NUTS 2 level, using information derived from European statistical datasets compiling different cartographic sources. One of the methods used to develop a typology was a clustering approach while the other method used was an expert-based analytical procedure. Even when the limitations stemming from the data available for the whole of Europe are considered, the results are encouraging. The results show two different regional distributions in Europe. These distributions, which have some similarities but also certain differences, both reveal the general characteristics of NUTS 2 regions and shed new light on the ways in which societal expectations for production, protection and consumption might be spatially reconciled. The expert-based approach seems to produce a more faithful classification. Both typologies result in most regions being classified as pluri-active, or complex or multifunctional, which may indicate that multiple modes of rural occupancy are widely found in each region and therefore that a more detailed scale of analysis would be more likely to enable evidence-based decisions to be made

The mean field theory of spin glasses: the heuristic replica approach and recent rigorous results

The mathematically correct computation of the spin glasses free energy in the infinite range limit crowns 25 years of mathematic efforts in solving this model. The exact solution of the model was found many years ago by using a heuristic approach; the results coming from the heuristic approach were crucial in deriving the mathematical results. The mathematical tools used in the rigorous approach are quite different from those of the heuristic approach. In this note we will review the heuristic approach to spin glasses in the light of the rigorous results; we will also discuss some conjectures that may be useful to derive the solution of the model in an alternative way.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; lecture at the Flato Colloquia Day, Thursday 27 November, 200

Modeling DNA Structure, Elasticity and Deformations at the Base-pair Level

We present a generic model for DNA at the base-pair level. We use a variant of the Gay-Berne potential to represent the stacking energy between neighboring base-pairs. The sugar-phosphate backbones are taken into account by semi-rigid harmonic springs with a non-zero spring length. The competition of these two interactions and the introduction of a simple geometrical constraint leads to a stacked right-handed B-DNA-like conformation. The mapping of the presented model to the Marko-Siggia and the Stack-of-Plates model enables us to optimize the free model parameters so as to reproduce the experimentally known observables such as persistence lengths, mean and mean squared base-pair step parameters. For the optimized model parameters we measured the critical force where the transition from B- to S-DNA occurs to be approximately $140{pN}$. We observe an overstretched S-DNA conformation with highly inclined bases that partially preserves the stacking of successive base-pairs.Comment: 15 pages, 25 figures. submitted to PR

Desarrollo de aderezos con harina de amaranto y harina de quinua.

El uso de aderezos es muy amplio debido al sabor que aportan a nuestras comidas, dentro de los ingredientes que se usan para su elaboración se encuentra la yema de huevo. El inconveniente es que posee gran cantidad de colesterol, un huevo contiene aproximadamente 200 mg de colesterol, que casi cumple con el límite de la ingesta alimentaria establecido por la American Heart Association de <300mg/día (Sun et al., 2011). El objetivo de este trabajo fue desarrollar aderezos empleando harina de quinua y amaranto como emulsificantes, sustituyendo a la yema de huevo. Se elaboraron los aderezos empleando: sal, vinagre, azúcar y agua; como emulsificantes: yema de huevo, harina de amaranto y harina de quinua. Las formulaciones se presentan en la Tabla I. Se midieron las curvas de flujo y el tamaño de partícula de los aderezos. Las tasas de cremado para los aderezos ADCtrl (Aderezo Control), AD Quinoa (Aderezo Quinoa) y AD Amaranto (Aderezo Amaranto) fueron: 3.67 x 10-7, 1.33 x 10-7 y 4.67 x 10-7. Todos los aderezos presentaron n < 1 (índice de fujo), siendo todos pseudoplásticos. Es posible elaborar aderezos estables empleando la harina de quinua y amaranto

The AdS(4) x CP(3) string and its Bethe equations in the near plane wave limit

We perform a detailed study of bosonic type IIA string theory in a large light-cone momentum / near plane wave limit of $AdS_4 \times CP_3$. In order to attain this we derive the Hamiltonian up to cubic and quartic order in number of fields and calculate the energies for string excitations in a $R\times S^2 \times S^2$ subspace. The computation for the string energies is performed for arbitrary length excitations utilizing an unitary transformation which allows us to remove the cubic terms in the Hamiltonian. We then rewrite a recent set of proposed all loop Bethe equations in a light-cone language and compare their predictions with the obtained string energies. We find perfect agreement.Comment: 28 pages, references and footnote adde