Extending the Bajo de Sico, Puerto Rico, Seasonal Closure: An Examination of Small-scale Fishermen’s Perceptions of Possible Socio-economic Impacts on Fishing Practices, Families, and Community

Despite considerable conservation efforts, many reef fish fisheries around the world continue to be in peril. Many are vulnerable to overexploitation because they have predictable and highly aggregated spawning events. In U.S. Caribbean waters, fishery managers are increasingly interested in advancing the use of closed areas as a means for rebuilding reef fisheries, protecting coral reef habitats, and furthering ecosystem-based management while maintaining the sustained participation of local fishing communities. This study details small-scale fishermen’s views on the Caribbean Fishery Management Council’s proposals to lengthen the current Bajo de Sico seasonal closure off the west coast of Puerto Rico to afford additional protection to snapper-grouper spawning populations and associated coral reef habitats. Drawing on snowball sampling techniques, we interviewed 65 small-scale fishermen who regularly operate in the Bajo de Sico area. Snowball sampling is a useful method to sample difficult-to-find populations. Our analysis revealed that the majority of the respondents opposed a longer seasonal closure in the Bajo de Sico area, believing that the existing 3-month closure afforded ample protection to reef fish spawning aggregations and that their gear did not impact deep-water corals in the area. Whilst fishermen’s opposition to additional regulations was anticipated, the magnitude of the socio-economic consequences described was unexpected. Fishermen estimated that a year round closure would cause their gross household income to fall between 10% and 80%, with an average drop of 48%. Our findings suggest that policy analysts and decision-makers should strive to better understand the cumulative impacts of regulations given the magnitude of the reported socio-economic impacts; and, more importantly, they should strive to enhance the existing mechanisms by which fishermen can contribute their knowledge and perspectives into the management process

The inhomogeneous Suslov problem

We consider the Suslov problem of nonholonomic rigid body motion with inhomogeneous constraints. We show that if the direction along which the Suslov constraint is enforced is perpendicular to a principal axis of inertia of the body, then the reduced equations are integrable and, in the generic case, possess a smooth invariant measure. Interestingly, in this generic case, the first integral that permits integration is transcendental and the density of the invariant measure depends on the angular velocities. We also study the Painlev\'e property of the solutions.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Discrete harmonic analysis associated with ultraspherical expansions

We study discrete harmonic analysis associated with ultraspherical orthogonal functions. We establish weighted l^p-boundedness properties of maximal operators and Littlewood-Paley g-functions defined by Poisson and heat semigroups generated by certain difference operator. We also prove weighted l^p-boundedness properties of transplantation operators associated to the system of ultraspherical functions. In order to show our results we previously establish a vector-valued local Calder\'on-Zygmund theorem in our discrete setting

Conical square functions associated with Bessel, Laguerre and Schr\"odinger operators in UMD Banach spaces

In this paper we consider conical square functions in the Bessel, Laguerre and Schr\"odinger settings where the functions take values in UMD Banach spaces. Following a recent paper of Hyt\"onen, van Neerven and Portal, in order to define our conical square functions, we use $\gamma$-radonifying operators. We obtain new equivalent norms in the Lebesgue-Bochner spaces $L^p((0,\infty ),\mathbb{B})$ and $L^p(\mathbb{R}^n,\mathbb{B})$, $1<p<\infty$, in terms of our square functions, provided that $\mathbb{B}$ is a UMD Banach space. Our results can be seen as Banach valued versions of known scalar results for square functions

Riesz transforms, Cauchy-Riemann systems and amalgam Hardy spaces

In this paper we study Hardy spaces $\mathcal{H}^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$, $0<p,q<\infty$, modeled over amalgam spaces $(L^p,\ell^q)(\mathbb{R}^d)$. We characterize $\mathcal{H}^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ by using first order classical Riesz transforms and compositions of first order Riesz transforms depending on the values of the exponents $p$ and $q$. Also, we describe the distributions in $\mathcal{H}^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ as the boundary values of solutions of harmonic and caloric Cauchy-Riemann systems. We remark that caloric Cauchy-Riemann systems involve fractional derivative in the time variable. Finally we characterize the functions in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^d) \cap \mathcal{H}^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ by means of Fourier multipliers $m_\theta$ with symbol $\theta(\cdot/|\cdot|)$, where $\theta \in C^\infty(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$ and $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ denotes the unit sphere in $\mathbb{R}^d$.Comment: 24 page

Solutions of Weinstein equations representable by Bessel Poisson integrals of BMO functions

We consider the Weinstein type equation $\mathcal{L}_\lambda u=0$ on $(0,\infty )\times (0,\infty )$, where $\mathcal{L}_\lambda=\partial _t^2+\partial _x^2-\frac{\lambda (\lambda -1)}{x^2}$, with $\lambda >1$. In this paper we characterize the solutions of $\mathcal{L}_\lambda u=0$ on $(0,\infty )\times(0,\infty )$ representable by Bessel-Poisson integrals of BMO-functions as those ones satisfying certain Carleson properties

Lepton flavor violating decays of vector mesons

We estimate the rates of lepton flavor violating decays of the vector mesons $\rho, \omega, \phi \to e \mu$. The theoretical tools are based on an effective Lagrangian approach without referring to any specific realization of the physics beyond the standard model responsible for lepton flavor violation (\Lfv). The effective lepton-vector meson couplings are extracted from the existing experimental bounds on the nuclear $\mu^--e^-$ conversion. In particular, we derive an upper limit for the \Lfv branching ratio ${\rm Br}(\phi \to e \mu) \leq1.3 \times 10^{-21}$ which is much more stringent than the recent experimental result ${\rm Br}(\phi \to e \mu) < 2 \times 10^{-6}$ presented by the SND Collaboration. Very tiny limits on \Lfv decays of vector mesons derived in this letter make direct experimental observation of these processes unrealistic.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.