The Rise and Fall of the Ebro Water Transfer

This article analyzes the Ebro inter-basin transfer, which was the main project of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan. The Ebro transfer was prompted by pervasive pressures, scarcity and degradation of Southeastern basins in Spain. The heated policy debate on the Ebro transfer, highlights the difficulties of achieving a sustainable water management, because of the conflicting interests of stakeholders and regions. Alternatives to the Ebro transfer show that, acceptable outcomes combine demand and supply measures. Nevertheless, implementation could be difficult and requires compensation to farmers, otherwise an excessive burden on farmers would be met by social opposition leading to the failure of measures

Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots

J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012 Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within a known environment

Indices of O-regular variation for weight functions and weight sequences

A plethora of spaces in Functional Analysis (Braun-Meise-Taylor and Carleman ultradifferentiable and ultraholomorphic classes; Orlicz, Besov, Lipschitz, Lebesque spaces, to cite the main ones) are defined by means of a weighted structure, obtained from a weight function or sequence subject to standard conditions entailing desirable properties (algebraic closure, stability under operators, interpolation, etc.) for the corresponding spaces. The aim of this paper is to stress or reveal the true nature of these diverse conditions imposed on weights, appearing in a scattered and disconnected way in the literature: they turn out to fall into the framework of O-regular variation, and many of them are equivalent formulations of one and the same feature. Moreover, we study several indices of regularity/growth for both functions and sequences, which allow for the rephrasing of qualitative properties in terms of quantitative statements.Comment: 37 page

Selección de presas por el caracolero (Rostrhamus sociabilis) en cuerpos de agua permanentes y temporarios del centro de Argentina.

– En este estudio se analizó el patrón de selección de presas del caracolero (Rostrhamus sociabilis) sobre el caracol de agua dulce Pomacea canaliculata en la provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Para esto se colectaron los restos presa de esta especie bajo las perchas de alimentación del caracolero y se colectaron individuos vivos de P. canaliculata en cinco cuerpos de agua temporarios y en tres lagunas. En cada localidad de muestreo, se comparó la distribución de frecuencias de los tamaños de los caracoles colectados de la población y de los caracoles predados por el caracolero. El caracolero seleccionó el tamaño de sus presas en todas las localidades; sin embargo, al patrón de selección difirió entre los diferentes tipos de ambientes. En las lagunas, el caracolero seleccionó presas de tamaño intermedio, pero en los cuerpos de agua temporarios seleccionó tanto las presas intermedias como las de mayor tamaño. A pesar de esto, el tamaño promedio de los caracoles predados en los cuerpos de agua temporarios fue 8–17 mm menor que en las lagunas. Las estimaciones de abundancia de caracoles (y, presumiblemente, su disponibilidad para los caracoleros) fueron mayores en los cuerpos de agua temporarios que en las lagunas. Las diferencias en la abundancia de presas y en la fisonomía del hábitat entre ambientes podrían ser responsables de las diferencias en el patrón de selección de presas observado.Prey selection by snail kites (Rostrhamus sociabilis) on freshwater apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) was studied in permanent and temporary wetlands in Buenos Aires province, Central Argentina. Live individuals of P. canaliculata and prey remains of this species left under perches by snail kites were collected in five temporary and three permanent wetlands. Frequency distributions of size of live and preyed-upon snails were compared at each sampling locality. Although snail kites selected prey by size both in temporary and permanent wetlands, the pattern of prey selection differed between wetland types. Snail kites selected prey of intermediate size in permanent wetlands but in temporary wetlands they selected for intermediate and large-sized snails. In spite of this selection pattern, snail preyed by snail kites in temporary wetlands was on average 8–17 mm smaller than in permanent wetlands. Estimates of snail abundance (and presumably prey availability) were higher in temporary wetlands than in permanent wetlands. Differences in habitat physiognomy and in snail abundance between both types of habitat could be responsible for differences in the pattern of prey selection between wetland types.Fil: Mapelli, Fernando Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia"; ArgentinaFil: Kittlein, Marcelo Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras; Argentin

A Phragm\'en-Lindel\"of theorem via proximate orders, and the propagation of asymptotics

We prove that, for asymptotically bounded holomorphic functions in a sector in $\mathbb{C}$, an asymptotic expansion in a single direction towards the vertex with constraints in terms of a logarithmically convex sequence admitting a nonzero proximate order entails asymptotic expansion in the whole sector with control in terms of the same sequence. This generalizes a result by A. Fruchard and C. Zhang for Gevrey asymptotic expansions, and the proof strongly rests on a suitably refined version of the classical Phragm\'en-Lindel\"of theorem, here obtained for functions whose growth in a sector is specified by a nonzero proximate order in the sense of E. Lindel\"of and G. Valiron.Comment: 20 page

The surjectivity of the Borel mapping in the mixed setting for ultradifferentiable ramification spaces

We consider r-ramification ultradifferentiable classes, introduced by J. Schmets and M. Valdivia in order to study the surjectivity of the Borel map, and later on also exploited by the authors in the ultraholomorphic context. We characterize quasianalyticity in such classes, extend the results of Schmets and Valdivia about the image of the Borel map in a mixed ultradifferentiable setting, and obtain a version of the Whitney extension theorem in this framework.Comment: 31 pages; this version has been accepted for publication in Monatsh. Mat