Snake eels (Ophichthidae) of the remote St. Peter and St. Paul’s Archipelago (Equatorial Atlantic) : Museum records after 37 years of shelf life

Despite of its major zoogeographical interest, the biological diversity of central Atlantic oceanic islands are still poorly known because of its remoteness. Incomplete species inventories are a hindrance to macroecology and conservation because knowledge on species distribution are important for identifying patterns and processes in biodiversity and for conservation planning. Records of the snake-eel family Ophichthidae for the St. Peter and St. Paul’s Archipelago, Brazil, are presented for the first time after revision of material collected and deposited in a museum collection 37 yrs ago. Specimens of Apterichtus kendalli and Herpetoichthys regius were collected using rotenone on sand bottoms and one Myrichthys sp. was observed and photographed swimming over a rocky reef. Remarkably, these species were not seen or collected in the St. Peter and St. Paul’s Archipelago ever since despite the substantial increase of biological expeditions over the past two decades, suggesting that the unjustified rotenone sampling prohibition in Brazil is hindering advancement of the nation’s biological diversity knowledge.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Economic and social impacts of logging at national forests - a study case at Brazil

Brazil has the largest tropical rainforests in the world and most of them are located at Amazon River basin area. During the last three decades, deforestation are growing very fast in this region, having negative impacts at local and global weather. In order to minimize these impacts and protect part of the biodiversity, Brazilian government established several national forests in this area, but just one have being explored, the Tapajós National Forest (known as Flona Tapajós). This paper evaluates the economic and social features of a reduced impact logging project conducted at Flona Tapajós from 1999 to 2003. It was coordinated by IBAMA (the Brazilian governmental agency responsible for managing National Forests), funded by ITTO (International Tropical Timber Organization) and conducted by Treviso Agropecuária Ltda (a private enterprise). This project is locally known as ITTO project. Basing on field interviews and examining IBAMA´s and Treviso´s documents, this paper concludes that ITTO project was highly profitable for the private company, in spite of the company had obeyed all Brazilian working laws, what is not very common at this Brazilian region. Treviso´s internal rate of return was 35.79%. ITTO project impacted significantly the community workers involved with the project and it was able to teach this population how to manage rainforests in order to produce timber without destroying them. The paper ends by suggesting some attitudes that Brazilian government can follow in its discussion about new reduced impact logging projects to be implemented at Flona Tapajós and other national forests by both private enterprises and local communities.

Functional Decomposition using Principal Subfields

Let $f\in K(t)$ be a univariate rational function. It is well known that any non-trivial decomposition $g \circ h$, with $g,h\in K(t)$, corresponds to a non-trivial subfield $K(f(t))\subsetneq L \subsetneq K(t)$ and vice-versa. In this paper we use the idea of principal subfields and fast subfield-intersection techniques to compute the subfield lattice of $K(t)/K(f(t))$. This yields a Las Vegas type algorithm with improved complexity and better run times for finding all non-equivalent complete decompositions of $f$.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for ISSAC'1