Sustainable Planning of Land Use Changes in farming areas under ecological protection

Land use has been changing in the last decades because of agricultural intensification and land abandonment which implies deterioration in the optimum habitat structure and quality. Habitat degradation and loss, resulting from changes in land use remain significant drivers of biodiversity loss. These trends are widely recognised and have forced national and international agencies to identify protected sites for natural areas with high biodiversity value. Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are natural zones particularly relevant for nature conservation. Regional planning is bound to play an increasing role in nature conservation policies because much biodiversity is located in farming areas outside natural parks. Agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin has always been highly dependent on rainfed crops, cereal, vine and olive. Vine growing plays an important role not only from the economic point of view, but also environmentally as a permanent plant cover in terms of preventing erosion, managing land and water resources in a sustainable way, defending against desertification an settling population in rural areas. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to implement a decision tool system to analyse the feasibility of new proposals to upgrade traditional vineyards in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. The study focuses on the sustainability of current farming practices in Special Protection Areas for Steppe Land Birds. This paper presents a model to quantify the resulting habitat fragmentation basing on infrastructure facilities, leading to mapping areas where to apply restriction measures to prevent physical destruction of the habita

An empirical calibration of nebular abundances based on the sulphur emission lines

We present an empirical calibration of nebular abundances based on the strong emission lines of [SII] and [SIII] in the red part of the spectrum through the definition of a sulphur abundance parameter S23. This calibration presents two important advantages against the commonly used one based on the optical oxygen lines: it remains single-valued up to abundances close to solar and is rather independent of the degree of ionization of the nebula.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

The Temporal Efficiency of SO2 Emissions Trading

The Temporal Efficiency of SO2 Emissions Tradin

Measuring the black hole spin direction in 3D Cartesian numerical relativity simulations

We show that the so-called flat-space rotational Killing vector method for measuring the Cartesian components of a black hole spin can be derived from the surface integral of Weinberg's pseudotensor over the apparent horizon surface when using Gaussian normal coordinates in the integration. Moreover, the integration of the pseudotensor in this gauge yields the Komar angular momentum integral in a foliation adapted to the axisymmetry of the spacetime. As a result, the method does not explicitly depend on the evolved lapse $\alpha$ and shift $\beta^i$ on the respective timeslice, as they are fixed to Gaussian normal coordinates, while leaving the coordinate labels of the spatial metric $\gamma_{ij}$ and the extrinsic curvature $K_{ij}$ unchanged. Such gauge fixing endows the method with coordinate invariance, which is not present in integral expressions using Weinberg's pseudotensor, as they normally rely on the explicit use of Cartesian coordinates

FCNC in the minimal 3-3-1 model revisited

We show that in the minimal 3-3-1 model the flavor changing neutral currents (FCNCs) do not impose necessarily strong constraints on the mass of the $Z^\prime$ of the model if we also consider the neutral scalar contributions to such processes, like the neutral mesons mass difference and rare semileptonic decays. We first obtain numerical values for all the mixing matrices of the model i.e., the unitary matrices that rotate the left- and right-handed quarks in each charge sector which give the correct mass of all the quarks and the CKM mixing matrix. Then, we find that there is a range of parameters in which the neutral scalar contributions to these processes may interfere with those of the $Z^\prime$, implying this vector boson may be lighter than it has been thought.Comment: Extended version including the effect of a pseudoscalar. 37 pags. and 12 figures. New references added. Version matches the published versio

Trumpet Slices in Kerr Spacetimes

We introduce a new time-independent family of analytical coordinate systems for the Kerr spacetime representing rotating black holes. We also propose a (2+1)+1 formalism for the characterization of trumpet geometries. Applying this formalism to our new family of coordinate systems we identify, for the first time, analytical and stationary trumpet slices for general rotating black holes, even for charged black holes in the presence of a cosmological constant. We present results for metric functions in this slicing and analyze the geometry of the rotating trumpet surface.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; version published in PR

Calorons on the lattice - a new perspective

We discuss the manifestation of instanton and monopole solutions on a periodic lattice at finite temperature and their relation to the infinite volume analytic caloron solutions with asymptotic non-trivial Polyakov loops. As a tool we use improved cooling and twisted boundary conditions. Typically we find 2Q lumps for topological charge Q. These lumps are BPS monopoles.Comment: Latex. 16 pages, 9 figure