57 research outputs found
Domestication of payments for ecosystem services: new evidence from the Andes.
The current project has sought to assess i) the potential of agricultural biodiversity-focused PES to serve as a cost-effective and socially equitable domesticated diversity conservation incentive scheme, as well as ii) how economic incentive mechanisms such as PES can be designed to build on and complement local institutions of collective action. Results are presented from pilot Payment for Agrobiodiversity Conservation (PACS) schemes and framed field experiments implemented in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes aimed at sustaining diversity within quinoa, a traditional Andean grain.
Findings indicate that opportunity costs of conservation vary widely not only between the two study sites, but also between community-based groups within each site. This creates opportunities to minimize intervention costs by selecting least-cost conserving farmers. However, as shown with respect to the role of wealth and cooperation in determining opportunity costs, this also has implications for the type of farmer to be included in the conservation programme. Promisingly, depending on the fairness principle deemed most important in the local context, there does not necessarily have to be a significant trade-off between the schemes’ potential cost-effectiveness and equity outcomes. The observed behavior in the farmer experimental games further supports such findings and suggests that understanding farmer perceptions of fairness can have important implications for the design of conservation incentive mechanisms, particularly given the important influence of such perceptions on the pro-social behavior that underlies much de facto conservation. Incentive mechanisms, such as PACS, that can support socially valued ends not only by harnessing selfish preferences to public ends but also by evoking public-spirited motives are also more likely to be sustainable over the long-term.
The use of PACS incentives for the maintenance of traditional crop varieties and the improvement of smallholder farmer livelihoods thus appears promising for further development and up-scaling
Metallicities and ages for 35 star clusters and their surrounding fields in the Small Magellanic Cloud
In this work we study 35 stellar clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)
in order to provide their mean metallicities and ages. We also provide mean
metallicities of the fields surrounding the clusters. We used Str\"omgren
photometry obtained with the 4.1 m SOAR telescope and take advantage of and colors for which there is a metallicity calibration presented in
the literature. The spatial metallicity and age distributions of clusters
across the SMC are investigated using the results obtained by Str\"omgren
photometry. We confirm earlier observations that younger, more metal-rich star
clusters are concentrated in the central regions of the galaxy, while older,
more metal-poor clusters are located farther from the SMC center. We construct
the age-metallicity relation for the studied clusters and find good agreement
with theoretical models of chemical enrichment, and with other literature age
and metallicity values for those clusters. We also provide the mean
metallicities for old and young populations of the field stars surrounding the
clusters, and find the latter to be in good agreement with recent studies of
the SMC Cepheid population. Finally, the Str\"omgren photometry obtained for
this study is made publicly available.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables, Accepted for publication in A&
- …