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

Distribution functions for a family of axially symmetric galaxy models

We present the derivation of distribution functions for the first four members of a family of disks, previously obtained in (MNRAS, 371, 1873, 2006), which represent a family of axially symmetric galaxy models with finite radius and well behaved surface mass density. In order to do this we employ several approaches that have been developed starting from the potential-density pair and, essentially using the method introduced by Kalnajs (Ap. J., 205, 751, 1976) we obtain some distribution functions that depend on the Jacobi integral. Now, as this method demands that the mass density can be properly expressed as a function of the gravitational potential, we can do this only for the first four discs of the family. We also find another kind of distribution functions by starting with the even part of the previous distribution functions and using the maximum entropy principle in order to find the odd part and so a new distribution function, as it was pointed out by Dejonghe (Phys. Rep., 133, 217, 1986). The result is a wide variety of equilibrium states corresponding to several self-consistent finite flat galaxy models.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, updated version, accepted for publication in Rev. Acad. Colomb. Cienc. Ex. Fis. Na