Forest-making in agrarian frontiers:Place-based transformative pathways toward sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon

The Brazilian Amazon’s arc of deforestation is an agrarian frontier dominated by large-scale commodity production. Deforestation patterns are supported by lock-in mechanisms of various forms: politico-institutional (e.g., party politics, public policies), techno-economic (e.g., technical knowledge, financial incentives), and socio-cognitive (e.g., narratives, values, perceptions). Within this context, many place-based forest restoration initiatives have existed and resisted for decades, although often underacknowledged and invisibilized. In this thesis, I ask how such place-based forest restoration initiatives carve transformative pathways toward sustainability in agrarian frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon. To answer this question, I propose a place-based approach to transformative pathways, highlighting three main aspects. First, the protagonism of local communities in transforming the landscape based on territorial attachment, human-nature connectedness and relational values to forests. Second, their local agency continuously exercised through a silent praxis of resistance in everyday life. Third, the cross-scale nature of such pathways, embedded in political contexts that can nudge transformations in (un)sustainable directions. State-level politics play a key mediating role in this process, buffering or reinforcing lock-in mechanisms through a narrative-policy nexus. Therefore, this thesis analyzes two contrasting states in the arc of deforestation: Acre, a new frontier state, renowned for its history of forest protection and socioenvironmental mobilizations; and Mato Grosso, Brazil’s largest soy producer and exporter and a consolidated frontier of commodity expansion. Within each state, I look into a relevant place-based forest restoration initiative: the RECA Agroforestry Project in the border of Rondônia and Acre, and the Xingu Seed Network in Mato Grosso. I analyze what I label as the triggering, nurturing and resilience phases of their transformative pathways and how they play out in such different contexts. The analysis is based on three rounds of semi-structured interviews, two rounds of field visits, an online survey, as well as document analysis of public policies and institutional materials from the case studies, all conducted between 2019 and 2022. The results show that, even in face of high deforestation pressures, these initiatives challenge the dominant commodity system by actively making forests in agrarian frontiers through multidimensional transformations in values, practices and politics. Recognizing these initiatives as crucial agents of change toward sustainable futures is a key step in counteracting the enduring patterns of deforestation in the tropics

Understanding deforestation lock-in: Insights from Land Reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon

Cropland and pasture expansion continues to erase natural ecosystems at a staggering speed globally, notably in the tropics. Conventional policy approaches, usually focused on a particular land-use change driver (e.g., specific commodities) or individual regulations (e.g., the Amazon Soy Moratorium), have consistently failed to achieve sufficient or sustained results. The swift reversal of Brazil’s earlier success in reducing Amazon deforestation – now again accelerated – offers perhaps the most sobering illustration of that. Therefore, this article draws from scholarship on sustainability transitions to propose a more comprehensive systems view of unsustainable land-use patterns. We examine persistent tropical deforestation as a case of “lock-in,” using a transitions lens, and explore its constitutive elements. As a case study, we analyze the situation of Land Reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon, where as much as one-third of that biome’s deforestation takes place. While subject to some specific factors, those places are also enmeshed in a broader setting that is common across the Brazilian Amazon’s deforestation frontier (e.g., infrastructure conditions, market demands, and sociocultural norms). Drawing from document analysis of Brazilian policies and fieldwork in three Land Reform settlements in Pará State, we expose multiple forms of techno-economic, institutional, and socio-cognitive lock-in that together drive deforestation systemically in those settlements. These drivers form a strongly consolidated socio-technical regime around large-scale agriculture that includes material and immaterial factors (e.g., cultural ones), a regime that not only resists change but also – like a vortex – pulls others into it. Escaping deforestation lock-in may thus require outside forces to help local actors destabilize and eventually replace this unsustainable land-use regime. International zero-deforestation efforts offer a starting point, but a transition requires moving beyond piecemeal, incremental change or end-of-pipe approaches and toward concerted, strategic action that addresses multiple of those regime elements in a coordinated way to replace it as a system. We argue that understanding deforestation lock-in is vital for tackling its worrisome persistence and that sustainability transitions theory offers an illuminating, but still underutilized, framework to analyze and eventually overcome unsustainable land use

Dilaton Domain Walls and Dynamical Systems

Domain wall solutions of $d$-dimensional gravity coupled to a dilaton field $\sigma$ with an exponential potential $\Lambda e^{-\lambda\sigma}$ are shown to be governed by an autonomous dynamical system, with a transcritical bifurcation as a function of the parameter $\lambda$ when $\Lambda<0$. All phase-plane trajectories are found exactly for $\lambda=0$, including separatrices corresponding to walls that interpolate between $adS_d$ and adS_{d-1} \times\bR, and the exact solution is found for $d=3$. Janus-type solutions are interpreted as marginal bound states of these ``separatrix walls''. All flat domain wall solutions, which are given exactly for any $\lambda$, are shown to be supersymmetric for some superpotential $W$, determined by the solution.Comment: 30 pp, 11 figs, significant revision of original. Minor additional corrections in version to appear in journa

Current management of pelvic organ prolapse in aging women : EMAS clinical guide

Management of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common and challenging task. Nowadays older women are more active than they were in the past, and the development of POP disrupts quality of life and impairs social and personal activities. The menopausal transition is a time of vulnerability, during which many women start experiencing symptoms and signs of POP. The role of hormonal changes or of hormonal therapies in influencing the development or progression of POP has been explored extensively. The management of POP requires considerable clinical skills. Correct diagnosis and characterization of the prolapse and an identification of the individual woman's most bothersome symptoms are the hallmark of appropriate initial management. Therapy is multimodal and often multidisciplinary, and requires a competence in pelvic medicine and surgery. The integration of hormonal, non-hormonal and surgical strategies is important and needs to be adjusted to changing circumstances on an individualized basis. When surgery is required, optimal management requires clinicians who are familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of all the available strategies and who are able to use these strategies in a tailored manner. Complex cases should be sent to specialist referral centers. Management of POP should be integrated into the practice of healthcare professionals dealing in menopause.Peer reviewe

Pair Production of small Black Holes in Heterotic String Theories

We study pair production of small BPS BH's in heterotic strings compactified on tori and in the FHSV model. After recalling the identification of small BH's in the perturbative BPS spectrum, we compute the tree-level amplitudes for processes initiated by massless vector bosons or gravitons. We then analyze the resulting cross sections in terms of energy and angular distributions. Finally, we briefly comment on scenari with large extra dimensions and on generalizations of our results to non-BPS, non-extremal and rotating BH's.Comment: 33 page

On the characteristics of velocities fields on the vicinity of manhole inlet grates during flood events

The accurate characterisation of flow from urban surfaces to sewer/stormwater systems is important for urban drainage design and flood modelling/risk identification. However, the geometrical complexity and large variety of drainage structures (linking elements) available makes model calibration and verification difficult. In this study an extensive comparison between experimentally measured and numerically modelled flow characteristics in the vicinity of ten different designs of manhole grate was performed under drainage flow in sub‐critical conditions. Using a 2D surface PIV (sPIV) system the work presents the first detailed characterisation of velocity fields around these linking elements. In addition, it provides the first detailed verification of the ability of a 2D numerical model to describe both velocity fields and drainage flows. The overall comparison shows a close relationship between numerical and the experimental results with some higher inflows in the experimental results as a consequence of a localised transition from weir to orifice condition near the void areas of the grates. It was also noted that velocity differences decreased further from the manhole, due mainly to the more directional flow. Overall the work demonstrates the potential for further use of 2D numerical models to describe flow conditions at linking elements, either directly within modelling simulations or indirectly via the characterisation of energy loss coefficients

A genome scan for milk production traits in dairy goats reveals two new mutations in <i>Dgat1</i> reducing milk fat content

The quantity of milk and milk fat and proteins are particularly important traits in dairy livestock. However, little is known about the regions of the genome that influence these traits in goats. We conducted a genome wide association study in French goats and identified 109 regions associated with dairy traits. For a major region on chromosome 14 closely associated with fat content, the Diacylglycerol O-Acyltransferase 1 (DGAT1) gene turned out to be a functional and positional candidate gene. The caprine reference sequence of this gene was completed and 29 polymorphisms were found in the gene sequence, including two novel exonic mutations: R251L and R396W, leading to substitutions in the protein sequence. The R251L mutation was found in the Saanen breed at a frequency of 3.5% and the R396W mutation both in the Saanen and Alpine breeds at a frequencies of 13% and 7% respectively. The R396W mutation explained 46% of the genetic variance of the trait, and the R251L mutation 6%. Both mutations were associated with a notable decrease in milk fat content. Their causality was then demonstrated by a functional test. These results provide new knowledge on the genetic basis of milk synthesis and will help improve the management of the French dairy goat breeding program