Land use dynamics in Brazilian La Plata Basin and anthropogenic climate change     

Ana Carolina F. de Vasconcelos  Sandro L. Schlindwein  Marcos A. Lana  Alfredo C. Fantini  Michelle Bonatti  Luiz R. D’Agostini  Sergio R. Martins 《Climatic change》2014,127(1):73-81

The La Plata Basin (LPB) is one of the most important regions for agriculture and livestock production in South America, playing a central role in the world food production and food security. Within its borders is also located the whole Brazilian Pantanal region. Identifying the most important land use sectors in LPB as well as the changes observed in the past years is fundamental to recognize which areas of the basin might be more vulnerable to climate change in order to design adaptation strategies. A general characterization of land use and livestock production of Brazilian LPB was done by using the System of Automatic Retrieving (SIDRA) of Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) platform as the major source of data. It was observed expressive increases in land areas used for temporary crops, such as soybean, sugarcane, and maize, as well as increases in poultry and swine production. These important changes in agricultural land use and livestock production are currently associated to non-climatic drivers, but this dynamic might be strongly affected by the consequences of climate change and variability, with negative socio-economic impacts for the whole region.  相似文献   

A high resolution hindcast of the meteorological sea level component for Southern Europe: the GOS dataset     

Alba Cid  Sonia Castanedo  Ana J. Abascal  Melisa Menéndez  Raúl Medina 《Climate Dynamics》2014,43(7-8):2167-2184

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A Middle Miocene carbonate embankment on an active volcanic slope: Ilhéu de Baixo,Madeira Archipelago,Eastern Atlantic     

B. Gudveig Baarli  Mrio Cacho  Carlos M. da Silva  Markes E. Johnson  Eduardo J. Mayoral  Ana Santos 《Geological Journal》2014,49(1):90-106

Carbonate factories on insular oceanic islands in active volcanic settings are poorly explored. This case study illuminates marginal limestone deposits on a steep volcanic flank and their recurring interruption by deposits linked to volcaniclastic processes. Historically known as Ilhéu da Cal (Lime Island), Ilhéu de Baixo was separated from Porto Santo, in the Madeira Archipelago, during the course of the Quaternary. Here, extensive mines were tunnelled in the Miocene carbonate strata for the production of slaked lime. Approximately 10 000 m³ of calcarenite (−1 to 1ø) was removed by hand labour from the Blandy Brothers mine at the south end of the islet. Investigations of two stratigraphic sections at opposite ends of the mine reveal that the quarried material represents an incipient carbonate ramp developed from east to west and embanked against the flank of a volcanic island. A petrographic analysis of limestones from the mine shows that coralline red algae from crushed rhodoliths account for 51% of all identifiable bioclasts. This material was transported shoreward and deposited on the ramp between normal wave base and storm wave base at moderate depths. The mine's roof rocks are formed by Surtseyan deposits from a subsequent volcanic eruption. Volcaniclastic density flows also are a prevalent factor interrupting renewed carbonate deposition. These flows arrived downslope from the north and gradually steepened the debris apron westwards. Slope instability is further shown by a coral rudstone density flow that followed from growth of a coral reef dominated by Pocillopora madreporacea (Lamarck), partial reef collapse, and transport from a more easterly direction into a fore‐reef setting. The uppermost facies represents a soft bottom at moderate depths in a quiet, but shore‐proximal setting. Application of this study to a broader understanding of the relationship between carbonate and volcaniclastic deposition on oceanic islands emphasizes the susceptibility of carbonates to dilution and complete removal by density flows of various kinds, in contrast to the potential for preservation beneath less‐disruptive Surtseyan deposits. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献   

Hybrid Model for Urban Air Pollution Forecasting: A Stochastic Spatio-Temporal Approach     

Ana Russo  Amílcar O. Soares 《Mathematical Geosciences》2014,46(1):75-93

Air pollution is usually driven by a complex combination of factors in which meteorology, physical obstacles, and interactions between pollutants play significant roles. Considering the characteristics of urban atmospheric pollution and its consequent impacts on human health and quality of life, forecasting models have emerged as an effective tool to identify and forecast air pollution episodes. The overall objective of the present work is to produce forecasts of pollutant concentrations with high spatio-temporal resolution and to quantify the uncertainty in those forecasts. Therefore, a new approach was developed based on a two-step methodology. Firstly, neural network models were used to generate short-term temporal forecasts based on air pollution and meteorology data. The accuracy of those forecasts was then evaluated against an independent set of historical data. Secondly, local conditional distributions of the observed values with respect to the predicted values were used to perform spatial stochastic simulations for the entire geographic area of interest. With this approach the spatio-temporal dispersion of a pollutant can be predicted, while accounting for both the temporal uncertainty in the forecast (reflecting the neural networks efficiency at each monitoring station) and the spatial uncertainty as revealed by the spatial variograms. Based on an analysis of the results, our proposed method offers a highly promising alternative for the characterization of urban air quality.  相似文献   

Streamflow response to regional climate model output in the mountainous watershed: a case study from the Swiss Alps     

Kazi?RahmanEmail author  Christophe?Etienne  Ana?Gago-Silva  Chetan?Maringanti  Martin?Beniston  Anthony?Lehmann 《Environmental Earth Sciences》2014,72(11):4357-4369

Regional climate model (RCM) outputs are often used in hydrological modeling, in particular for streamflow forecasting. The heterogeneity of the meteorological variables such as precipitation, temperature, wind speed and solar radiation often limits the ability of the hydrological model performance. This paper assessed the sensitivity of RCM outputs from the PRUDENCE project and their performance in reproducing the streamflow. The soil and water assessment tool was used to simulate the streamflow of the Rhone River watershed located in the southwestern part of Switzerland, with the climate variables obtained from four RCMs. We analyzed the difference in magnitude of precipitation, maximum and minimum air temperature, and wind speed with respect to the observed values from the meteorological stations. In addition, we also focused on the impact of the grid resolution on model performance, by analyzing grids with resolutions of 50 × 50 and 25 × 25 km². The variability of the meteorological inputs from various RCMs is quite severe in the studied watershed. Among the four different RCMs, the Danish Meteorological Institute provided the best performance when simulating runoff. We found that temperature lapse rate is significantly important in the mountainous snow and glacier dominated watershed as compared to other variables like precipitation, and wind speed for hydrological performance. Therefore, emphasis should be given to minimum and maximum temperature in the bias correction studies for downscaling climatic data for impact modeling in the mountainous snow and glacier dominated complex watersheds.  相似文献   

The state of the environment in Mexico     

Manuel Bollo Manent  José Ramón Hernández Santana  Ana Patricia Méndez Linares 《Central European Journal of Geosciences》2014,6(2):219-228

The present work evaluates the state of the environment in Mexico based on indicators of the present status of the country’s natural resource management, social and economical conditions and anthropogenic modifications. The Mexican environment is interpreted as a spatially open system having a historical character that is essentially determined by the continual interaction between nature, society and economy. The landscape approach is followed, considering as units of territorial analysis each one of the 145 biophysical environmental units included in the national physiographic regionalization. The assessment of 16 indicators for each biophysical environmental unit was made considering their regional environmental integrity problems, the degree of disarticulation of their structure and function, and the alteration of their territorial structure, all of which determine whether or not they accomplish their environmental functions and achieve environmental stability. The classification of the state of the environment included 5 categories in 8 combinations represented in the map of the state of the environment in Mexico for the year 2008. The map shows that nearly 47.10% of the country’s surface has an environmental status ranging between unstable and critical, the problematic areas being mostly concentrated in the southeast and center of the national territory.  相似文献   

The evolution of the bimodal colour distribution of galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey groups     

Héctor J. Martínez  Ana L. O'Mill  Diego G. Lambas 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2006,372(1):253-258

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The Scale of VGI in Map Production: A Perspective on European National Mapping Agencies          下载免费PDF全文

Ana‐Maria Olteanu‐Raimond  Glen Hart  Giles M. Foody  Guillaume Touya  Tobias Kellenberger  Demetris Demetriou 《Transactions in GIS》2017,21(1):74-90

The perspective of European National Mapping Agencies (NMA) on the role of citizen sensing in map production was explored. The NMAs varied greatly in their engagement with the community generating volunteered geographic information (VGI) and in their future plans. From an assessment of NMA standard practices, it was evident that much VGI was acquired with a positional accuracy that, while less than that typically acquired by NMAs, actually exceeded the requirements of the nominal data capture scale used by most NMAs. Opportunities for VGI use in map revision and updating were evident, especially for agencies that use a continuous rather than cyclical updating policy. Some NMAs had also developed systems to engage with citizen sensors and examples are discussed. Only rarely was VGI used to collect data on features beyond the standard set used by the NMAs. The potential role of citizen sensing and so its current scale of use by NMAs is limited by a series of concerns, notably relating to issues of data quality, the nature and motivation of the contributors, legal issues, the sustainability of data source, and employment fears of NMA staff. Possible priorities for future research and development are identified to help ensure that the potential of VGI in mapping is realized.  相似文献   

A local-scale approach to estuarine flood risk management   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Paula Freire  Alexandre O. Tavares  Luís Sá  Anabela Oliveira  André B. Fortunato  Pedro P. dos Santos  Ana Rilo  João L. Gomes  João Rogeiro  Rui Pablo  Pedro J. Pinto 《Natural Hazards》2016,84(3):1705-1739

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Local indices for the South American monsoon system and its impacts on Southeast Brazilian precipitation patterns     

David Marcolino Nielsen  Marcio Cataldi  André Luiz Belém  Ana Luiza Spadano Albuquerque 《Natural Hazards》2016,81(2):909-938

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