Interspecific fish hybrids in Brazil: management of genetic resources for sustainable use

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

How are climate change adaptation strategies put into practice? A case study comparison of natural hazard prevention

Climate change affects increasingly the management of natural resources and has diverse impacts of environmental, social and economic nature. To take this complexity into account, climate change adaptation policies consider the principle of sustainable development. Sustainability is an integrative concept which should insure a long-term and multi-sectoral response to climate change. But the question appears if sustainable development is only retained at the conceptual level or effectively implemented in practice. This paper pursues this question by comparing three projects addressing natural hazard in Swiss mountains. The aim is to investigate how sustainable development is perceived by involved stakeholders and implemented in practice. Two dimensions are thus taken into account: the type of actors participating in these projects and their preferences and interests. The first dimension thus analyzes if diverse actors representing the environmental, economic and social arenas are integrated; the second dimension investigates if different interests and preferences in the sense of sustainability were incorporated in the design and implementation of climate change adaptation. Data were gathered through a standardized survey among all actors involved in the three projects. Preliminary results show that sustainability receives diverse weight and interest in the different cases.

A model of economic management of cultural heritage: the rehabilitation of fort christmas as an interpretation center of defensive architecture of the Mediterranean in Cartagena (Spain)

The Cultural Heritage constitutes a way to generate social identities and play an important role in the development of the Spanish Mediterranean cities that opt to sustainable quality tourism. The reflection on the necessity of intervention on this heritage, in addition to establishing what should be done, brings up the need to define the reasons for taking action, why and what-for. These decisions are essential to establish if its maintenance and recovery are economically sustainable. The Project "Cartagena Port of Cultures", with support from the European Union, is an example of effective instrument for ensuring the sustainability of our built heritage conservation. Its main objective was to enable sustainable development of tourism in Cartagena based on sustainability and seasonality. This was achieved through a process of recovery of heritage resources and their optimum promotion and marketing.

Identifying the role of natural resources in knowledge-based strategies of development

Knowledge has adopted a preferential role in the explanation of development while the evidence about the effect of natural resources in countries’ performance is more controversial in the economic literature. This paper tries to demonstrate that natural resources may positively affect growth in countries with a strong natural resources specialization pattern although the magnitude of these effects depend on the type of resources and on other aspects related to the production and innovation systems. The positive trajectory described by a set of national economies mainly specialized in natural resources and low-tech industries invites us to analyze what is the combination of factors that serves as engine for a sustainable development process. With panel data for the period 1996-2008 we estimate an applied growth model where both traditional factors and other more related to innovation and absorptive capabilities are taken into account. Our empirical findings show that according to the postulates of a knowledge-based approach, a framework that combines physical and intangible factors is more suitable for the definition of development strategies in those prosperous economies dominated by natural resources and connected activities, while the internationalization process of activities and technologies become also a very relevant aspect.

Illinois Institute of Natural Resources project list : January 1, 1981.

Includes index.

Fish toxicants and the environment : an ad hoc report to the Research Advisory Council, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Cover title.

Evaluation of the use and management of fish resources in the pachitea river basin, Peruvian Amazon

The purpose of this study was to analyze the interrelations between the needs of local people and their usage and management of natural fisheries. Between June and August 2001, 177 households in the basin were interviewed regarding their fishing customs. The results were analyzed with parametric and nonparametric statistics considering a cultural and a geographic comparison. Results confirm that indigenous households rely more on fisheries as a resource than colonists. Fishing takes place throughout the year but is more common in the dry season. Fishing is commonly practiced using hooks and cast nets. More destructive techniques such as dynamite and "barbasco" (poisonous plant) were also used. Indigenous people use a greater array of techniques and they fish at a greater diversity of sites. Respondents also reported that fishing yields have decreased recently. Some of the most common fish genera captured are Pimelodus and Leporinus.

Resident perceptions of natural resources between cities and across scales in the Pacific Northwest

As the global population becomes increasingly urban, research is needed to explore how local culture, land use, and policy will influence urban natural resource management. We used a broad-scale comparative approach and survey of residents within the Portland (Oregon)-Vancouver (Washington) metropolitan areas, USA, two states with similar geographical and ecological characteristics, but different approaches to land-use planning, to explore resident perceptions about natural resources at three scales of analysis: property level (“at or near my house”), neighborhood (“within a 20-minute walk from my house”), and metro level (“across the metro area”). At the metro-level scale, nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed that the two cities were quite similar. However, affinity for particular landscape characteristics existed within each city with the greatest difference generally at the property-level scale. Portland respondents expressed affinity for large mature trees, tree-lined streets, public transportation, and proximity to stores and services. Vancouver respondents expressed affinity for plentiful accessible parking. We suggest three explanations that likely are not mutually exclusive. First, respondents are segmented based on preferences for particular amenities, such as convenience versus commuter needs. Second, historical land-use and tax policy legacies may influence individual decisions. Third, more environmentally attuned worldviews may influence an individual’s desire to produce environmentally friendly outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging variations in residents’ affinities for landscape characteristics across different scales and locations because these differences may influence future land-use policies about urban natural resources.

Multilevel negotiation in smart grids for VPP management of distributed resources

A multilevel negotiation mechanism for operating smart grids and negotiating in electricity markets considers the advantages of virtual power player management.

Integrated Management of IaaS Resources

This paper proposes and reports the development of an open source solution for the integrated management of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing resources, through the use of a common API taxonomy, to incorporate open source and proprietary platforms. This research included two surveys on open source IaaS platforms (OpenNebula, OpenStack and CloudStack) and a proprietary platform (Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure - PACI) as well as on IaaS abstraction solutions (jClouds, Libcloud and Deltacloud), followed by a thorough comparison to determine the best approach. The adopted implementation reuses the Apache Deltacloud open source abstraction framework, which relies on the development of software driver modules to interface with different IaaS platforms, and involved the development of a new Deltacloud driver for PACI. The resulting interoperable solution successfully incorporates OpenNebula, OpenStack (reuses pre-existing drivers) and PACI (includes the developed Deltacloud PACI driver) nodes and provides a Web dashboard and a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface library. The results of the exchanged data payload and time response tests performed are presented and discussed. The conclusions show that open source abstraction tools like Deltacloud allow the modular and integrated management of IaaS platforms (open source and proprietary), introduce relevant time and negligible data overheads and, as a result, can be adopted by Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) cloud providers to circumvent the vendor lock-in problem whenever service response time is not critical.

Democracy and the curse of natural resources

We propose a theoretical model to explain empirical regularities related to the curse of natural resources. This is an explicitly political model which emphasizes the behavior and incentives of politicians. We extend the standard voting model to give voters political control beyond the elections. This gives rise to a new restriction into our political economy model: policies should not give rise to a revolution. Our model clarifies when resource discoveries might lead to revolutions, namely, in countries with weak institutions. Natural resources may be bad for democracy by harming political turnover. Our model also suggests a non-linear dependence of human capital on natural resources. For low levels of democracy human capital depends negatively on natural resources, while for high levels of democracy the dependence is reversed. This theoretical finding is corroborated in both cross section and panel data regressions.

Report of Recommendations to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, June 30, 2001

State Agency Audit Report

Report of Recommendations to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, June 30, 2002

State Agency Audit Report