Marine spatial planning: Lessons learned from the Portuguese debate

This paper presents and discusses legal, methodological and political frameworks for the development of the proposed Portuguese Marine Spatial Plan initiated in 2008. It considers lessons learned and is informed by discussions that have taken place since publication of the ‘Roadmap for Maritime Spatial Planning: Achieving Common Principles in the EU’. New goals are based on horizontal planning tools that cut across sea-related sectoral policies and support joined up policy making. It is in this context that Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) emerged as an essential process for sustainable decision making. The OSPAR Commission undertook an overview of national planning systems within its administrative boundaries, which confirmed spatial plans reduced conflicts. However, problems exist accessing good quality data and dealing with entrenched sectoral views. Furthermore, the transboundary nature of marine resources requires cooperation between neighbouring states. In 2006, Portugal developed a ‘National Sea Strategy’ that recognized the importance of developing its maritime space while valuing marine habitats and biodiversity. MSP development of the Portuguese sea commenced in 2008 and findings are now evaluated. They showed adaptation of existing tools to be possible and desirable, provided undertaken cautiously and found conceptual ambiguities were barriers to conflict resolution. Furthermore they showed management strategies should be designed and analysed on a case by case basis, recognising temporal and spatial variations.     

Soil geochemical prospecting for gold at Marrancos (Northern Portugual)

This paper discusses some geochemical mapping techniques and their effectiveness in detecting of gold and its pathfinder's geochemical anomalies. The study area (Marrancos area) is situated in Northern Portugal. Gold occurs in a quartz breccia with pyrite and arsenopyrite hosted by metamorphic rocks (hornfels) and it is present in these two sulphide minerals as inclusions or disseminated in the crystal lattice. In this area, the geochemical anomalies obtained by isoconcentration mapping of single elements were difficult to interpret. The use of alternative geochemical mapping such as multielement halos (additive halos) proved to be effective in the definition of Au, As, Bi, Sb, Te and Se secondary geochemical signature.     

Water budget and vertical conductance for Lowry (Sand Hill) Lake in north-central Florida, USA

Water-budget components and the vertical conductance were determined for Lowry (Sand Hill) Lake in north-central Florida, USA. In this type of lake, which interacts with both the surface-water and groundwater systems, the inflow components are precipitation, surface-water inflow, groundwater inflow, and direct runoff (i.e. overland flow), and the outflow components are evaporation, groundwater outflow, and surface-water outflow. In a lake and groundwater system that is typical of many karst lakes in Florida, a large part of the groundwater outflow occurs by means of vertical leakage through an underlying confining unit to a deeper, highly transmissive aquifer called the upper Floridan aquifer. The water-budget component that represents vertical leakage to the upper Floridan aquifer was calculated as a residual using the water-budget equation. For the 13 month period from August 1994 to August 1995, relative to the surface area of the lake, rainfall at Lowry Lake was 1.55 m yr⁻¹, surficial aquifer inflow was 0.79 m yr⁻¹, surface-water inflow was 1.92 m yr⁻¹, and direct runoff was 0.01 m yr⁻¹. Lake evaporation was 1.11 m yr⁻¹, and surface-water outflow was 1.61 m yr⁻¹. The lake stage increased 0.07 m yr⁻¹, and the vertical leakage to the upper Floridan aquifer was 1.48 m yr⁻¹. Surficial aquifer outflow from the lake was negligible. At Lowry Lake, vertical leakage is a major component of the water budget, comprising about 35% of the outflow during the study period. The vertical conductance (K_V/b), a coefficient that represents the average of the vertical conductances of the hydrogeologic units between the bottom of a lake and the top of the upper Floridan aquifer, was determined to be 2.51 × 10⁻⁴ day⁻¹ for Lowry Lake.     

Application of geostatistical methods in gold geochemical anomalies identification (Montemor-O-Novo, Portugal)

The study described herein concerns the application of geostatistical methods to data soil from Montemor-O-Novo area (Southern Portugal). In the area, the gold mineralised zones (Banhos, Caeiras, Falés, Gamela, Malaca and Monfurado) are characterised by different geological settings and mineralogical assemblages. A total of 1211 soil samples were collected in Montemor-O-Novo area and analysed for Cu, Pb, Zn, As, Ba and Au by atomic absorption spectrometry.To account for spatial structure, simple and cross variograms were computed for the main directions of the grid sampling. From the experimental variograms a linear model of coregionalization composed of three structures, a nugget effect and two anisotropic spherical structures, was fitted to each of the six variables. The coregionalization matrices deduced from the theoretical model show the relationships between the variables at different scales. These matrices were compared with those obtained by principal component analysis (PCA).This methodology was the basis for estimating the corresponding spatial components (Y0, Y1 and Y2) using factorial kriging analysis (FKA). Maps of raw data, Y0, Y1 and Y2 were made for each variable.The use of multivariate analysis permit the study of the spatial structure intrinsic to geochemical data and the identification and refinement of significant anomalies related to Au-bearing mineral deposits.     

Using Ontologies for Integrated Geographic Information Systems

Today, there is a huge amount of data gathered about the Earth, not only from new spatial information systems, but also from new and more sophisticated data collection technologies. This scenario leads to a number of interesting research challenges, such as how to integrate geographic information of different kinds. The basic motivation of this paper is to introduce a GIS architecture that can enable geographic information integration in a seamless and flexible way based on its semantic value and regardless of its representation. The proposed solution is an ontology-driven geographic information system that acts as a system integrator. In this system, an ontology is a component, such as the database, cooperating to fulfill the system's objectives. By browsing through ontologies the users can be provided with information about the embedded knowledge of the system. Special emphasis is given to the case of remote sensing systems and geographic information systems. The levels of ontologies can be used to guide processes for the extraction of more general or more detailed information. The use of multiple ontologies allows the extraction of information in different stages of classification. The semantic integration of aerial images and GIS is a crucial step towards better geospatial modeling.     

The use of GPR for characterizing underground weathered profiles in the sub-humid tropics

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been used as a tool to access information about ground subsurface features. Such information is very important for different types of studies, varying from those related to archeological research to those studying geological elements of bedrock. More recently, however, GPR has been increasingly applied to environmental studies, especially for soil research. This paper presents the results of an application of GPR for the study of weathered profiles. GPR was used to discover the degree of trustworthiness of the information on the ground subsurface through the interpretation of the results of the radar sections as well as the data collected from boreholes, which reached until 21 m. The results show a relatively high degree of details obtained by GPR, indicating the possibility of speeding up ground subsurface surveys related to geomorphological, geological, and pedological studies.