Attainment of ecosystem based governance in European waters—A State property rights regime approach for Ireland

On Ireland's continental shelf, as well as within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), there are significant biodiversity hotspots including those associated with Cold Water Corals (CWC). Some of these ecosystems enjoy little or no actual protection and are subject to the effects of open access. Sectorally driven initiatives, a recalcitrant attitude to environmental law and inadequate governance, have added to the conditions that have facilitated years of damage by fishers and other actors from many States. A review of the current governance regime, influenced primarily by the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), is presented. Failings of this regime are highlighted by the destruction of some biodiversity hotspots associated with vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs), an externality primarily arising from the effects of deepwater fishing. While exploring some of the principles relating to the institution of property rights, this paper makes a link between property rights, the public trust doctrine and sovereign rights. The paper suggests that such biodiversity systems are the property of citizens of the individual States in whose area of jurisdiction they occur. The paper argues for an Irish State property rights regime as part of an ecosystem approach within a nested institutional architecture. This has important implications for the governance of biodiversity such as that associated with CWC and for the development of an Irish National Oceans Policy.     

Sea-clutter modeling using a radial-basis-function neural network

Recently, neural networks have been proposed for radar clutter modeling because of the inherent nonlinearity of clutter signals. This paper performs an analysis of the practicality of using a radial basis function (RBF) neural network to model sea clutter and to detect small target embedded in sea clutter. An experiment using an instrumental quality radar was carried out on the eastcoast of Canada to create a rich sea clutter and small surface target database. This database contains both staring and scanning data under various environmental conditions. Using data-sets with different characteristics, we investigate the effects of quantization error, measurement noise, generalization of the neural net over ranges and sampling rate on the RBF clutter model. Despite these physical limitations, the RBF model was shown to approach an optimal predictive performance. The RBF predictor was also applied to detect various small targets in this database based on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) principle. This RBF-CFAR detector was demonstrated to be able to detect small floating targets even in rough sea conditions     

Solar work at Manila observatory

Seventeen comets, having information on sodium D-line emission during their apparition, have been studied. The heliocentric distances corresponding to the sodium emission commencement or termination epoch are found to have a dependence on the phase of the solar cycle. For comets appearing during a solar maximum the sodium emission is detectable out to greater distances than, for the comets appearing during solar minimum. The sodium emission is also found to depend on heliographic latitude of the comet. It is concluded that the spatial properties of the solar wind during a solar maximum and minimum are responsible for the observed dependence.