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The Soutpansberg Transect investigates the abundance and diversity of ants and spiders along an altitudinal gradient in the Western Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa. It has a north-south orientation over the mountain and is a long term project initiated in 2009. Data collection is carried out in intervals that suit the data logger capacity. To study the diversity patterns in ants and other invertebrate groups across the spatial transect over a long-term period and the climate the invertebrates.

This paper focuses on binomial mobility-sustainability. Particular attention is paid to pedal mobility and to the fact that cycle transport ia a mean for a correct use of space. The work analyzes the route taken by Apulia Region, that conseiders cycle mobility as palnning and programming instrument, trasversally linked several filed.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. WSN nodes are in general battery-powered, thereby and efficient usage of their energy budget is of paramount importance to avoid performance degradation in IoT applications. To this end, this chapter proposes techniques to manage the WSN nodes’ power consumption. The aim of the first technique is to minimize the transmitted power for a given quality of service requirement at the receiver side. To this end, a power control is considered at each WSN node as well as the use of multiple distributed access points at the receiver side. The second technique to reduce the WSN energy consumption is energy harvesting (EH). Namely, the use of artificial light EH is considered to extend the WSN lifetime. Thus, an experimental setup based on a photovoltaic cell, a boost converter and a commercial WSN node is presented. It is shown that under certain settings it is possible to extend the WSN node’s lifetime without bound, when the transmission time period is above a certain threshold.

Trabajo Fin de Grado leído en la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos en el curso académico 2022/2023. Directores/as: Javier Alfonso De Esteban Curiel ; This paper explores the evolution of tourism and sustainability, the impacts of tourism and the main challenges and opportunities for sustainable tourism in Spain. The policy instruments and frameworks that promote and regulate sustainable tourism are also examined. This paper aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on tourism and sustainability, providing a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing sustainable tourism in Spain.

Increasing the rate of renovation for the existing building stock is a crucial challenge for EU’s energy policy. The Smart City Block (SCB) project proposes an innovative answer to this challenge. The underlying hypothesis is that introducing a collective dimension to renovation could result in increasing rates of renovation while also impacting positively the efficiency of the renovation and the social ties within urban areas. The collective dimension considered is the city block in Brussels.The first part of this paper describes the theoretical part of the project that was necessary to develop an adapted methodology. It describes the SCB offering, Brussels segmentation and some results of surveys.The SCB offering shows that many different options can be proposed to the city block dwellers, ranging from a collective insulation, efficient heating systems and shared photovoltaics to collective kitchen garden in the inner space of the block, shared vehicles or shared spaces. This is especially relevant for Brussels where city blocks often have an inner space that could be used. Besides, the segmentation of Brussels based on city block characteristics offers a typology that can be further used to target specific environmental or social deficit.However, the collective dimension introduced in the project is challenging for western individualistic minds. In order to evaluate the acceptance of households, a survey was conducted on 4 city blocks in Brussels, representing over 450 households. It shows a clear willingness to investigate the concept further but only if concrete proposals with estimations of energy and financial savings are provided. Sharing space, equipment and activities was more positively accepted than what we initially expected. Although the attitude-behaviour gap must not be underestimated, this opening can be viewed as an evolution of lifestyles in some segments of the population. Governance and institutional arrangements are expected to play a critical role in supporting this evolution.The second ...

Since 2009, with the appearance of the Bitcoin, blockchain has gained great popularity all over the world for multiple reasons. The ones that stand out the most are the transparency of the information, its immutability, meaning it is permanent and unalterable, its security thanks to the nature and the way the network is organized, and the fact that it is decentralized. The most common thing until then, or even now, when people want to send information or money, is having to go through a central node, and then from that node the information is sent to the receiver. Some clear examples are social media and banks, who are in clear control of all the information since the central servers first receive the data and then send it to the recipient. It can be said that the whole paradigm of data and the way it was handled changed when blockchain appeared, and the investigation and development have not stopped since. It was clear that there was a lack of security on the previous methods, given that the central node or server could forge and manipulate the data, since it had the whole control. Thus, a change was highly needed, and it finally appeared. Considering the huge amount of industry practitioners that take part in construction, trust is one of the most important things. This is the reason why the construction industry has already started asking itself whether things could change completely to try and avoid information asymmetry, to be able to keep track of all the payments and contracts alongside with their corresponding modifications, among others. With the current energetic situation of the planet, decentralized P2P energy trading systems are gaining importance and reputation. Not only are they linked to renewable energy systems, but they also allow the prosumers either buying or selling energy depending on their needs, decreasing the high dependency people currently have on the electric companies. The goal of this project is to introduce some concepts regarding the blockchain, the smart grids and the ...

In Sardinia (Italy), the highest frequency of extreme events is recorded in the Central-East area (3-4 events per year). The presence of high and steep mountains near the sea on the central and south-eastern coast, causes an East- West precipitation gradient in autumn especially, due to hot and moist currents coming from Africa. Soil structure and utilization make this area highly vulnerable to flash flooding and landslides. The specific purpose of this work is to provide a description of the heavy rainfall phenomenon on a statistical basis. The analysis mainly focuses on i) the existence of trends in heavy rainfall and ii) the characterization of the distribution of extreme events. First, to study possible trends in extreme events a few indices have been analyzed by the linear regression test. The analysis has been carried out at annual and seasonal scales. Then, extreme values analysis has been carried out by fitting a Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) to the data. As far as trends are concerned, different results are obtained at the two temporal scales: significant trends are obtained at the seasonal scale which are masked at the annual scale. By combining trend analysis and GPD analysis, the vulnerability of the study area to the occurrence of heavy rainfall has been characterized. Therefore, this work might support the improvement of land use planning and the application of suitable prevention systems. Future work will consider the extension of the analysis to all Sardinia and the application of statistical methods taking into account the spatial correlation of extreme events.

The present study deals with the use of renewable energy sources (RES) for biofuel production in addition to the power derived from hydroelectric and heat produced by district heating plants. It follows and integrates the main aim to reduce the use of fossil fuels in the considered study area according to the Directive Europe 2020. The possibility to address animal manure and other local biomass to the biogas yield with subsequent upgrading to biomethane was investigated, starting from the production up to the end use. The proposed solution implies the realization of one centralized biogas plant coupled with the upgrading section and one filling station. Details were deepen in order to improve the economic sustainability of the plant, the direct involvement of farmers in the management company and the acceptance level from the residents. Proceedings of the 19th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 6-10 June 2011, Berlin, Germany, pp. 2099-2101