The indoor environment and its natural dynamics in small Spanish historical churches such as the studied here depend on the variations of outdoor climate and the moisture dynamics of walls, built with different materials. Such indoor environments are impacted by local factors, which may put at risk the conservation of a church's cultural assets. Natural ventilation in spring, the presence of people and especially the wintertime use of ageing heating system induce substantial fluctuations in indoor environments primarily affecting the stability of relative humidity (RH). RH is the physical parameter that can induce efflorescence as well as plaster blistering and detachment in its inside walls, drying and cracking in the timber and efflorescence and disgregation in the carved dolostone.Where the RH inside building is not high, as in the present case, natural and induced fluctuations may lower it considerably (<25 %), which is detrimental to conservation and human well-being both. Human presence partially counters the steep declines in RH attributable to heating in winter and warm, dry summer weather, although the trade-off is a rise in CO 2 levels inside the church.Heating induces substantial changes in the T and RH on the high altar and in the upper areas of the nave, while natural ventilation affects the RH at the base of the church and favours the elimination of CO 2 . The results obtained have allowed us to develop a series of recommendations that might be useful for the preventive conservation of such historic buildings, without compromising human comfort.

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Central to the entire discipline of heritage restoration and conservation is the concept of information management. Nevertheless, traditionally, conservation and restoration has been a poorly documented discipline, which has led not only to a lack of standardization and awareness about the processes carried out in the past, but also poses problems both when new restoration works are necessary and for the preventive conservation of the elements of heritage. This study sets out to propose a conceptual framework to explore the relationship between conservation of heritage and information management on the basis of case studies; in particular: a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) of a regional government concerning an endangered plant (wild grapevine) with an important potential for cultural and touristic uses in a wine-making region; an open data guide—the Digital Guide of Andalusian Cultural Heritage; a university repository connected to Europeana, which contains reports and outcomes of projects of geometric documentation of elements of heritage; a repository of an organization in charge of the protection and care of the heritage; and finally, two examples of the use of heritage building information models (HBIM) in complex monuments. After discussing the characteristics of each case, this paper concludes that, although the availability of information and tools is growing, further progress is still necessary concerning the interoperability, outreach and reuse of the different solutions.

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