Brazil's controversial new Forest Code grants amnesty to illegal deforesters, but creates new mechanisms for forest conservation.

Recent research on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has rarely included empirical observation of how land managers perceive and respond to forest governance rules. In this case study, we consider how two decades of pilot projects for integrated conservation and sustainable development (ICDPs) variously influenced forest governance across three agrarian reform settlements in northwestern Mato Grosso state. The analysis combines: i) remote sensing of deforestation from 1997–2015; ii) land use and economic data for individual settler farms and cooperatives; iii) settlers' perceptions regarding legitimacy and relevance of state policies, including land use regulations under the Brazilian Forest Code. Deforestation across settlements varied in association with synergies – or lack thereof – between policy instruments and socially embedded rules organizing economic alternatives to the dominant regional pattern of cattle ranching. In two of the settlements deforestation surpassed or was approaching 80% of their total area. In the third settlement deforestation stabilized at 45%, corresponding with the initiation of ICDP support for a pilot project focused on Brazil nut extractivism to consolidate community management of the settlement's collective forest reserve. The latter process involved a ‘policy mix’ or sequence of overlapping components: technical assistance, cooperative organization, environmental licensing, infrastructure, equitable contracts with surrounding indigenous communities and market development. Comparing with the two counterfactual cases, we suggest a framework for analysis of systemic socio‐ecological change in settlements in the Brazilian Amazon, and reconsider the role of ICDPs in landscape approaches to environmental governance in tropical forests. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

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Brazil’s transportation infrastructure did not follow the country’s agricultural development and the macro-logistics operations still rely on trucking. Even with a lack of roads, the service areas of the ports on the Atlantic coast, particularly the port of Santos, expanded to central Brazil, the country’s most productive agricultural area. Recently, the Federal Government released mid-term plans to build railways to reduce transportation costs until 2035. However, no simulation about port regionalization and competitiveness was performed. This research evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed transportation infrastructure regarding transportation cost and new routes that can reshape the ports’ influence areas. Our geographically explicit model used the Dinamica_EGO modeling platform and PostgreSQL, fed by official public data from transportation and agriculture authorities. Considering the hypothesis that new railways can increase port competitiveness, we computed scenarios considering the planned 2035 infrastructure and compared them to the current situation. The findings showed that the Ferrogrão railway can effectively reduce transport costs, therefore changing the spatial configuration of macro-logistics basins. In conclusion, a geospatial model can predict short-cheaper routes, port regionalization, and competitiveness regarding the geographic aspects of the supply chain. The long-distance and importance of Brazilian agriculture exportation justify and value the investigation.

Sonic booms around buildings still require further study for them to be well understood. Previously, a combined ray tracing/radiosity program was created in FORTRAN to simulate the behavior of sonic booms around structures. The program was validated against the 2009 SonicBOBS data and some simple urban geometries. The original program produced good agreement, however, substantial drawbacks to the code were evident. It was not user friendly and creating new geometries was very difficult. The code was ported to Python in order make the user experience better which sacrificed the speed benefits of FORTRAN. Substantial modifications to the code were made to improve the speed and it has been validated with the original Fortran simulations and now runs at a comparable computation time to the original. In addition, the method for creating and importing geometries has been updated so complicated geometries can be incorporated into the simulation more easily by the user. The new program will be discussed in detail. In order to test the new software, several input booms were propagated through an urban environment. The characteristics for the boom before it interacted with the city were then compared to see how the urban environment changes the boom. These updates will allow for the future integration of additional functionality including non-homogeneous atmosphere, turbulence, edge diffraction and other factors that are expected to have a significant impact on the resulting booms.

The propagation of sonic booms in and around large urban areas needs to be well understood in order to determine the impact of the sound will have on the population. Previously a combined ray tracing/radiocity method was developed to model sonic booms around large buildings. While the overall propagation was acceptable, the model had some limitations. One of these limitations was the assumption of a constant speed of sound over the entire propagation area. This updated model uses an atmosphere stratified in the z direction to include the effects of changing temperature in the vertical direction. Another limitation of the previous model is high computation times. As the environment becomes larger and more complicated the computation time becomes very large. To improve computation time and allow for larger, more complex environments, the stratification of the atmosphere was exploited and applied to the environment as well. Only the sections of the building that are within the striation are checked for collisions. This significantly reduces the required computations and simplifies each step of the ray tracing even for complex building configurations. The computation times and pressure using the updated model are presented for several urban environments. The previous model results will be shown as a comparison.