Antonio Vaamonde

Developing a Method to Assessing the Municipal Financial Health

Following the conceptual framework developed by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, which is based on three broad dimensions of sustainability, flexibility and vulnerability, this paper proposes a method for evaluating the financial health of municipalities. This methodology could be useful for performance assessment in any country and framework. An aggregate indicator has been obtained for each municipality that covers all the aspects analyzed. For this, multivariate statistical techniques of principal component analysis and discriminant analysis are combined. The proposed method overcomes the problem that we detected in the literature related to the weighting of variables, optimizing the measurement of the variability of all indicators that are included in the financial condition. The indicator evaluates and ranks the degree of financial health of each municipality and serves as a tool to study how different factors might have an impact on its financial health. The performance of the indicator has been contrasted with the socioeconomic variables of population size and geographic location. The proposed method has been applied to 5,165 Spanish municipalities.

PCBs in wild mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) from the N-NW Spanish coast: current levels and long-term trends during the period 1991-2009.

Concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were determined in wild mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) from seven areas of the N-NW Spanish coast, during the period 1991-2009. The studied area is comprised of highly productive ecosystems which support important commercial fishing and shellfishing activities. The seven PCBs indicator congeners recommended by ICES (IUPAC nos. 28, 52, 101, 118, 138, 153 and 180), were analysed by gas chromatography with an electron capture detector (GC-ECD). Lowest average concentrations of PCBs were recorded in Arousa (1.04 μg kg(-1) wet weight), a low populated area with no industry; while the highest levels were found in areas near cities and/or showing a high industrial activity such as: Bilbao Ziérbena (139 μg kg(-1) ww) or A Coruña (55 μg kg(-1) ww). The hexachlorinated congeners CB153 and CB138 dominated the profiles in all wild mussel populations, although a geographical pattern was found in which the relative contributions of the lower chlorinated congeners were higher in the west coast (Rías of Vigo, Pontevedra and Arousa), which may reflect the occurrence of recent inputs of those compounds in the area. Finally, the application of the Mann-Kendalls test demonstrate the existence of a significant decrease in PCBs levels since 1991 up to 1996 in the studied area, whereas either a slow decrease or stable concentrations were registered over the past decade.

Using modestr to download, import and clean species distribution records

Summary Data quality is one of the highest priorities for species distribution data warehouses, as well as one of the main concerns of data users. There is the need, however, for computational procedures with the facility to automatically or semi-automatically identify and correct errors and to seamlessly integrate expert knowledge and automated processes. New version modestr 2.0 (http://www.ipez.es/ModestR) makes it easy to download occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), to import shape files with species range maps such as those available at the website of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), to import KML files, to import CSV files with records of the users, to import ESRI ASCII grid probability files generated by distribution modelling software and show the resulting records on a map. modestr supports five different methods for cleaning the data: (i) data filtering when downloading records from GBIF, (ii) habitat data filtering, (iii) taxonomic disambiguation filtering, (iv) automatic spatial dispersion and environmental layer filters and (v) custom data filtering.