Characterization, biodegradation and cytotoxicity of thermoplastic starch and ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer blends.

Ethylene-vinyl alcohol samples containing 27 and 38 % ethylene were used to prepare blends containing 30 and 50 % thermoplastic starch (TPS) plasticized with glycerol. Their biodegradability and cytotoxicity were studied by different techniques (XRD, DSC, TGA, CA, ATR-FTIR, SEM). TPS presence significantly affected copolymer behavior, as confirmed by the appearance of OH IR 1000-1170 cm bands and overall reduction of EVOH crystallinity, melting point, thermal stability and hydrophobicity.

An actionable hydroeconomic Decision Support System for the assessment of water reallocations in irrigated agriculture. A study of minimum environmental flows in the Douro River Basin, Spain.

Despite major recent advances in socio-hydrology and hydroeconomics research, interdisciplinary methods and models for water policy assessment remain largely concealed to the academic arena. Most river basin authorities still base decision-making on inputs from hydrologic Decision Support Systems (DSS), and have limited information on the economic costs that water policies may impose on the economy. This paper presents a time-variant hierarchical framework that connects a hydrologic module and an economic module by means of two-way feedback protocols.

To charge or to cap in agricultural water management. Insights from modular iterative modeling for the assessment of bilateral micro-macro-economic feedback links.

This paper develops an iterative micro-macro-economic modeling framework to assess agricultural water management policies including feedbacks between local and economy-wide impacts. The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of a set of bidirectional protocols that work through land use and price changes to model the bilateral feedbacks between the micro and macro scales. The proposed framework is applied to the Castile and León Region in Spain, where we assess the performance of two alternative water conservation policies (charges and caps) and compare results to those obtained using a conventional stand-alone microeconomic model.

An ensemble experiment of mathematical programming models to assess socio-economic effects of agricultural water pricing reform in the Piedmont Region, Italy.

The Piedmont Region in NW Italy has recently deployed an ambitious and pioneering agricultural water pricing reform aimed at integrating and effectively enforcing EU's Water Framework Directive principles of cost recovery, polluter-pays and affordability. This paper develops a multi-model ensemble framework encompassing 5 mathematical programming models (2 Positive Mathematical Programming models, 2 Positive Multi-Attribute Utility Programming models and 1 Weighted Goal Programming model) that represent the observed behavior of socioeconomic agents to: 1) simulate the impacts of the Piedmontese water pricing reform on land use allocation and management, water conservation, profit and water tariff revenue; 2) sample modeling uncertainty through the ensemble spread; and 3) explore potential tipping points through use of scenario-discovery techniques. Our research suggests that the key challenge to the reform lies in the management of rice fields, an extensive (17% of the agricultural area), water-demanding and relatively low-added-value crop that nonetheless delivers significant ecosystem services (e.