The literature, aimed at understanding the income-price elasticity of air passenger demand, bases its analysis on airport movement. The diversity of studies regarding the casualty between air transportation and economic growth are examples. Some studies covering this link, estimate the income-price relationship with the demand considering international traffic. Considering a domestic setting, where this traffic is significant in Brazil, studies related to remote regions are scarce, and the existing ones focus on governmental policies and subsidies. In addition, empirical studies on the theme consenter themselves in developed regions, such as Europe, North America, and Australia. For Brazil, where we find the Amazon region, there are no empirical researches. This paper analyses the price-income elasticity of the demand regarding domestic passengers in air links from remote cities of the Brazilian Amazon. This study uses panel data regression analysis method on a database of domestic scheduled flights of Brazil´s National Civil Aviation Agency. The results show that air passengers involving remote region flights present a lower sensitiveness regarding local income and airline´s price variations than those in flights among capitals. The higher difference is in income-elasticity of the remote city of origin, which is lower than that of the air traffic among capitals.

Native and exotic fruits from the Amazon have varied characteristics, with aroma being a decisive factor in attracting and accepting them and their medicinal use as a nutraceutical supplement. This work aimed to analyze the chemical constituents of the volatile concentrates of some Myrtaceous fruit species sampled in the Brazilian Amazon. The fruit's pulps were subjected to simultaneous distillation-extraction, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was used to analyze their volatile chemical composition. In the volatile concentrate of Eugenia stipitata (Araçá-boi) were identified α-pinene (17.5%), citronellyl butanoate (15.6%), and pogostol (13.5%) as primary constituents; in Eugenia uniflora (Ginja) were curzerene (30.5%), germacrone (15.4%), atractylone (13.1%), and (E)-β-ocimene (11.1%); in Myrciaria dubia (Camu-Camu) were α-pinene (55.8%), (E)-β-ocimene (13.1%), and α-terpineol (10.0%); in Psidium guajava (Goiaba) were (2E)-hexenal (21.7%), hexanal (15.4%), caryophylla-4(12),8(13)-dien-5-β-ol (10.5%), caryophyllene oxide (9.2%), and pogostol (8.3%); and in Psidium guineense (Araçá) were limonene (25.2%), ethyl butanoate (12.1%), epi-β-bisabolol (9.8%), and α-pinene (9.2%). The analyzed fruit species' volatile concentrates presented a significant diversity of constituents with a predominance of functional groups, such as monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, and fatty acid derivatives, originating from the plant's secondary metabolism and representing significant importance regarding their nutritional and medicinal uses.

This study aimed to detect picobirnavirus (PBV) in the fecal samples of wild and domestic animals from 2014 to 2016 in the Amazon biome. Fecal samples from different animals, including birds (n=41) and mammals (n=217) were used. The PAGE test showed negativity for PBV. However, 32 samples (12.4%, 32/258) showed positive results in RT-PCR analyses. Among the positive sam-ples, pigs and cats, both with 28.12% (9/32), registered the highest frequencies. In phylogenetic analysis, eight sequences from positive samples grouped in the Genogroup 1 of PBV (PBV GI). PBV occurrence was significantly related to cats and pigs, but not other mammals or birds, in-dependently of their geographical origin. Nucleotide analysis demonstrated similarity among the feline group, but the absence of a defined structure between the clades. PBVs are highly wide-spread viruses that can affect the most diverse types of hosts in the Amazon biome, including humans.

Artisanal cheeses made with raw milk are highly appreciated products in Brazil. Most of these cheeses are produced in small properties across different production regions in the country, many of which have been granted a protected designation of origin. The most prominent state that manufactures these products is Minas Gerais, but production is also gaining strength in other Brazilian states. This text presents an overview of the many types of artisanal cheeses produced in the country, grouped by geographical regions, and reviews the current challenges faced by producers and government considering the safety of these cheeses.

This research investigates the exposure of plant species to extreme drought events in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, employing an extensive dataset collected from 205 automatic weather stations across the region. Meteorological indicators derived from hourly data, encompassing precipitation, maximum and minimum air temperature, were utilized to quantify past, current, and future drought conditions. The dataset, comprising 10,299,236 data points, spans a substantial temporal window and exhibits a modest percentage of missing data. Missing data were excluded from analysis, aligning with the decision to refrain from imputation methods due to potential bias. Drought quantification involved the computation of the Aridity Index, the analysis of consecutive hours without precipitation, and the classification of wet and dry days per month. Mann-Kendall trend analysis was applied to assess trends in evapotranspiration and maximum air temperature, considering their significance. The hazard assessment, incorporating environmental factors influencing tree growth dynamics, facilitated the ranking of meteorological indicators to identify regions most exposed to drought events. The results revealed consistent occurrences of extreme rainfall events, indicated by positive outliers in monthly precipitation values. However, significant trends were observed, including an increase in daily maximum temperature and consecutive hours without precipitation, coupled with a decrease in daily precipitation across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. No significant correlation between vulnerability ranks and weather station latitudes and elevation were found, suggesting geographical location and elevation does not strongly influence observed dryness trends.

The present article discusses the institutional model adopted in Brazil regarding energy production through biomass. The theoretical-empirical method is used to conclude that the model's difficulties can be overcome by adopting a network of contracts capable of subjecting renewable energy generation to an energy compensation model.

Water footprint has been widely used to illustrate the consumption of water in many situations; for instance, in products, processes or regions of interest. In this work, we analyzed – using a sensitivity analysis approach – the effect of some variables in the calculation of the water footprint in the viticulture in Brazilian Serra Gaúcha (the major producing region of Brazilian Wine).The classical Penman-Monteith model for evapotransporation was considered, with uncertainties in some parameters (dead mulch covering fraction in the vineyard, maximum temperatures for some months, altitudes and latitudes of the site). The sensitivity analysis was conducted using the SAFE toolbox under Octave framework. The results indicated that the the portion of the water footprint corresponding to the evapotranspiration is more sensitive to the values of mulch covering fraction and the altitude of the site in comparison with the latitude and the maximum temperatures.

Crop yield estimation supported by satellite remote sensing data can provide expeditious and strategic information for farmers’ decision-making. Most recent forecasting methods have indicated a promising pathway based on machine learning algorithms. However, validation performances, demand for big data and their inherent inexplicability have not yet consolidated a substantial differential to replace methods based on simpler and more understandable models. This paper proposes an approach based on simple linear models fitted from vegetation indices (VIs) assessed at regular intervals of time series derived from MODIS satellite images, aiming to forecast cotton yields in representative areas of the Brazilian Cerrado. Data from 281 commercial production plots were taken to train (167 plots) and test (114 plots) linear regression models relating seed cotton yield and nine well-known VIs averaged in 15-days intervals. Among the evaluated VIs, EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) and TVI (Triangular Vegetation Index) showed the lowest root mean square errors (RMSE) and the highest determination coefficients. The best periods for in-season yield prediction were from the 90-105 to 135-150 days after sowing (DAS), i.e. phenological phases corresponding to boll development, open boll and fiber maturation, with lowest RMSE of about 750 kg ha-1 and R2=0.70. The best forecasts for early crop stages were provided by models at the peaks (maximum value of the VI time-series) for EVI and TVI, which occurred around 80-90 DAS. The proposed approach makes the yield predictability more inferable along the crop time series just by providing sowing dates, contour maps and its respective VIs.

This paper compares the performance of three text-to-speech (TTS) models released from June 2021 to January 2022 in order to establish a baseline for Brazilian Portuguese. Those models were trained using dataset for Brazilian Portuguese. The experimental setup considers tts-portuguese dataset to fine-tune the following TTS models: VITS end-to-end model; glowtts and gradtts acoustic models both using hifi-gan vocoder. Performance metrics are arranged into objective and subjective metrics. As subjective metrics, the naturalness and intelligibility are measured based on the mean opinion score (MOS). Results shows that gradtts+hifigan model achieved naturalness of 4.07 MOS, close to performance of current commercial models.

The hand-net is the standard method for capturing mosquitoes with sylvatic diurnal activity in disease outbreaks in Brazil. However, occupational risks and biases related to the collectors´ abilities and attractiveness are important limitations. In this study, we compared hand-nets with automatic traps (CDC) associated to CO2 and BG-Lure®, in the Vassununga State Park, a Brazilian Savanna protection area. The collections carried out over 27 days, on the ground and the forest canopy. A total of 1,555 mosquitoes were obtained in 20 taxa. The diversity index ranged between 1.12 and 1.79 and the dominance index, from 0.22 to 0.40. The dominant species in the ground was Aedes scapularis (46.0%) and in the canopy, Hg. janthinomys/capricornii (31.9%). Haemagogus leucocelaenus was rare (n=2). The hand-net resulted in the greatest diversity and abundance of species in both strata, followed by traps associated with CO2. A low degree of similarity was observed between the hand-net on the ground compared to the other capture methods. The use of BG-Lure® alone resulted in a low number of specimens. In conclusion, the hand-net is still the method of choice for collecting arbovirus vectors in the diurnal period, especially yellow fever vectors.

Background: To describe epidemiological characteristics and perform a SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance in the southeastern region of São Paulo state. Methods: During the first months of 2022, we compared weekly SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence considering age, Ct value and variants lineages. Results: An increase in the number of SARS-CoV-2 positive cases until the fourth epidemiological week were observed. From the 4th epidemiological week onwards, the number of tests for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis began to decrease, but the number of positive samples for SARS-CoV-2 remained high, reaching its most expressive level with a rate of 60% of infected individual cases. In this period, we observed a growing increase in SARS-CoV-2 infection within the age group 0-10 throughout the epidemiological weeks, from 2.8% in the 1st epidemiological week to 9.2% in the 8th epidemiological week. We further observed significantly higher Ct values within younger patients samples compared to other older age groups. According to lineage assignment, SARS-CoV-2 (BA.1) was the most prevalent (74.5%) in the younger group, followed by BA.1.1 (23%), BA.2 (1.7%) and Delta (1%). Phylogenetic analysis showed that BA.2 sequences clustered together, indicating sustained transmission of this Omicron VOC sublineage by that time. Our results suggest the initial dissemination steps of the Omicron’s sublinage BA.2 into the younger group, due specific genomic features of the detected sequences. Conclusion: These data provide interesting results related to the spread, emerging and evolution of the Omicron variant in the Southeast Brazilian population.

Thermal comfort is extremely important in architecture, especially in environments with more people spending longer on studies or intellectual activities. This research describes a case study to investigate university buildings' energy and thermal performance as a part of the ANEEL program. Due to this importance, and the need to save energy in Brazilian public buildings, the ANEEL-the Brazilian Energy Electricity Regulatory Agency, launched 2016 a national program focusing on energy efficiency in public universities around the country. University offices and classrooms require high intellectual effort; thus, environmental comfort is critical for maintaining its users' physical and mental health. This study included a pre-diagnosis of the performance of the envelope, lighting, and air conditioning systems and a survey about the quality of the environments from the users' point of view. The Prescriptive Method of the Brazilian Labeling Program (PBE) for Commercial, Service, and Public Buildings (RTQ-C) assessed the building performance. Statistical analysis was applied to correlate the quality and thermal preference of the users from the PMV/PPD. The results showed a high rate of thermal discomfort in both environments of the studies, even when using air conditioning.

The Brazilian livestock is predominantly extensive, with approximately 90% of the production being sustained on pasture, which occupies around 20% of the territory. In the current climate change scenario and where cropland is becoming a limited resource, there is a growing need for a more efficient land use and occupation. It is estimated that more than half of the Brazilian pastures have some level of degradation; however there is still no mapping of the quality of pastures on a national scale. In this study, we mapped and evaluated the spatio-temporal dynamics of pasture quality in Brazil, between 2010 and 2018, considering three classes of degradation: Absent (D0), Intermediate (D1), and Severe (D2). There was no variation in the total area occupied by pastures in the evaluated period, in spite of the accentuated spatial dynamics, with a retraction in the center-south and expansion to the north, over areas of ​​native vegetation. The percentage of non-degraded pastures increased ~12%, due to the recovery of degraded areas and the emergence of new pasture areas as a result of the prevailing spatial dynamics. However, about 44 Mha of the pasture area is currently severely degraded. The dynamics in pasture quality were not homogeneous in property size classes. We observed that in the approximately 2.68 million properties with livestock activity, the proportion with quality gains was twice as low in small properties compared to large ones, and the proportion with losses was three times greater, showing an increase in inequality between properties with more and less resources (large and small, respectively). The areas occupied by pastures in Brazil present an unique opportunity to increase livestock production and make available areas for agriculture, without the need for new deforestation in the coming decades.

There is a lack of information on vaccination for pregnant women in the Brazilian literature. Our aim was to evaluate the data on vaccines recorded on the pregnancy card and knowledge about the importance of vaccination for women admitted for labor in a reference public tertiary maternity unit in Presidente Prudente, São Paulo, Brazil. Vaccine data as prescribed by the National Immunization Program of Brazil (NIP) in prenatal cards for patients in labor from the 45 municipalities of the western region of São Paulo state were obtained. A questionnaire relating to knowledge about the types and importance of vaccination in pregnancy was applied. All vaccines indicated by the NIP were registered in only 12.0% of the prenatal cards, and 33.0% of cards registered any vaccines. In this group, 16.6% were aged between 14 and 21 years, and tetanus and COVID-19 were the most prevalent vaccines that they had heard of during prenatal care. Data on vaccines was poorly recorded in the cards, suggesting a lack of attention and unpreparedness of professionals working in primary care. Our study has countrywide and global relevance, and may be applied mainly in Latin American countries facing similar difficulties and limitations with low rates of vaccination during pregnancy.

Patches of Diopatra species from Brazilian sandy beaches were followed for ca. 50 years. Data were accessed from papers, gray literature, images and collections to verify time changes in the South Brazilian Bight (SBB) from 1974-2021. We modeled maximum density over time at 15 beaches, observing very high densities (> 100 ind.m-2) in 1974 followed by a decrease (~ 10 ind.m-2) of three species of Diopatra until 1995 and a strong decline (1996-2002) when populations were almost regionally extinct (0-1 ind. m-2). A slight recovery (3-4 ind.m-2) occurred after 2006 for a single species, D. marinae, associated with warmer northern waters, suggesting a range shift. This pattern was associated with a) heatwaves linked to an El-Niño event (1988) and gradual SST surface warming of ca. 1 oC since 1974. The usage of Diopatra spp. as fishing bait could also be associated with such a reduction. After 2016, D. neapolitana, a likely alien species, was established in the SBB in high densities. Projections based on Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) suggest a potential of invasion in the same range of the known species of D. cuprea complex along the Brazilian coast despite that there are no signs of competition between both species.

Correlations between the Neoproterozoic belts surrounding the West African Craton and northern Brazilian cratons have long been a subject of interest and controversies. Due to the splitting of African and South American continents by the Atlantic oceanic domains, no direct links are preserved, requiring relying on various geological or geophysical characteristics to propose such correlations. In addition to the opening of the Atlantic oceanic domains, another difficulty arises from the covering of northern Brazilian belts by upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic basins, making these correlations speculative. Recently, four orogens have been evidenced in the Neoproterozoic belts of the western margin of the West Africa Craton, while the belts on the eastern side underwent only one orogeny. Similarities with the Pan-African I (900-650 Ma) and with the Pan-African II (650-480 Ma) orogenic events have been evidence in the western Brazilian belts (Araguay and Paraguay). The two first orogens on the western margin (Pan-African I and Pan-African II) can thus be extended to the western Brazilian belts and can be considered as parts of a single geodynamic system running from the Mauritania to the Paraguay including the “Gurupi rift” as an aulacogen connected to the NNW-SSE Panafrican I and II oceanic domains. Consequently, the eastern Brazilian belt should rather be linked the Eastern Trans-Saharan belts.

The concept of ecosystem services (ESs) provides a valuable approach to communicate societies' dependence on natural ecosystems, assisting in the evaluation of measures to protect vegetation in watersheds that promote water-related ESs. Vegetation cover and land use are important factors related to the capacity of ecosystems to provide soil loss regulation and sediment retention services, which are highly relevant for sediment management in watersheds draining into reservoirs with multiple water uses. This study aims to assess the relationship between potential changes in land use and land cover and the sediment retention service provided by riparian vegetation in a watershed draining into a hydroelectric reservoir in the Brazilian Cerrado. Sediment load was selected as a physical variable that affects different water uses in reservoirs, with these uses being dependent on the quality or quantity of stored water. Scenarios were analyzed to represent landscape reconfigurations from a baseline condition in order to account for the recovery of riparian vegetation by the agricultural sector, as foreseen in the Brazilian Forest Code. To map and quantify variations in annual sediment retention, the InVEST model was used, which allows estimating an integrated response of the drainage basin to large-scale land use changes over time and space. The results show that for the drainage basin of the Corumbá IV Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), the recovery of riparian areas occupied by annual crops has the potential to generate greater benefits to water use in the reservoir. In the studied catchment area, 14% of the total vegetation deficit in riparian areas is occupied by crops, while 86% is occupied by pastures. This highlights the buffering role of riparian vegetation as an effective practice for managing sediment flows originating from sheet erosion in agricultural landscapes. The methodology employed in this study allows for the quantification and mapping of the effects of soil and water conservation measures in river basins. This enables the prioritization of sectoral efforts for the restoration of native vegetation, considering the highest returns in benefits perceived by water users affected by sediment input in reservoirs. The study's results reinforce the importance of conserving vegetation in riparian areas and their surroundings for sediment retention, highlighting the role of these areas as assets in providing water-related ecosystem services.