Search

International audience; BIOPRESS (Linking Pan-European land cover change to pressures on Biodiversity'), a European Commission funded Global Monitoring for Environment and Security' project, produced land cover change information (19502000) for Europe from aerial photographs and tested if this information is suitable for monitoring habitats and biodiversity. The methods and results related to the land cover change work are summarised. Changes in land cover were established through 73 window and 59 transect samples distributed across Europe. Although the sample size was too small and biased to represent the spatial variability observed in Europe, the work highlighted the importance of method consistency, the choice of nomenclature and spatial scale. The results suggest different processes are taking place in different parts of Europe: the Boreal and Alpine regions are dominated by forest management; abandonment and intensification are mainly encountered in the Mediterranean; urbanisation and drainage are more characteristic of the Continental and Atlantic regions.

i On October 29, 1976, the Internal Revenue Service published new proposed arbitrage bond regulations. The preamble to the regulations stated that the main purpose of the new rules was to eliminate arbitrage as an inducement to refund. Arbitrage resulted from the yield differential between a municipal issuer's borrowing and lending rates. In an advance refunding, a municipal issuer borrows funds at a taxexempt rate and then reinvests the net proceeds in a portfolio of government securities which normally has a higher market yield. The portfolio is then structured to meet the debt service requirements of the issue being refunded. A primary determinant of the size of the new issue required to defease the outstanding debt is the differential in yield allowed on the government portfolio and the interest rate on the outstanding debt. Under the old regulations, 85% of the new issue proceeds were required to be invested at a yield not in ex