Report on the Mission to Canaima
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Catalogue of the Amphibians of Venezuela: Illustrated and Annotated Species List, Distribution, and Conservation 1,2César L
Mannophryne vulcano, Male carrying tadpoles. El Ávila (Parque Nacional Guairarepano), Distrito Federal. Photo: Jose Vieira. We want to dedicate this work to some outstanding individuals who encouraged us, directly or indirectly, and are no longer with us. They were colleagues and close friends, and their friendship will remain for years to come. César Molina Rodríguez (1960–2015) Erik Arrieta Márquez (1978–2008) Jose Ayarzagüena Sanz (1952–2011) Saúl Gutiérrez Eljuri (1960–2012) Juan Rivero (1923–2014) Luis Scott (1948–2011) Marco Natera Mumaw (1972–2010) Official journal website: Amphibian & Reptile Conservation amphibian-reptile-conservation.org 13(1) [Special Section]: 1–198 (e180). Catalogue of the amphibians of Venezuela: Illustrated and annotated species list, distribution, and conservation 1,2César L. Barrio-Amorós, 3,4Fernando J. M. Rojas-Runjaic, and 5J. Celsa Señaris 1Fundación AndígenA, Apartado Postal 210, Mérida, VENEZUELA 2Current address: Doc Frog Expeditions, Uvita de Osa, COSTA RICA 3Fundación La Salle de Ciencias Naturales, Museo de Historia Natural La Salle, Apartado Postal 1930, Caracas 1010-A, VENEZUELA 4Current address: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Río Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Laboratório de Sistemática de Vertebrados, Av. Ipiranga 6681, Porto Alegre, RS 90619–900, BRAZIL 5Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Altos de Pipe, apartado 20632, Caracas 1020, VENEZUELA Abstract.—Presented is an annotated checklist of the amphibians of Venezuela, current as of December 2018. The last comprehensive list (Barrio-Amorós 2009c) included a total of 333 species, while the current catalogue lists 387 species (370 anurans, 10 caecilians, and seven salamanders), including 28 species not yet described or properly identified. Fifty species and four genera are added to the previous list, 25 species are deleted, and 47 experienced nomenclatural changes. -
Canaima National Park and Angel Falls
Venezuela Tours • Canaima National Park & Angel Falls Canaima National Park & Angel Falls 6 nights / 7 days DAY 1: CARACAS A guide will greet you upon arrival and will transfer you to your hotel for two nights’ accommodation. DAY 2: CARACAS Today you will join a full day city tour of Venezuela with a shared guide and transportation included as well as all entrance fees required. The morning starts with a well-planned tour to the city’s major historical sites including Simon Bolivar’s birth place and museum, the cathedral and Sacro Museum, the Consejo Municipal and the Avila Hills for a panoramic view of the city. After lunch you will visit the Quinta Anauco museum, one of the best in the city. DAY 3: CARACAS – PUERTO ORDAZ – CANAIMA NATIONAL PARK A guide will transfer you to the airport in time to check in for and to board your flight to Puerto Ordaz connecting with your flight to Canaima National Park. Upon arrival a guide will greet you and will transfer your Canaima lodge for three nights’ accommodation. After lunch you will embark on a guided excursion to Yuri Falls. Yuri Falls are located some 10km from the Canaima Lagoon by boat. En route the group will stop for a number of fantastic photo opportunities in the unique landscape. Your guide will point out interesting rock formations and other peculiarities found in Canaima. After a short 20 minute navigation you will arrive at a pier where the group will disembark and prepare for a short walk through the jungle. At the falls where you will have some free time for swimming and relaxing before returning to camp for dinner and overnight accommodations. -
The Strange Revival of Bicameralism
The Strange Revival of Bicameralism Coakley, J. (2014). The Strange Revival of Bicameralism. Journal of Legislative Studies, 20(4), 542-572. https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2014.926168 Published in: Journal of Legislative Studies Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © 2014 Taylor & Francis. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:01. Oct. 2021 Published in Journal of Legislative Studies , 20 (4) 2014, pp. 542-572; doi: 10.1080/13572334.2014.926168 THE STRANGE REVIVAL OF BICAMERALISM John Coakley School of Politics and International Relations University College Dublin School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy Queen’s University Belfast [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a surprising reversal of the long-observed trend towards the disappearance of second chambers in unitary states, with 25 countries— all but one of them unitary—adopting the bicameral system. -
Why the World's Tallest Waterfall Is Named Angel Falls
terrae incognitae, Vol. 44 No. 1, April, 2012, 16–42 Why the World’s Tallest Waterfall is Named Angel Falls Karen Angel Eureka, California, USA Jimmie Angel (1899–1956) was an aviator and adventurer in the early years of air exploration. This article discusses his discovery of Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall, which bears his name, and the impact of that discovery — and his reputation and dogged determination — on later expeditions into the Venezuelan interior. The author, Angel’s niece, pieces together this fascinating story using a blend of dedicated archival research and painstakingly acquired family history and the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances of Jimmie and his wife Marie. The result is a tale of modern-day exploration and geographic discovery. keywords Jimmie Angel, Angel Falls, Auyántepui, E. Thomas Gilliard, Anne Roe Simpson, George Gaylord Simpson, Venezuela When I began researching the life of American aviator James “Jimmie” Crawford Angel (1899–1956), there were many stories about him in books, newspapers, magazines, and more recently on websites and blogs. Some stories can be verified by the Angel family or other sources; some stories are plausible, but remain unverified; other stories are fabrications. The result is a tangle of true stories and unverified stories. Finding the truth about Jimmie Angel is also complicated because he himself repeated the various unverified stories that became legends about his life.1 As the daughter of Jimmie Angel’s youngest brother Clyde Marshall Angel (1917– 97), I had heard stories about my uncle since childhood, but the family had few documents to support the stories. -
Federalism, Bicameralism, and Institutional Change: General Trends and One Case-Study*
brazilianpoliticalsciencereview ARTICLE Federalism, Bicameralism, and Institutional Change: General Trends and One Case-study* Marta Arretche University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil The article distinguishes federal states from bicameralism and mechanisms of territorial representation in order to examine the association of each with institutional change in 32 countries by using constitutional amendments as a proxy. It reveals that bicameralism tends to be a better predictor of constitutional stability than federalism. All of the bicameral cases that are associated with high rates of constitutional amendment are also federal states, including Brazil, India, Austria, and Malaysia. In order to explore the mechanisms explaining this unexpected outcome, the article also examines the voting behavior of Brazilian senators constitutional amendments proposals (CAPs). It shows that the Brazilian Senate is a partisan Chamber. The article concludes that regional influence over institutional change can be substantially reduced, even under symmetrical bicameralism in which the Senate acts as a second veto arena, when party discipline prevails over the cohesion of regional representation. Keywords: Federalism; Bicameralism; Senate; Institutional change; Brazil. well-established proposition in the institutional literature argues that federal Astates tend to take a slow reform path. Among other typical federal institutions, the second legislative body (the Senate) common to federal systems (Lijphart 1999; Stepan * The Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa no Estado -
Venezuela Self-Rule INSTITUTIONAL DEPTH and POLICY SCOPE Venezuela's Intermediate Governance Consists of Twenty-Three Estados
Venezuela Self-rule INSTITUTIONAL DEPTH AND POLICY SCOPE Venezuela’s intermediate governance consists of twenty-three estados (states) and the Distrito Capital (Capital District, formerly the Distrito Federal), as well as twelve island groupings which make up the dependencias federales (federal dependencies) with 6500 inhabitants, and until 1998, the territorios federales (federal territories), which were dependencies. The three territorios federales were granted the status of estados: Delta Amacuro in 1991, Amazonas in 1992, and Vargas in 1998.1 Estados are divided into statistical regions, which have no administrative life. New constitutions were passed in 1947, 1953, 1961, and 1999 (and revised in 2009). Two distritos metropolitanos (metropolitan districts)-- the Distrito del Alto Apure and Distrito Metropolitano de Caracas--were created in 2001 and 2000, respectively, and abolished late 2017. Venezuela was established as a federation by its first constitution in 1811 (Hernández-Mendible 1998: 2), but is today the most centralized of the four federal states in Latin America (Escobar Lemmon 2003; Lijphart 1999: 190; Levine 1989: 273; Bland 1997: 38, 2002). Estados gained some authority when the 1947 constitution was revised with the onset of democracy in 1961. A significant increase in regional authority also took place in the late eighties and early nineties (Penfold-Becerra 1999). In contrast, the presidency of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) was centralizing. Article 3 of the 1947 constitution divides the national territory in estados, the Distrito Federal, and the Territorios Federales and Dependencias Federales. Estados were recognized as autonomous entities (Title VI, Art. 120), vested with compe- tences over local police (Art. 93), own institutional set up (Art. -
Science Snap (#26): Angel Falls, Venezuela
Science Snap (#26): Angel Falls, Venezuela Sorcha McMahon is a third year PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Sorcha is investigating how strange igneous rocks called carbonatites may have formed, using both natural samples and high-pressure experiments. Canaima National Park. Photo credit: Sorcha McMahon Angel Falls is the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall in the Canaima National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Gran Sabana region of Bolívar State, in Venezuela. The waterfall drops from the summit of the largest tepui (table-top mountain) of the Guiana Highlands of South America, Auyantepui, from a height of 979 m. Angel Falls is said to have inspired the setting of the Disney animated film Up(2009) where the location is called Paradise Falls. The nearby Mount Roraima inspired the Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle to write his novel The Lost World about the discovery of a living prehistoric world full of dinosaurs and primeval plants. The borders of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana meet on the top of this tepui, which translates to “house of the gods” in the native tongue of the Pemon, the indigenous people who inhabit the Gran Sabana. Tepuis host a unique array of endemic plant and animal species, with ~1/3 of the plants found nowhere else on the planet. Angel Falls, Venezuela. It is also known as “Kerepakupai Vená” in the original indigenous Pemon language, meaning “waterfall of the deepest place”. Photo credit: Sorcha McMahon The extraordinary topography is part of the Guiana Shield, and began as the Great Plains; an igneous-metamorphic basement formed during the Precambrian as part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland (approx. -
Bicameralism in Belgium: the Dismantlement of the Senate for the Sake of Multinational Confederalism by Patricia Popelier
ISSN: 2036-5438 Bicameralism in Belgium: the dismantlement of the Senate for the sake of multinational confederalism by Patricia Popelier Perspectives on Federalism, Vol. 10, issue 2, 2018 Except where otherwise noted content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.5 Italy License E -215 Abstract Belgium was established in 1830 as a unitary state with a bicameral parliament, with symmetrical powers for the upper and the lower house. While federalism and bicameralism are often considered a pair, the Belgian system shows an inverse relationship. The Senate gradually turned into a house representative of the sub-states, but its powers declined inversely proportional to the level of decentralisation of the Belgian state. This paper inquires how the dismantling of the Belgian Senate fits in the increasingly devolutionary nature of the Belgian state structure. First, it nuances the link between bicameralism and federalism: bicameralism is an institutional device for federalism, but not by necessity, and only under specific conditions. The official narrative is that the Belgian Senate was reformed to turn it into a house of the sub-states in line as a federal principle, but in reality the conditions to fulfil this task are not fulfilled. Instead, the paper holds that bicameralism in Belgium is subordinate to the needs of multinational conflict management, and that complying with the federative ideal of an upper house giving voice to the collective needs of the sub-states would stand in the way of the evolution of the Belgian system towards confederalism based on two major linguistic groups. Key-words Bicameralism, parliamentary systems, federalism, confederalism, multinationalism Except where otherwise noted content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.5 Italy License E -216 Even before its establishment, when Belgium’s founders discussed the design of the new Belgian State, the upper chamber was highly contentious in Belgium. -
Shrouds of Mystery
Story Giles Foden Photographs Philip Lee Harvey SHROUDS OF MYSTERY Venezuela’s bizarre antediluvian landscape hides many secrets, tempting fearless adventurers over the years with the possibility of riches and even enlightenment The waterfall seemed to fall through eternity. Sifted in the sieve of itself – hovering in the air, staggering but never stopping – it appeared to be part of a world in which time had slowed down, or somehow been canceled altogether. There are verifiable reasons to explain how this impression could form in my head. Water from above was decelerating as it hit water below, water that had itself already slowed down – and so on and on. The phenomenon that is Angel Falls comes down in some of the world’s oldest natural formations: the table- like “tepui” mountains that rise, suddenly and inconceivably, from the Gran Sabana. This vast area of grassland and jungle is the heartland of Venezuela. The tepuis themselves are remnant geological features of Gondwanaland, Myth and legend surround a supercontinent that existed some 180 million years ago, when Africa and South America were conjoined. It was the American pilot Jimmie no wonder I felt out of time. Angel, after whom Angel Falls in Venezuela is Silent and amazed, perched on a rocky outcrop opposite the falls, I watched the cascade’s foaming sections, named. He was born streaming and checking in the roaring flow. At 3,212 feet high, Angel Falls is the world’s tallest waterfall, a “vertical in Missouri in 1899 river” that has mesmerized many before me. With a flash of insight, I realized its movement exemplified humanity’s never-ending Auyántepui, the mountain from which it descends, reads like dance between holism and separation; everything is connected, something out of a novel. -
Scienze Geologiche
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN SCIENZE GEOLOGICHE Ciclo XXVI Settore Concorsuale di afferenza: 04/A3 Settore Scientifico disciplinare: GEO/04 SPELEOGENESIS AND SECONDARY CAVE MINERALS IN QUARTZ‐SANDSTONE AND QUARTZITE ENVIRONMENT Presentata da: Francesco Sauro Coordinatore Dottorato Relatore Prof. Roberto Barbieri Prof. Jo De Waele Correlatore Prof. Leonardo Piccini Esame finale anno 2014 ... and the moon appeared as on a dead world of sole geology. You really had up there, the sense of the earth and rock as living bodies ... Seemed to be dreaming in terms of mineral. ... e apparve la luna come su un mondo morto di sola geologia. Si aveva veramente lassù, il senso della terra e della roccia come corpi viventi... Pareva di sognare in termini di minerale. Alfonso Vinci, Auyan Tepui, 1949 SPELEOGENESIS AND SECONDARY CAVE MINERALS IN QUARTZ-SANDSTONE AND QUARTZITE ENVIRONMENT ABSTRACT 9 RIASSUNTO 11 1. INTRODUCTION 13 1.1 Quartzite caves: beyond the quartz insolubility paradox 13 1.2 The mechanisms of quartz and silica weathering 14 1.2.1 Forms of quartz and silica 14 1.2.2 Characteristics of the silica-water system 14 1.2.3 Influence of inorganic and organic cations 16 1.2.4 Influence of organic compounds and microbial activity 17 1.3 Quartzite and quartz-sandstone weathering 18 1.3.1 Orthoquartzite and Metaquartzite 18 1.3.2 Quartz weathering landscapes and caves of the World 19 1.3.3 The Gran Sabana: the World’s finest epigenic quartzite Karst 22 1.3.4 Corona Sa Craba: an example of hypogenic speleogenesis in quartzites 23 1.4 Objectives and outline of the thesis 26 2. -
31 Day Expedition in Venezuela. Angel Falls and Ghost Cave
t: 01392 660056 e: [email protected] Venezuela Angel Falls and Ghost Cave expedition Experience the diversity of little known Venezuela in this epic month-long expedition as we travel to some of the most remote regions of the country. We embark on a breath taking 11 day trek & 3 days in canoes, as we journey to the edge of the explored world. We’ll visit the awe-inspiring Angel Falls and trek to the Cave of Ghosts - a truly spectacular cave hidden deep in the jungle that was only discovered in the last decade. Our journey continues as we spend time in a working ranch followed by a 4 day community project culminating in some well-earned R & R on the Caribbean Coast. Warning: this expedition is for adventurous Recommended itinerary: Culture shock rating: Days 11----3:3: Arrive Caracas transfer to Colonia Tovar. Upon arrival at Caracas we will be met Physical rating: and transferred to the cloud forest town of Colonia Tovar. Over the next two days we will be harvesting, preparing and packaging the food that we will need whilst trekking. With the help of our guide we will be taught how to harvest the right vegetables and prepare them so they are made into dehydrated food. The process takes a while but when we are on the trek enjoying our dinner that we prepared ourselves, the taste will be very rewarding. Day 4: Drive from Colonia Tovar to Ciudad Bolivar. Followed by a tour of this historical city. Day 5: Fly and trek to Uruyen Canyon. -
Economic Incentives Vital for Development of the Guiana Shield
Economic Incentives Vital for Development of the Guiana Shield By Dr. Odeen Ishmael, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs The fourth international congress on the biodiversity of the Guiana Shield, sponsored by the International Biodiversity Society of the Guiana Shield (IBG) in conjunction with the Guyana government, was held during August 8-12 in Georgetown, Guyana.i In his address to the forum on April 8, Guyana’s President David Granger proposed a three-pronged approach to be adopted for the effective protection and preservation of the Guiana Shield. That approach, he said, must include the establishment of a scientific research institute, the setting up of strong mechanisms for data and information sharing, and adequate investment and funding.ii President Granger said that the scientific community, governments, non- governmental organizations and communities must forge partnerships to protect the Shield’s biodiversity, while allowing states to leverage its high endemicity, cultural diversity and intact ecosystems for inclusive growth and secure futures.iii The Guiana Shield The Guiana Shield is a 1.7 billion-year-old Precambrian geological formation in northeast South America.iv The higher elevations are the Guiana Highlands, with flat- topped mountains and are the source of some of the world's most spectacular waterfalls such as Angel Falls and Kaieteur Falls. The Shield underlies Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana (Guyane) as well as parts of Brazil and Colombia. It has one of the highest measures of biodiversity in the world, and is the natural habitat of numerous endemic species of mammals, fresh water fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and insects.v vi It also sustains one of the largest blocks of primary tropical rain forest worldwide as well as a region marked by very high biodiversity levels.