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Description
The study of the integrated properties of star-forming galaxies is central to understand their formation and evolution. Some of these properties are extensive and therefore their analysis require totally covering and spatially resolved observations. Among these properties, metallicity can be defined in spiral discs by means of integral field spectroscopy (IFS) of individual HII regions. The simultaneous analysis of the abundances of primary elements, as oxygen, and secondary, as nitrogen, also provides clues about the star formation history and the processes that shape the build-up of spiral discs. Our main aim is to analyse simultaneously O/H and N/O abundance ratios in HII regions in different radial positions of the discs in a large sample of spiral galaxies to obtain the slopes and the characteristic abundance ratios that can be related to their integrated properties. We analysed the optical spectra of individual selected HII regions extracted from a sample of 350 spiral galaxies of the CALIFA survey. We calculated total O/H abundances and, for the first time, N/O ratios using the semi-empirical routine HII-CHI-MISTRY, which, according to Perez-Montero (2014MNRAS.441.2663P), is consistent with the direct method and reduces the uncertainty in the O/H derivation using [NII] lines owing to the dispersion in the O/H-N/O relation. Then we performed linear fittings to the abundances as a function of the de-projected galactocentric distances.
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