Variation of leaf litter decomposition among rivers, lagoons and sea: an experiment from Corfu island (Greece)

In aquatic ecosystems, the decomposition of organic detritus represents one of the most important ecosystem functions, which support complex detritus-based food webs that determine the critical balance between carbon mineralization and sequestration. The performance of the decomposition process is usually expressed as rate of decomposition, being a synthetic measure that take into account both abiotic and biotic factors. Decomposition rates have been also applied to evaluate the ecological status in terms of ecological functionality. However, despite a growing number of studies have tested the rate of decomposition between leaves of different riparian tree species in different aquatic ecosystems including rivers, transitional waters and sea, no comparative study among ecosystems typology is available up to date. Here, we compare decomposition rates from rivers, lagoons and sea of Corfu island (Greece). Five sampling sites were fixed in each of the three of the most important rivers and lagoons; other five sampling sites were fixed in the sea around the island. Twelve leaf packs containing 3±0.005 g of oven-dried Phragmites australis leaves were submerged in April 2014 and retrieved in May 2014 (after 30 days). Abiotic parameters were recorded in both sampling times. The retrieved leaf packs were cleaned and the macroinvertebrates retained were removed, counted, identified at lower taxonomic level and weighted. Leaf pack decomposition rates were calculated, and their variability was compared within each aquatic ecosystem, within each ecosystem typology (river, lagoon, sea) and among ecosystem typology. The results are going to be presented on the poster

SpaceGates Academy: teaching science communication and outreach of astronomy, planetary and space science to physics students

Science Communication and Societ

Diversity, distribution and conservation of the terrestrial reptiles of Oman (Sauropsida, Squamata)

All authors: Salvador Carranza , Meritxell Xipell, Pedro Tarroso, Andrew Gardner, Edwin Nicholas Arnold, Michael D. Robinson, Marc Simó-Riudalbas, Raquel Vasconcelos, Philip de Pous, Fèlix Amat, Jiří Šmíd, Roberto Sindaco, Margarita Metallinou †, Johannes Els, Juan Manuel Pleguezuelos, Luis Machado, David Donaire, Gabriel Martínez, Joan Garcia-Porta, Tomáš Mazuch, Thomas Wilms, Jürgen Gebhart, Javier Aznar, Javier Gallego, Bernd-Michael Zwanzig, Daniel Fernández-Guiberteau, Theodore Papenfuss, Saleh Al Saadi, Ali Alghafri, Sultan Khalifa, Hamed Al Farqani, Salim Bait Bilal, Iman Sulaiman Alazri, Aziza Saud Al Adhoobi, Zeyana Salim Al Omairi, Mohammed Al Shariani, Ali Al Kiyumi, Thuraya Al Sariri, Ahmed Said Al Shukaili, Suleiman Nasser Al Akhzami.In the present work, we use an exceptional database including 5,359 records of 101 species of Oman’s terrestrial reptiles together with spatial tools to infer the spatial patterns of species richness and endemicity, to infer the habitat preference of each species and to better define conservation priorities, with especial focus on the effectiveness of the protected areas in preserving this unique arid fauna. Our results indicate that the sampling effort is not only remarkable from a taxonomic point of view, with multiple observations for most species, but also for the spatial coverage achieved. The observations are distributed almost continuously across the two-dimensional climatic space of Oman defined by the mean annual temperature and the total annual precipitation and across the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the multivariate climatic space and are well represented within 17 out of the 20 climatic clusters grouping 10% of the explained climatic variance defined by PC1 and PC2. Species richness is highest in the Hajar and Dhofar Mountains, two of the most biodiverse areas of the Arabian Peninsula, and endemic species richness is greatest in the Jebel Akhdar, the highest part of the Hajar Mountains. Oman’s 22 protected areas cover only 3.91% of the country, including within their limits 63.37% of terrestrial reptiles and 50% of all endemics. Our analyses show that large areas of the climatic space of Oman lie outside protected areas and that seven of the 20 climatic clusters are not protected at all. The results of the gap analysis indicate that most of the species are below the conservation target of 17% or even the less restrictive 12% of their total area within a protected area in order to be considered adequately protected. Therefore, an evaluation of the coverage of the current network of protected areas and the identification of priority protected areas for reptiles using reserve design algorithms are urgently needed. Our study also shows that more than half of the species are still pending of a definitive evaluation by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).This work was funded by grants CGL2012-36970, CGL2015-70390-P from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (cofunded by FEDER) to SC, the project Field study for the conservation of reptiles in Oman, Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs, Oman (Ref: 22412027) to SC and grant 2014-SGR-1532 from the Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya to SC. MSR is funded by a FPI grant from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (BES-2013-064248); RV, PT and LM were funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) through post-doc grants (SFRH/BPD/79913/2011) to RV, (SFRH/BPD/93473/2013) to PT and PhD grant (SFRH/BD/89820/2012) to LM, financed by Programa Operacional Potencial Humano (POPH) – Quadro de Referência Estrategico Nacional (QREN) from the European Social Fund and Portuguese Ministerio da Educação e Ciência

Sit still and pay attention: Using the Wii Balance-Board to detect lapses in concentration in children during psychophysical testing.

During psychophysical testing, a loss of concentration can cause observers to answer incorrectly, even when the stimulus is clearly perceptible. Such lapses limit the accuracy and speed of many psychophysical measurements. This study evaluates an automated technique for detecting lapses based on body movement (postural instability). Thirty-five children (8-11 years of age) and 34 adults performed a typical psychophysical task (orientation discrimination) while seated on a Wii Fit Balance Board: a gaming device that measures center of pressure (CoP). Incorrect responses on suprathreshold catch trials provided the "reference standard" measure of when lapses in concentration occurred. Children exhibited significantly greater variability in CoP on lapse trials, indicating that postural instability provides a feasible, real-time index of concentration. Limitations and potential applications of this method are discussed

The influence of substorm-induced electric fields on the build-up of particle radiation during geospace magnetic storms.

International audienceThe enhanced magnetospheric convection electric field and the substorm‐induced electric fields are the drivers of plasma acceleration during geospace magnetic storms. The relative influence of the two drivers on the development of the storm‐time ring current is the topic of this study. We use a three‐dimensional dynamic ion‐tracing model, to construct maps of the temporal and spatial variations of ion− number densities in the inner magnetosphere. Outflowing ionospheric oxygen ions and protons are traced under two distinct scenarios: in the first case, we follow their transport and acceleration under the influence of a large convection electric field only. In the second case, we add an impulsive electric field due to magnetic field dipolarization, as observed by spacecrafts during substorm expansion. Our aim is to evaluate the contribution of substorms to the build‐up of particle radiation in the inner magnetosphere

GridNews: A distributed automatic Greek broadcast transcription system

In this paper, a distributed system storing and retrieving Broadcast News data recorded from the Greek television is presented. These multimodal data are processed in a grid computational environment interconnecting distributed data storage and processing subsystems. The innovative element of this system is the implementation of the signal processing algorithms in this grid environment, offering additional flexibility and computational power. Among the developed signal processing modules are: the Segmentor, cutting up the original videos into shorter ones, the Classifier, recognizing whether these short videos contain speech or not, the Greek largevocabulary speech Recognizer, transcribing speech into written text, and finally the text Search engine and the video Retriever. All the processed data are stored and retrieved in geographically distributed storage elements. A user-friendly, web-based interface is developed, facilitating the transparent import and storage of new multimodal data, their off-line processing and finally, their search and retrieval. Index Terms — Computer architecture, distributed database systems, multimedia systems, speech recognition, user interface 1