Contribución al conocimiento de la flora pteridológica de El Hierro (Islas Canarias)

BONALBERTI PERONI, C., PERONI, A. & PERONI, G. 2001. Contribución al conocimiento de la flora pteridológica de El Hierro (Islas Canarias). Bot. Complutensis 25: 289-297. Se ha llevado a cabo un estudio de los pteridófitos de El Hierro, la más occidental de las islas del archipiélago canario. En total se han censado 30 táxones pertenecientes a 12 familias. Las especies se acompañan de datos sobre su rareza y condiciones ecológicas en que se desarrollan.BONALBERTI PERONI, C., PERONI, A. & PERONI, G. 2001. Contribution to the knowledge of the Pteridoligical Flora of El Hierro (Canary Islands). Bot. Complutensis 25: 289-297. A study on the Pteridophyta of El Hierro, the western island of the Canary Archipelago, was realized. A census of 30 taxa subdivided in 12 families was made. Some notes have a greatest importance for the rareness of species or for ecological conditions where taxa vegetate

Experimental investigation on the bending behaviour of hybrid and steel thin walled box beams—The role of adhesive joints

In the automotive design, nowadays there are two fundamental drivers. On one hand there are the environmental problems, on the other hand there are the safety matters. Within this contest, the weight reduction has become a key driver in the design of vehicles and it is necessary to consider and to study the use of nonconventional materials taking advantage from their high potential of weight reduction and energy absorption capability. In this perspective, the aim of this work is the study of the structural behaviour of box beams by means of a series of three points bending tests. The examined cross sections are those typically used in automotive construction. Different type of materials (steel, composite) and joining technologies (adhesive, spot weld) have been examined, considering different configurations. The work put in evidence the advantages coming from the use of adhesive, which allows structures with important weight reduction and better mechanical properties than traditional joining solution

Energy Efficiency of Hybrid-Power HetNets: A Population-like Games Approach

In this paper, a distributed control scheme based on population games is proposed. The controller is in charge of dealing with the energy consumption problem in a Heterogeneous Cellular Network (HetNet) powered by hybrid energy sources (grid and renewable energy) while guaranteeing appropriate quality of service (QoS) level at the same time. Unlike the conventional approach in population games, it considers both atomicity and non-anonymity. Simulation results show that the proposed population-games approach reduces grid consumption by up to about 12% compared to the traditional best-signal level association policy.U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research FA9550-17-1-0259Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte DPI2016-76493-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Empresa DPI2017-86918-

Convergent adaptations: bitter manioc cultivation systems in fertile anthropogenic dark earths and floodplain soils in central Amazonia

Shifting cultivation in the humid tropics is incredibly diverse, yet research tends to focus on one type: long-fallow shifting cultivation. While it is a typical adaptation to the highly-weathered nutrient-poor soils of the Amazonian terra firme, fertile environments in the region offer opportunities for agricultural intensification. We hypothesized that Amazonian people have developed divergent bitter manioc cultivation systems as adaptations to the properties of different soils. We compared bitter manioc cultivation in two nutrient-rich and two nutrient-poor soils, along the middle Madeira River in Central Amazonia. We interviewed 249 farmers in 6 localities, sampled their manioc fields, and carried out genetic analysis of bitter manioc landraces. While cultivation in the two richer soils at different localities was characterized by fast-maturing, low-starch manioc landraces, with shorter cropping periods and shorter fallows, the predominant manioc landraces in these soils were generally not genetically similar. Rather, predominant landraces in each of these two fertile soils have emerged from separate selective trajectories which produced landraces that converged for fast-maturing low-starch traits adapted to intensified swidden systems in fertile soils. This contrasts with the more extensive cultivation systems found in the two poorer soils at different localities, characterized by the prevalence of slow-maturing high-starch landraces, longer cropping periods and longer fallows, typical of previous studies. Farmers plant different assemblages of bitter manioc landraces in different soils and the most popular landraces were shown to exhibit significantly different yields when planted in different soils. Farmers have selected different sets of landraces with different perceived agronomic characteristics, along with different fallow lengths, as adaptations to the specific properties of each agroecological micro-environment. These findings open up new avenues for research and debate concerning the origins, evolution, history and contemporary cultivation of bitter manioc in Amazonia and beyond

Media use during adolescence: the recommendations of the Italian Pediatric Society.

BACKGROUND: The use of media device, such as smartphone and tablet, is currently increasing, especially among the youngest. Adolescents spend more and more time with their smartphones consulting social media, mainly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because. Adolescents often feel the necessity to use a media device as a means to construct a social identity and express themselves. For some children, smartphone ownership starts even sooner as young as 7 yrs, according to internet safety experts. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We analyzed the evidence on media use and its consequences in adolescence. RESULTS: In literature, smartphones and tablets use may negatively influences the psychophysical development of the adolescent, such as learning, sleep and sigh. Moreover, obesity, distraction, addiction, cyberbullism and Hikikomori phenomena are described in adolescents who use media device too frequently. The Italian Pediatric Society provide action-oriented recommendations for families and clinicians to avoid negative outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Both parents and clinicians should be aware of the widespread phenomenon of media device use among adolescents and try to avoid psychophysical consequences on the youngest

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

Community Biodiversity Management: Promoting resilience and the conservation of plant genetic resources

This book is the first to set out a clear overview of CBM as a methodology for meeting socio-environmental changes. CBM is shown to be a key strategy that promotes community resilience, and contributes to the conservation of plant genetic resources. The authors present the underlying concepts and theories of CBM as well as its methodology and practices, and introduce case studies primarily from Brazil, Ethiopia, France, India, and Nepal. Contributors include farmers, leaders of farmers’ organizations, professionals from conservation and development organizations, students and scientists

High genetic diversity within and among bitter cassava cultivated in three soil types in Central Amazonia.

Bitter cassava is an important food crop that was domesticated in Amazonia. Although it is exclusively propagated by stem cuttings, cassava retained its ability of sexual reproduction. The occurrence and incorporation of sexual plants into the stock of clonal varieties contributes to the high genetic diversity observed within the crop. Despite being well adapted to nutrient deprived soils of Amazonia, ethnobotanical observations showed that communities of smallholder farmers along the middle Madeira River, in Central Amazonia, also cultivate cassava in the highly fertile soils of the floodplains and Amazonian dark earths (ADE). These farmers grow different sets of varieties in each soil type, which may also contribute to the maintenance of high levels of genetic diversity within the crop. We evaluated with 10 nuclear microsatellite markers the genetic diversity within and among some of the most commonly cultivated bitter cassava varieties grown on ADE, floodplain and Oxisols soils in the middle Madeira region. High levels of genetic diversity within varieties were observed (HO ranging from 0.495 to 0.707, and HE ranging from 0.250 to 0.460). Additionally, varieties were generally highly differentiated from each other. Although high levels of genetic diversity were previously observed in studies carried out in regions of low soil fertility in other parts of Amazonia, we identified that management of different soil types is important to the maintenance of genetically distinct stocks of varieties, which also contributes to the maintenance of the genetic diversity within the crop

Wish you were here: How defaunated is the Atlantic Forest biome of its medium- to large-bodied mammal fauna?

Mammals represent the largest-bodied elements of the world’s surviving megafauna and provide several key ecosystems services, yet their populations are often under steep decline throughout the tropics. Anthropogenic defaunation is one the most important contemporary threats to modern mammal faunas. Although the Atlantic Forest biome of South America shows several clear signs of defaunation, the extent to which this biome has lost its mammal fauna remains poorly understood. Here, we collate and analyze a comprehensive body of secondary data to quantitatively assess the spatial patterns of defaunation of all medium- to large-bodied Atlantic Forest mammals which were then classed by morpho-ecological traits. We used a Defaunation Index, which was scaled-up to the entire biome using kriging interpolation, to examine the integrity of site-specific mammal faunas. We further use environmental and socioeconomic predictors to explain the drivers of defaunation. Our results show high levels of defaunation (>0.5) for most of the Atlantic Forest. Apex predators, other carnivores, large-bodied mammals and large herbivores were among the most defaunated functional groups. Remaining native vegetation cover, forest fragment size, and the largest neighboring forest remnant were the main negative predictors of defaunation. We conclude that medium- to large-bodied Atlantic Forest mammals are under high levels of threat due to historical population losses that continue today. A conservation action plan thus becomes imperative to prevent this biome from becoming an even “emptier forest”, severely compromising patterns of diversity, ecological processes and ecosystem functioning