Gli effetti antropici nell’evoluzione storica della costa “Picena”

The historical evolution of the southern Marche shoreline (between the Conero promontory and the Tronto R. mouth) has been investigated comparing it with both natural and anthropic changes. The study started searching, georeferencing and digitizing in a GIS environment all the available historical maps and the observations deriving from archeological and documental findings, in order to reconstruct the position of the shoreline at different times, mostly for fluvial mouths. This allowed us to highlight that for the last two millennia anthropic interventions influenced coastal dynamics more than climate variations. For all the investigated sites a close relation between shoreline fluctuations and forestation/deforestation processes was clearly revealed. Among others, it emerged that river mouths progradation continued up to 1930, well after the end of the “Little Ice Age” (around 1850). The above relation is particularly striking for the last two centuries, for which we have both accurate maps and census of forested areas. During the XIX century, notwithstanding the warm climate favored slope protection, widespread deforestation resulted in a regular advance of shorelines (average rate about 4.95 m/y for the first half of the century and 1.08 m/y for the second half). The XX century featured a more irregular behavior with substantial retreat after the ‘30s: this derives almost exclusively from anthropic interventions in the river basins (construction of dams, river bed quarrying, river reshaping, abandonment of crops etc.) leading to a severe decrease of solid load. For the last few decades and at present, the most important factors driving the behavior of coastlines resulted to be the various interventions carried out along the beaches and in front of them to reduce erosion. Keywords: antropogenic impact, historical evolution, coastline, central-southern Marche, Adriatic Se

Tendenza evolutiva della spiaggia della Riserva Naturale della Sentina (San Benedetto del Tronto, AP)

Abstract The Regional Natural Reserve “Sentina” stretches itself for some 1.7 km along the southernmost end of the littoral area of San Benedetto del Tronto (AP) at the boundary with Abruzzo; it hosts one of the very few costal dunes still preserved in the Marche Region. Its gravelly-sandy beach in still natural, but is bound to the north by a long series of emerged barriers and to the south by a long (more than 300 m) pier; these structures noteworthy influence the retreat of the shoreline. In the area, a long monitoring (starting from 2000) has been carried out in order to interpret and quantify the modification occurred on both the emerged and submerged beach. During this time span, the shoreline retreated every year: up to 2006 its retreat has been evaluated in 27.7 m, with a local maximum of 33.5 m, whilst for the following 6 years (notwithstanding an artificial nourishment in 2008) it continued to retreat by 22.2, as an average. Therefore, in 12 years wave erosion resulted in some 50 m of backing; this also implied the loss of about 42’000 m2 of coastal dunes. Therefore, it is logical to assume that if no relevant intervention will be carried out, standing the almost absent nourishment deriving from the solid load of the Tronto R., in the next future the Sentina area will suffer progressive coastal erosion, with severe backing of the shoreline and distruction of the coastal dunes. Keywords: coastal erosion, monitoring, “Sentina” Reserve, coastal dune

Escursione lungo il litorale “piceno”

Abstract At the end of the National Symposium “Coastal erosion: defense, adaptation or withdrawal?”, organized by the Italian National Group for the Research on Coastal Environment (GNRAC), a short (half day) excursion has been organized to visit the “picena” coast (i.e. the portion of Marche littoral to the south of the Conero Mt.): some key location of which are here synthetically described. Namely, some of the main features of the coastline in Porto Sant’Elpidio, Porto Recanati and Sirolo are described. Key words: Adriatic Sea, Marche Region, coastal erosio

Characterization of oligomeric forms from mammalian FoF1ATPsynthase by BN-PAGE: the role of detergents

It is now widely accepted that F0F1ATPsynthase is present in membrane, beside as monomers, in homo-dimeric and higher homo-oligomeric forms, which probably play critical roles in determining mitochondrial morphology. One-step mild detergent extraction followed by blue native electrophoresis (BN-PAGE) is a very interesting tool for studying the native membrane protein assemblies which can be associated with second/third-dimensional SDS-PAGE, immunoblotting, in-gel enzyme activity staining and mass spectrometry analyses. By combining these techniques, we resolved monomers and higher oligomeric forms of ATPsynthase from bovine heart mitochondria. However, a critical point is the choice of the detergents, which strongly influence the protein pattern of BN-PAGE. By using Triton X-100 we obtained that, in spite of the same subunit composition, monomers have a much lower specific activity than dimers and the two forms have a different pattern of tyrosine phosphorylation, suggesting that monomers and dimers are functionally distinct in membrane. In addition, enzyme self-association appeared to occur independently from the binding to ATPsynthase of the inhibitor protein IF1. Dodecylmaltoside was optimal to extract the enzyme from single biopsy samples, allowing us to demonstrate that IF1 plays a central role in regulating the enzyme activity in heart in vivo. Only low concentration of digitonin maintained significant amounts of ATPsynthase oligomers, which seemed to retain intact their native catalytic properties