3D CAMERAS ACQUISITIONS FOR THE DOCUMENTATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE

Abstract. Photography has always been considered as a valid tool to acquire information about reality. Nowadays, its versatility, together with the development of new techniques and technologies, allows to use it in different fields of application. Particularly, in the digitization of built heritage, photography not only enables to understand and document historical and architectural artifacts but also to acquire morphological and geometrical data about them with automated digital photogrammetry. Nowadays, photogrammetry enables many tools to give virtual casts of reality by showing it in the way of point cloud. Although they can have metric reliability and visual quality, traditional instruments &amp;ndash; such as monoscopic cameras &amp;ndash; involve a careful planning of the campaign phase and a long acquisition and processing time. On the contrary, the most recent ones, based on the integration of different sensors and cameras, try to reduce the gap between time and results. The latter include some systems of indoor mapping who, thanks to 360&amp;deg; acquisitions and SLAM technology, reconstruct the original scene in real time in great detail and with a photorealistic rendering. This study is aimed at reporting a research evaluating metric reliability and the level of survey detail with a Matterport Pro2 3D motorized rotating camera, equipped with SLAM technology, whose results have been compared with point clouds obtained by image-based and range-based processes.</p

Sustainability and Long Term-Tenure: Lion Trophy Hunting in Tanzania

It is argued that trophy hunting of large, charismatic mammal species can have considerable conservation benefits but only if undertaken sustainably. Social-ecological theory suggests such sustainability only results from developing governance systems that balance financial and biological requirements. Here we use lion (Panthera leo) trophy hunting data from Tanzania to investigate how resource ownership patterns influence hunting revenue and offtake levels. Tanzania contains up to half of the global population of free-ranging lions and is also the main location for lion trophy hunting in Africa. However, there are concerns that current hunting levels are unsustainable. The lion hunting industry in Tanzania is run by the private sector, although the government leases each hunting block to companies, enforces hunting regulation, and allocates them a species-specific annual quota per block. The length of these leases varies and theories surrounding property rights and tenure suggest hunting levels would be less sustainable in blocks experiencing a high turnover of short-term leases. We explored this issue using lion data collected from 1996 to 2008 in the Selous Game Reserve (SGR), the most important trophy hunting destination in Tanzania. We found that blocks in SGR with the highest lion hunting offtake were also those that experienced the steepest declines in trophy offtake. In addition, we found this high hunting offtake and the resultant offtake decline tended to be in blocks under short-term tenure. In contrast, lion hunting levels in blocks under long-term tenure matched more closely the recommended sustainable offtake of 0.92 lions per 1000 km2. However, annual financial returns were higher from blocks under short-term tenure, providing $133 per km2 of government revenue as compared to$62 per km2 from long-term tenure blocks. Our results provide evidence for the importance of property rights in conservation, and support calls for an overhaul of the system in Tanzania by developing competitive market-based approaches for block allocation based on long-term tenure of ten years

Conservation prioritization can resolve the flagship species conundrum

Conservation strategies based on charismatic flagship species, such as tigers, lions, and elephants, successfully attract funding from individuals and corporate donors. However, critics of this species-focused approach argue it wastes resources and often does not benefit broader biodiversity. If true, then the best way of raising conservation funds excludes the best way of spending it. Here we show that this conundrum can be resolved, and that the flagship species approach does not impede cost-effective conservation. Through a tailored prioritization approach, we identify places containing flagship species while also maximizing global biodiversity representation (based on 19,616 terrestrial and freshwater species). We then compare these results to scenarios that only maximized biodiversity representation, and demonstrate that our flagship-based approach achieves 79−89% of our objective. This provides strong evidence that prudently selected flagships can both raise funds for conservation and help target where these resources are best spent to conserve biodiversity

The Biodiversity Moonshot: A Spark for a Transformative Change or a New Business‐Case Facade?

Biodiversity has recently gained increased attention in sustainability management research. It sustains the ecosystems on which organizations depend, while simultaneously being threatened by organizational activities. By highlighting this dynamic of impact and dependence, the integration of biodiversity into management discourse offers an opportunity to foster a more holistic understanding of the business–nature relationship, grounded in a systems perspective. At the same time, however, there is a risk that biodiversity will be reduced to yet another environmental variable subsumed within the prevailing business‐case logic that views nature primarily as a source of economic value. This approach has proven inadequate to drive the transformative change needed to address the environmental crisis. Drawing on a discussion among scholars, this essay outlines six critical challenges—measurement, strategic decision making, innovation, public policy, interdisciplinary approaches, and dominant ontologies—which, depending on how they are addressed, may either catalyze a rethinking of the business–nature relationship or merely perpetuate existing paradigms

Mutant p53 as a guardian of the cancer cell

Forty years of research have established that the p53 tumor suppressor provides a major barrier to neoplastic transformation and tumor progression by its unique ability to act as an extremely sensitive collector of stress inputs, and to coordinate a complex framework of diverse effector pathways and processes that protect cellular homeostasis and genome stability. Missense mutations in the TP53 gene are extremely widespread in human cancers and give rise to mutant p53 proteins that lose tumor suppressive activities, and some of which exert trans-dominant repression over the wild-type counterpart. Cancer cells acquire selective advantages by retaining mutant forms of the protein, which radically subvert the nature of the p53 pathway by promoting invasion, metastasis and chemoresistance. In this review, we consider available evidence suggesting that mutant p53 proteins can favor cancer cell survival and tumor progression by acting as homeostatic factors that sense and protect cancer cells from transformation-related stress stimuli, including DNA lesions, oxidative and proteotoxic stress, metabolic inbalance, interaction with the tumor microenvironment, and the immune system. These activities of mutant p53 may explain cancer cell addiction to this particular oncogene, and their study may disclose tumor vulnerabilities and synthetic lethalities that could be exploited for hitting tumors bearing missense TP53 mutations

Designing protected area networks that translate international conservation commitments into national action

Most countries have committed to protect 17% of their terrestrial area by 2020 through Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, with a focus on protecting areas of particular importance for biodiversity. This means national-scale spatial conservation prioritisations are needed to help meet this target and guide broader conservation and land-use policy development. However, to ensure these assessments are adopted by policy makers, they must also consider national priorities. This situation is exemplified by Guyana, a corner of Amazonia that couples high biodiversity with low economic development. In recent years activities that threaten biodiversity conservation have increased, and consequently, protected areas are evermore critical to achieving the Aichi targets. Here we undertake a cost-effective approach to protected area planning in Guyana that accounts for in-country conditions. To do this we conducted a stakeholder-led spatial conservation prioritisation based on meeting targets for 17 vegetation types and 329 vertebrate species, while minimising opportunity costs for forestry, mining, agriculture and urbanisation. Our analysis identifies 3 millio

The Genealogical Population Dynamics of HIV-1 in a Large Transmission Chain:Bridging within and among Host Evolutionary Rates

Transmission lies at the interface of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) evolution within and among hosts and separates distinct selective pressures that impose differences in both the mode of diversification and the tempo of evolution. In the absence of comprehensive direct comparative analyses of the evolutionary processes at different biological scales, our understanding of how fast within-host HIV-1 evolutionary rates translate to lower rates at the between host level remains incomplete. Here, we address this by analyzing pol and env data from a large HIV-1 subtype C transmission chain for which both the timing and the direction is known for most transmission events. To this purpose, we develop a new transmission model in a Bayesian genealogical inference framework and demonstrate how to constrain the viral evolutionary history to be compatible with the transmission history while simultaneously inferring the within-host evolutionary and population dynamics. We show that accommodating a transmission bottleneck affords the best fit our data, but the sparse within-host HIV-1 sampling prevents accurate quantification of the concomitant loss in genetic diversity. We draw inference under the transmission model to estimate HIV-1 evolutionary rates among epidemiologically-related patients and demonstrate that they lie in between fast intra-host rates and lower rates among epidemiologically unrelated individuals infected with HIV subtype C. Using a new molecular clock approach, we quantify and find support for a lower evolutionary rate along branches that accommodate a transmission event or branches that represent the entire backbone of transmitted lineages in our transmission history. Finally, we recover the rate differences at the different biological scales for both synonymous and non-synonymous substitution rates, which is only compatible with the 'store and retrieve' hypothesis positing that viruses stored early in latently infected cells preferentially transmit or establish new infections upon reactivation.status: publishe

Global protected area expansion is compromised by projected land-use and parochialism

Peer reviewe

Changing perspectives on the internationalization of R&D and innovation by multinational enterprises: a review of the literature

Internationalization of R&D and innovation by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) has undergone a gradual and comprehensive change in perspective over the past 50 years. From sporadic works in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, it became a systematically analysed topic in the 1970s, starting with pioneering reports and “foundation texts”. Our review unfolds the theoretical and empirical evolution of the literature from dyadic interpretations of centralization versus decentralization of R&D by MNEs to more comprehensive frameworks, wherein established MNEs from Advanced Economies still play a pivotal role, but new players and places also emerge in the global generation and diffusion of knowledge. Hence views of R&D internationalization increasingly rely on concepts, ideas and methods from IB and other related disciplines such as industrial organization, international economics and economic geography. Two main findings are highlighted. First, scholarly research pays an increasing attention to the network-like characteristics of international R&D activities. Second, different streams of literature have emphasized the role of location- specific factors in R&D internationalization. The increasing emphasis on these aspects has created new research opportunities in some key areas, including inter alia: cross-border knowledge sourcing strategies, changes in the geography of R&D and innovation, and the international fragmentation of production and R&D activities

Il futuro ha una storia antica. Casi di imprese innovative in Toscana

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