Experimental food subsidies keep eagles inside protected areas: implications for conservation and resource management

The conservation and management of mobile species, populations and dynamic habitats, presents significant challenges since such species face diverse threats during various stages of their life cycle. Protected areas (PAs) are essential tools in conservation efforts, aiming to preserve native species and their habitats. However, larger mobile animals, such as the Bonelli's eagle (Aquila fasciata), may require much larger areas outside PAs for essential life moments, including foraging, resting, and wintering. As a result, the efficacy of PAs in conserving such species may be questionable. We designed an experiment in an eastern Spain PA that is home to nesting Bonelli's eagles to determine if increasing food availability through experimental feeding within the PA could result in an effective reduction of space use outside the protected area by the eagles and lead to reduce death risk. Over the period of 2016 to 2021, we tracked 10 Bonelli's eagles from six different territories using GPS-GSM transmitters. We evaluated their space use before, during, and after the feeding experiment. Our results indicate that the availability of food within PAs restricted the eagles' movement, resulting in a higher concentration of locations inside the PAs. The eagles spent less time outside the PAs when they were fed and less time in highly human-dominated habitats. Consequently, this reduced mortality risks that were higher outside the PAs. Our findings suggest that management decisions aimed at increasing food availability within PAs, could be critical in conserving endangered species populations such as the Bonelli's eagle in Mediterranean landscapes.Fieldwork seasons (2017 – 2018) were partially supported by the Wildlife Service of the Valencian Community Regional Government (Conselleria d'Agricultura, Desenvolupament Rural, Emergència Climàtica i Transició Ecològica, Generalitat Valenciana, Spain). Red Eléctrica de España provided financial support to track Bonelli's eagles under the supplementary feeding project. The corresponding author A. L-P. is supported by a Val I+D predoctoral grant (ACIF/2020/051) and an internship grant (CIBEFP/2021/75), both funded by the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). This paper is part of the Ph.D. thesis of A. López-Peinado at the University of Valencia (Spain)

Analysis of monoterpenoids in inclusion complexes with β-cyclodextrin and study on ratio effect in these microcapsules.

In recent studies, the insecticide activity against some stored products pests of monoterpenoids, such as linalool, S-carvone, camphor, geraniol, γ-terpinene and fenchone, and phenylpropanoids, like E-anethole and estragole, has been proved. Currently, applications of these volatile compounds are complicated due to their chemical and physical properties. This is one of the major problems for their use as insecticides; therefore, microencapsulation could be the solution to problems of stability, evaporation and release. Microencapsulation of these chemicals was carried out with β-cyclodextrin using a chemical precipitation method at four different ratios (β-cyclodextrin: monoterpenoids), 1.33:1, 3.33:1, 4.66:1 and 6.66:1 (w/w) in order to determine the ratio effect. This study establishes that encapsulation at the ratio of 3.33:1 to linalool and γ-terpinene was higher, whereas S-carvone, camphor, E-anethole, geraniol, estragole and fenchone showed the greatest encapsulation when the ratio was 6.66:1. Furthermore, the efficiency of encapsulation was estimated by measuring the content of the compounds in the powder by gas chromatography. The maximum inclusion efficiency of β-cyclodextrin was reached by camphor (52%) followed by geraniol (34%) using 10 g of β-cyclodextrin and linalool (31%) using 5 g of this matrix. The present study indicates that natural products such as monoterpenoids or phenylpropanoids could be microencapsulated in an efficient way using an appropriate amount of β-cyclodextrin. Keywords: Microencapsulation, β-cyclodextrin, Camphor, Geraniol and Linaloo

On Providing Metro Ethernet Services over Transparent WDM Optical Rings

The long list of benefits (especially cost and capacity) of Ethernet LANs has made the IEEE, the ITU-T, and the Metro Ethernet Forum define the requirements for taking Ethernet beyond the local area, toward the metropolitan region. In addition, the ever-increasing traffic demands of new applications and users can only be met by the huge bandwidth capacity provided by optical fibers. This work studies how to provide metro Ethernet services over transparent tunable-transmitter fixed-receiver WDM optical ring networks. A new adaptation layer of ME to WDM is proposed, and its benefits and drawbacks are studied. It is shown that such a transparent WDM ring network can be seen as a logical full-mesh topology by the upper ME layer, thus reducing to one the number of optical-electronic-optical conversions per unicast frame. Additionally, two different approaches are proposed in the case of broadcast/multicast traffic, since this may bring scalability difficulties in ring topologies.The work described in this article was carried out with the support of the Building the Future Optical Network in Europe (BONE) project, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission through the 7th ICT-Framework Programme. Additionally, the authors are thankful for the support of the T2C2 (grant TIN2008-06739C04-01) and MEDIANET (grant S2009/TIC-1468) projects for the development of this work.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramPublicad