Forest resilience to global warming is strongly modulated by local-scale topographic, microclimatic and biotic conditions

Resilience of endangered rear edge populations of cold-adapted forests in the Mediterranean basin is increasingly altered by extreme heatwave and drought pressures. It remains unknown, however, whether microclimatic variation in these isolated forests could ultimately result in large intra-population variability in the demographic responses, allowing the coexistence of contrasting declining and resilient trends across small topographic gradients. Multiple key drivers promoting spatial variability in the resilience of rear edge forests remain largely unassessed, including amplified and buffered thermal exposure induced by heatwaves along topographic gradients, and increased herbivory pressure on tree saplings in defaunated areas lacking efficient apex predators. Here we analysed whether indicators of forest resilience to global warming are strongly modulated by local-scale topographic, microclimatic and biotic conditions. We studied a protected rear edge forest of sessile oak Quercus petraea, applying a suite of 20 indicators of resilience of tree secondary growth, including multidecadal and short-term indices. We also analysed sapling recruitment success, recruit/adult ratios and sapling thermal exposure across topographic gradients. We found large within population variation in secondary growth resilience, in recruitment success and in thermal exposure of tree saplings to heatwaves, and this variability was spatially structured along small-scale topographical gradients. Multidecadal resilience indices and curves provide useful descriptors of forest vulnerability to climate warming, complementing assessments based in the analysis of short-term resilience indicators. Species-specific associations of trees with microclimatic variability are reported. Biotic factors are key in determining long-term resilience in climatically stressed rear edge forests, with strong limitation of sapling recruitment by increased roe deer and wild boar herbivory. Our results also support non-stationary effects of climate determining forest growth responses and resilience, showing increased negative effects of warming and drought over the last decades in declining stands. Synthesis. Our findings do not support scenarios predicting spatially homogeneous distributional shifts and limited resilience in rear edge populations, and are more supportive of scenarios including spatially heterogeneous responses, characterised with contrasting intra-population trends of forest resilience. We conclude that forest resilience responses to climate warming are strongly modulated by local-scale microclimatic, topographic and biotic factors. Accurate predictions of forest responses to changes in climate would therefore largely benefit from the integration of local-scale abiotic and biotic factors

Regime shifts of Mediterranean forest carbon uptake and reduced resilience driven by multidecadal ocean surface temperatures

The mechanisms translating global circulation changes into rapid abrupt shifts in forest carbon capture in semi‐arid biomes remain poorly understood. Here, we report unprecedented multidecadal shifts in forest carbon uptake in semi‐arid Mediterranean pine forests in Spain over 1950-2012. The averaged carbon sink reduction varies between 31% and 37%, and reaches values in the range of 50% in the most affected forest stands. Regime shifts in forest carbon uptake are associated with climatic early warning signals, decreased forest regional synchrony and reduced long‐term carbon sink resilience. We identify the mechanisms linked to ocean multidecadal variability that shape regime shifts in carbon capture. First, we show that low‐frequency variations of the surface temperature of the Atlantic Ocean induce shifts in the non‐stationary effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on regional forest carbon capture. Modelling evidence supports that the non‐stationary effects of ENSO can be propagated from tropical areas to semi‐arid Mediterranean biomes through atmospheric wave trains. Second, decadal changes in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) significantly alter sea-air heat exchanges, modifying in turn ocean vapour transport over land and land surface temperatures, and promoting sustained drought conditions in spring and summer that reduce forest carbon uptake. Third, we show that lagged effects of AMO on the winter North Atlantic Oscillation also contribute to the maintenance of long‐term droughts. Finally, we show that the reported strong, negative effects of ocean surface temperature (AMO) on forest carbon uptake in the last decades are unprecedented over the last 150 years. Our results provide new, unreported explanations for carbon uptake shifts in these drought‐prone forests and review the expected impacts of global warming on the profiled mechanisms

Microbial aetiology of healthcare associated pneumonia in Spain: a prospective, multicentre, case-control study

Introduction: Healthcare-associated pneumonia (HCAP) is actually considered a subgroup of hospital-acquired pneumonia due to the reported high risk of multidrug-resistant pathogens in the USA. Therefore, current American Thoracic Society/Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines suggest a nosocomial antibiotic treatment for HCAP. Unfortunately, the scientific evidence supporting this is contradictory. Methods: We conducted a prospective multicentre case-control study in Spain, comparing clinical presentation, outcomes and microbial aetiology of HCAP and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) patients matched by age (±10 years), gender and period of admission (±10 weeks). Results: 476 patients (238 cases, 238 controls) were recruited for 2 years from June 2008. HCAP cases showed significantly more comorbidities (including dysphagia), higher frequency of previous antibiotic use in the preceding month, higher pneumonia severity score and worse clinical status (Charslon and Barthel scores). While microbial aetiology did not differ between the two groups (HCAP and CAP: Streptococcus pneumoniae: 51% vs 55%; viruses: 22% vs 12%; Legionella: 4% vs 9%; Gram-negative bacilli: 5% vs 4%; Pseudomonas aeruginosa: 4% vs 1%), HCAP patients showed worse mortality rates (1-month: HCAP, 12%; CAP 5%; 1-year: HCAP, 24%; CAP, 9%), length of hospital stay (9 vs 7 days), 1-month treatment failure (5.5% vs 1.5%) and readmission rate (18% vs 11%) (p<0.05, each). Conclusions: Despite a similar clinical presentation, HCAP was more severe due to patients' conditions (comorbidities) and showed worse clinical outcomes. Microbial aetiology of HCAP did not differ from CAP indicating that it is not related to increased mortality and in Spain most HCAP patients do not need nosocomial antibiotic coverage

Estantería de cajones extraíbles, intercambiables y agrupables, fabricada con material proveniente de residuos agrícolas

Treball Final de Grau en Enginyeria en Disseny Industrial i Desenvolupament de Productes. Codi: DI1048. Curs acadèmic: 2021/2022El objetivo del presente trabajo de final del grado, consiste en el diseño de una estantería con cajones, funcional, atractiva, medioambientalmente sostenible y económica, aplicando los conocimientos adquiridos por las asignaturas cursadas a lo largo de los años en el Grado de Ingeniería en Diseño Industrial y Desarrollo de Productos en la Universidad Jaume I. Para dotar de una mayor funcionalidad a las estanterías del mercado, el diseño es un pilar básico del proyecto. Gracias a la configuración de la estructura y a las posibles distribuciones de los cajones, se logran obtener múltiples posibilidades de organización y almacenaje, gracias a sus cajones extraíbles, con posibilidad de agruparse y formar por ellos solos una cajonera. Esto también permite jugar con el atractivo de la estantería según el criterio de los usuarios, gracias al diseño que se le ha concedido. La sostenibilidad y el ciclo de vida de los productos son términos indispensables a la hora de producir en un mercado donde cada vez más, la importancia de la procedencia de los materiales a emplear y su postconsumo es de carácter prioritario. En el presente proyecto se estudian dos residuos agrícolas, las propiedades de estos y los procesos de fabricación para ser utilizados como material principal de la estantería. La procedencia de los residuos es cercana, minimizando así la huella de carbono, y con su habitual fin de vida no se obtienen beneficios. Los residuos estudiados son el alga posidonia oceánica y la poda de palmera, los cuales se encuentran en abundancia en la Comunidad Valenciana. En todas las etapas anteriores de diseño, estudio y procesos de fabricación de los residuos agrícolas se tiene en cuenta el factor económico, para poder abaratar los mayores costes posibles, para que la estantería tenga un precio más accesible

Quorum: Flexible quality of service for internet services

In this paper we describe Quorum, a non-invasive approach to scalable quality-of-service provisioning that uses traffic shaping, admission control, and response monitoring at the border of an Internet site to ensure throughput and response time guarantees. We experimentally compare an implementation of Quorum both to hardware over-provisioning and to leading software approaches using real world workloads. Our results show that Quorum can enforce the same QoS guarantees as either of the compared approaches, while achieving better resource utilization than over-provisioning and without the application rewriting overhead required by intrusive software approaches. We also demonstrate that our implementation can successfully handle extreme situations such as sudden traffic surges, application misbehavior and node failures. Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of Quorum by providing QoS guarantees for a complex and heterogeneous Internet service that cannot be implemented by other current software approaches.

The Active Information System (AIS): A Model for Developing Scalable Web Services

The World Wide Web has become a primary venue for disseminating information to large numbers of users. From news stories, to music videos, to driving directions, more and more people are turning to the web to find information they need in their day-to-day lives. As web-based services become more complex, the traditional web model is becoming insufficient. There is an increasing demand for a model that supports large-scale, push-based data delivery combined with user-specific customization. In this paper, we describe our model, the Active Information System (AIS). The AIS is a model for web services that supports scalable information dissemination and dynamic user interaction. In addition to our model, we describe the Framework for Layered Object-Oriented Distribution (flood), a toolkit that provides the basic communication primitives and user-level functions necessary for AIS-style applications. We evaluate our model and toolkit by illustrating their use in developing a scalable, realtime auction application with functionality far beyond what is possible today. 1

Regime shifts of Mediterranean forest carbon uptake and reduced resilience driven by multidecadal ocean surface temperatures

imbalance-p paper contact with [email protected] mechanisms translating global circulation changes into rapid abrupt shifts in forest carbon capture in semi-arid biomes remain poorly understood. Here, we report unprecedented multidecadal shifts in forest carbon uptake in semi-arid Mediterranean pine forests in Spain over 1950-2012. The averaged carbon sink reduction varies between 31% and 37%, and reaches values in the range of 50% in the most affected forest stands. Regime shifts in forest carbon uptake are associated with climatic early warning signals, decreased forest regional synchrony and reduced long-term carbon sink resilience. We identify the mechanisms linked to ocean multidecadal variability that shape regime shifts in carbon capture. First, we show that low-frequency variations of the surface temperature of the Atlantic Ocean induce shifts in the non-stationary effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on regional forest carbon capture. Modelling evidence supports that the non-stationary effects of ENSO can be propagated from tropical areas to semi-arid Mediterranean biomes through atmospheric wave trains. Second, decadal changes in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) significantly alter sea-air heat exchanges, modifying in turn ocean vapour transport over land and land surface temperatures, and promoting sustained drought conditions in spring and summer that reduce forest carbon uptake. Third, we show that lagged effects of AMO on the winter North Atlantic Oscillation also contribute to the maintenance of long-term droughts. Finally, we show that the reported strong, negative effects of ocean surface temperature (AMO) on forest carbon uptake in the last decades are unprecedented over the last 150 years. Our results provide new, unreported explanations for carbon uptake shifts in these drought-prone forests and review the expected impacts of global warming on the profiled mechanisms