Prickly pear seed oil extraction, chemical characterization and potential health benefits

4openInternationalBothPrickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica L.) is a member of the Cactaceae family originally grown in South America, and the plant is now distributed to many parts of the world, including the Middle East. The chemical composition and biological activities of different parts of prickly pear, including cladodes, flowers, fruit, seeds and seed oil, were previously investigated. Oil from the seeds has been known for its nutritive value and can be potentially used for health promotion. This review is an effort to cover what is actually known to date about the prickly pear seeds oil extraction, characteristics, chemical composition and potential health benefits to provide inspiration for the need of further investigation and future research. Prickly pear seeds oil has been extracted using different extraction techniques from conventional to advanced. Chemical characterization of the oil has been sufficiently studied, and it is sufficiently understood that the oil is a high linoleic oil. Its composition is influenced by the variety and environment and also by the method of extraction. The health benefits of the prickly pear seed oil were reported by many researchers. For future research, additional studies are warranted on mechanisms of action of the reported biological activities to develop nutraceutical products for the prevention of various chronic human diseasesopenAl-Naqeb, Ghanya; Fiori, Luca; Ciolli, Marco; Aprea, EugenioAl-Naqeb, G.; Fiori, L.; Ciolli, M.; Aprea, E

Extending the vibroscape to agroecosystems: investigating the influence of abiotic factors and monitoring insect vibrational signaling

Environmental conditions are crucial factors that influence communication systems and affect animal behavior. Research in the field of biotremology has improved our understanding of insect behavior, ecology, and evolution. However, the interactions between vibrational signaling and environmental factors are less studied, mainly because of technical issues faced in field trials. We therefore developed and tested an approach to investigate the effect of abiotic factors on insect vibrational signaling and explored its implementation as a monitoring tool for insect vibrational signals, using a vineyard as an agroecosystem model. Our results showed a significant decrease in insect signaling activity during unsuitable conditions of high temperature and wind velocity. We determined for the first time, the daily signaling pattern of the two insect pests, Scaphoideus titanus and Halyomorpha halys, in natural conditions. Biotremology techniques could be profitably used to monitor not only the presence of target pest species but also the biodiversity associated with vibrational signaling insects. In particular, the method implemented in this study could be used as a tool to compare the quality of cultivated areas under different management system

Socio-Ecological Connectivity for Productive, Circular and Resilient Territories. The Experience of the "Saturn" EIT Climate-KIC Pan European Project

Since the European conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns happened in Aalborg in 1994 the urgency to promote a more balanced relationship and to enhance the reconnection between urban and rural areas became a matter of discussion in research and policy-making. A further important push towards the implementation of reconnection strategies occurred in 1997 with the European Conference on Rural Development. Nowadays, many stakeholders involved in territorial and landscape planning, in order to implement a new relationship between cities and countryside, aim to remove rural areas from margins, to bring citizens closer to the urgent need to safeguard the entire natural ecosystem, and to preserve rural areas and the ecosystem services they provide. The food system can be a key of reconnection between urban and rural areas and has a great impact on materials and energy flows in the metabolism of a city-region. The contribution will explore the spatial transformation of urban and rural landscapes in the city of Trento through a multidisciplinary lens on social dynamics and the governance of food policies

Coexistence at the top of the food chain: anthropogenic risk primarily drives brown bear space use and resource selection in the Italian Alps

The Italian Alps are among the most anthropized mountain areas in the world. In a multi-use landscape where a variety of activities such as farming, livestock herding, hunting, and outdoor recreation take place, large mammals must adjust their behavior to carry out their daily activities. The brown bear, the largest carnivore in the Alps, was recently rescued from near extinction and must now find its place in a complex, human-dominated landscape. In this study, we use individual-based movement, activity and trait information (spanning from 2006 to 2019) to assess multi-scale behavioral decisions related to the perception of risk, the availability of habitat, and the proximity of food resources. Perceived risk from human activities was found to influence spatial and temporal patterns of selection across scales more than other attributes. Spatially, brown bears reduced risk exposure when selecting for home ranges and resources within those ranges by avoiding humans, at the cost of limiting their selection of high-quality habitats and high-calorie food sources. Temporally, intraspecific competition was identified as the main determinant of activity patterns and daily movement length over the years, while human disturbance had a major effect on movement behavior on a daily (day vs. night) scale. Brown bears in the Alps are slowly recovering, but competition for space with humans, lack of habitat connectivity, and human-caused mortality are hindering their recovery and the formation of a viable metapopulation throughout the Alps. In the increasingly crowded Alps, sustainable long-term coexistence can be achieved only if both bears and humans adjust their behaviors

FOSS tools and applications for education in geospatial sciences

While the theory and implementation of geographic information systems (GIS) have a history of more than 50 years, the development of dedicated educational tools and applications in this field is more recent. This paper presents a free and open source software (FOSS) approach for education in the geospatial disciplines, which has been used over the last 20 years at two Italian universities. The motivations behind the choice of FOSS are discussed with respect to software availability and development, as well as educational material licensing. Following this philosophy, a wide range of educational tools have been developed, covering topics from numerical cartography and GIS principles to the specifics regarding different systems for the management and analysis of spatial data. Various courses have been implemented for diverse recipients, ranging from professional training workshops to PhD courses. Feedback from the students of those courses provides an invaluable assessment of the effectiveness of the approach, supplying at the same time directions for further improvement. Finally, lessons learned after 20 years are discussed, highlighting how the management of educational materials can be difficult even with a very open approach to licensing. Overall, the use of free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) science provides a clear advantage over other approaches, not only simplifying software and data management, but also ensuring that all of the information related to system design and implementation is available

A method to assess the economic impacts of forest biomass use on ecosystem services in a National Park

The aim of the paper is to develop a method to assess the effect of forest biomass use for energy on ecosystem services (ES). Such method has been in the GRASS GIS environment, by creating an Decision Support System (DSS) called r.green.biomassfor. The method has been tested in the Triglav National Park in Slovenia. The potential forest biomass was estimated with r.green.biomassfor DSS taking into account the effects of forest biomass harvesting on ES in terms of economic value. The economic value of each ecosystem service to society has been estimated using different economic evaluation methods and were spatially located with a Geographical Information System (GIS) application. Then, a semi-structured questionnaire was administered face-to-face to the experts in order to understand the effects of forest biomass harvesting on the ES at local level. Finally, the results of the questionnaire survey were elaborated to obtain indicators useful to assess the economic gain or loss on the benefits provided by ES based on the results of r.green.biomassfor DSS. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

Human‐induced risk drives behavioural decisions in a recovering brown bear population

In human-dominated landscapes, rebounding bear populations share space with people, which may lead to bear–human conflicts and, consequently, a decrease in acceptance and an increase in bear mortality linked to human causes. Previous analyses of brown bear (Ursus arctos) movement data have shown that bears adopt a security-food trade-off strategy in response to variable human-related risk. However, brown bear flexibility to cope with these risky situations may be reduced when resting, mating or stocking fat in preparation for hibernation. In this study, we measured the multi-scale spatial response of brown bears to human-related risk and food resource distribution in a highly heterogeneous human-dominated landscape. We examined habitat selection both within the population range (‘second-order’ selection) and at bedding site locations (‘third-order’) for GPS-tagged brown bears of a recently reintroduced population in the Italian Alps. We identified resting locations by field-validated spatio-temporal cluster analysis of telemetry locations. We mapped food availability and distribution using dynamic geographic layers of fruiting wild berries, and human-related risk using human mobility data (Strava-based Cumulated Outdoor activity Index). Brown bears appeared to compromise their need for food resources for avoidance of anthropogenic disturbance when selecting home ranges, as they utilized areas richer in wild berries less when human use of outdoor tracks was higher. Furthermore, selection of resting site locations strongly depended on the avoidance of human-related risk only, with less frequented, more concealed and inaccessible sites being selected. We conclude that humans compete for space with bears beyond their infrastructural impact, that is, by actively occupying key areas for bear survival, thereby potentially restricting the bears' realized niche. We propose mitigating actions to promote bear–human coexistence by selectively restricting human access to key areas during sensitive annual physiological phases for bear surviva

Relevance of the cell neighborhood size in landscape metrics evaluation and free or open source software implementations

Landscape metrics constitute one of the main tools for the study of the changes of the landscape and of the ecological structure of a region. The most popular software for landscape metrics evaluation is FRAGSTATS, which is free to use but does not have free or open source software (FOSS). Therefore, FOSS implementations, such as QGIS’s LecoS plugin and GRASS’ r.li modules suite, were developed. While metrics are defined in the same way, the “cell neighborhood” parameter, specifying the configuration of the moving window used for the analysis, is managed differently: FRAGSTATS can use values of 4 or 8 (8 is default), LecoS uses 8 and r.li 4. Tests were performed to evaluate the landscape metrics variability depending on the “cell neighborhood” values: some metrics, such as “edge density” and “landscape shape index”, do not change, other, for example “patch number”, “patch density”, and “mean patch area”, vary up to 100% for real maps and 500% for maps built to highlight this variation. A review of the scientific literature was carried out to check how often the value of the “cell neighborhood” parameter is explicitly declared. A method based on the “aggregation index” is proposed to estimate the effect of the uncertainty on the “cell neighborhood” parameter on landscape metrics for different map

Fruit availability for migratory birds: a GIS approach

Bird migration is a widely studied phenomenon, however many factors that influence migratory flows remain unknown or poorly understood. Food availability en route is particularly important for many species and can affect their migration success, pattern and timing but this relationship has not been addressed at a wide scale due to the lack of spatial models of food availability on the terrain. This work presents a GIS-database approach that combines spatial and non-spatial ecological information in order to map fruit availability from vegetation over time in the SE Alps, an important node of European migratory routes. We created a unique database that contains information on the presence and periods of fructification of 52 wild plants carrying berries and a series of original cartographic themes. The presence and coverage of the plant species was modelled with the geo-statistical method of the Gaussian Kernel, which was validated against the ground truth of field sampling data with a correct classification power above 80% in most cases. The highest fruit availability in the study area during September and October co-occurs with the peak of captures of berry eating birds. The maps created and distributed along this work can be useful to address more detailed studies about stopover sites as well as the spatial ecology of other fruit eating animals