APPLICATION OF THE HABITAT FISH BIOLOGICAL INDEX (HFBI) FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF THE ECOLOGICAL STATUS OF PO DELTA LAGOONS (ITALY)

Fish fauna is one of the biological quality elements useful for assessing the ecological status of European transitional water bodies, for the purposes of applying the Water Framework Directive. For the assessment of the ecological status of Italian transitional aquatic ecosystems, the multimetric index “Habitat Fish Bio-Indicator” (HFBI), based on fish fauna, was developed and validated at national level. This paper reports the results of a study on the shallow-water fish fauna of 5 lagoon environments of the Po Delta (Northern Adriatic, Italy) which aimed to evaluate the ecological status of these water bodies by calculating the HFBI. The results made it possible to describe the taxonomic composition and the functional and trophic structures of the fish community characteristic of these delta lagoons. The shallow water fish assemblage was characterized by the presence of juvenile stages of marine migrating species (i.e., grey mullets of the genus Chelon, the sea bream Sparus aurata and the sea bass Dicentrarchus labrax) and by species of estuarine residents (i.e., small gobies Knipowitschia panizzae, Pomatoschistus marmoratus, and P. canestrinii, the silverside Atherina boyeri and the killfish Aphanius fasciatus). The guilds of hyperbentivores/zooplanktivores, microbentivores and detritivores were the most represented in the fish assemblage of the of investigated lagoons. The HFBI index, applied on an annual basis, made it possible to highlight marked differences in the ecological status of the Po Delta lagoons. Only Caleri lagoon resulted in a good state, Marinetta and Canarin lagoons in a moderate state, while Barbamarco and Scardovari lagoons resulted in a poor ecological state. Eutrophication, resulting from the large inputs of nutrients with freshwater from the Po River branches, and the modification of lagoon morphologies, a consequence of anthropogenic activities, are the main pressure factors that determine the ecological status of these transitional water bodies

The Italian long-term ecosystem research (LTER-Italy) network: results, opportunities, and challenges for coastal transitional ecosystems

1 - The Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) network, now a global reality, was founded on a combination of long-term ecological studies, short-term experiments, and comparisons among sites and eco-domains. 2 - The LTER-Italy network was officially established as a formal member of the LTER international network in 2006, following a wider on-going process in Europe; it currently consists of 22 sites representing the main ecosystem typologies of Italy. Four coastal transitional ecosystem sites are included in the LTER-Italy network: on the northern Peninsula, these include the Venice Lagoon and the lagoons of the Po River Delta, which are characterized by a temperate climate and the influence of tides; and in the southern sector, these include the coastal ecosystems of Sardinia and the Mar Piccolo of Taranto, which are characterized by a Mediterranean climate and the absence of sensible tides. 3 - In this paper, we present and discuss three main issues: the LTER-International and LTER-Europe context, emphasising the most practical issues and activities that must be addressed for the effective organization and maintenance of LTER networks; the history, structure, and perspectives of the national LTER-Italy network; and the opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses related to participation of the LTER-Italy network in the study of coastal transitional ecosystems

General Terms

Available methodologies for developing Sematic Web applications do not fully exploit the whole potential deriving from interaction with ontological data sources. Here we introduce an extension of the WebML modeling framework to fulfill most of the design requirements emerging for the new area of Semantic Web. We generalize the development process to support Semantic Web applications and we introduce a set of new primitives for ontology importing and querying

Massive wrist prosthesis for giant cell tumour of the distal radius: A case report with a 3-year follow-up

SummaryWe report the case of a 72-year-old woman in whom a mega wrist prosthesis was used to reconstruct the distal radius after en-bloc resection of a giant cell tumour. Three years later, her pain score was 2/10 and motion ranges were 20° of flexion, 70° of extension, 70° of pronation, 60° of supination, 20° of radial deviation, and 20° of ulnar deviation. The QuickDASH score was 52.27/100 and the Enneking score was 83%. Radiographically, the prosthesis was well aligned, with no evidence of loosening but with dorsal subluxation of the ulnar head. The outcome in this patient, together with published data, indicate that mega prosthesis use is among the treatment options for distal radius reconstruction after en-bloc resection of a giant cell tumour, provided a biocompatible, bipolar, unconstrained prosthesis is used

Model-Driven Design and Development of Semantic Web Service Applications

This paper proposes a model-driven methodology to design and develop semantic Web service applications and their components, described according to the emerging WSMO standard. In particular, we show that business processes and Web engineering models have sufficient expressive power to support the semi-automatic extraction of semantic descriptions (i.e., WSMO ontologies, goals, Web services, and mediators), thus partially hiding the complexity of dealing with semantics. Our method is based on existing models for the specification of business processes (BPMN) combined with Web engineering models for designing and developing semantically rich Web applications (WebML). The proposed approach leads from an abstract view of the business needs to a concrete implementation of the application, by means of several design steps; high level models are transformed into software components. Our framework increases the efficiency of the whole design process, yielding to the construction of semantic Web service applications spanning over several enterprises

C.: Web Modeling-based Approach to Automating Web Services Mediation, Choreography and Discovery

Abstract. We propose an approach for the discovery and integration of Semantic Web Services that exploits modern Web engineering methods, including visual declarative modeling (based on the WebML language), visual data marshalling, and automatic code generation. The approach to automatic interaction between services is based on a relational representation of the WSMO ontology model and on a set of visual primitives for defining the interaction between services and the choreography structure. Choreography, front-end, and services implementations are completely modeled by WebML schemas. Service discovery is based on a research prototype engine called Glue.