Physical, Chemical and Biological Properties of some Alternative Growing Substrates.

Peat represented the predominant constituent of growing media for soilless production in the last decades. However, due to the high cost of extraction and future availability and sustainability, a worldwide search for alternative substrates has been developed, focusing on secondary processing compounds or recycling wastes. In order to evaluate the suitability of new materials, organic by-products, namely hemp fiber (2 particle sizes) and grape marc were studied and compared with peat and some rising substitutes: Coir (3% fiber) and green compost. Methodology: Some of the main physical (particle size distribution, bulk density, water holding capacity and air capacity), chemical (pH, electrical conductivity, ash, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and heavy metals content) and biological properties (phytotoxicity) were analyzed. Results: All materials showed water holding capacity >40% (threshold considered sufficient on the base of peat-related classification), except for coir and hemp with large particle size and marc that registered a poor water-holding capacity (<40% retained water). The pH of the base materials was different with values ranging between 6.21 and 9.05. Compost and marc showed high values of electrical conductivity and copper content (and heavy metals for green compost) and a possible negative influence on germination of cress as resulting from the bioassay. Conclusion: Physical, chemical and biological properties of the materials suggested that coir has the potential to partially or totally replace peat, whereas marc and compost require to be mixed with other materials or properly select the source-of-origin materials before processing

Reproductive patterns of 1-year-old mixed shoots in different olive cultivars in Central Italy.

The increase of plant density in new olive orchard systems requires a deeper investigation about plant architecture to understand growth, branching pattern and yield and to select most suitable cultivars. The spatial arrangement of vegetative and reproductive structures helps to explain the fruiting attitude of the plant at different levels: the whole tree, the productive branch and the fruiting shoot. The objective of the present study was to investigate the reproductive attitude of 1-year-old mixed shoots in six olive cultivars grown in central Italy in order to determine inflorescence and fruit distribution and identify correlations between vegetative-reproductive variables. Results showed a differing inflorescence and fruit distribution along the shoot axis: a higher number in the median-distal portion for the cultivars ‘Arbequina’, ‘Don Carlo’ and ‘Giulia’, in the median-basal portion for ‘FS17’ and more homogeneous for ‘Arbosana’ and ‘Koroneiki’. A higher fruit number with increasing length of 1-yearold mixed shoot was registered, but with a shallow slope relationship compared to the number of flowers per shoot. After fruit set, the crop load remained constant until harvest. Cultivars showed a different vegetative-reproductive pattern in the climatic conditions of central Italy with differences between all cultivars. This study contributes to understand the reproductive pattern of 1-year-old mixed shoot in olive, suggesting a different suitability of the cultivars to different planting density systems

Géologie du svalbard

The paper reports on the design and construction of a multi- layered corpus of Italian, annotated at the syntactic and lexico-semantic levels, whose development is supported by dedicated software augmented with an intelligent interface. The issue of evaluating this type of resource is also addressed

The syntactic-semantic treebank of Italian. An overview

The paper reports on the design and construction of a multi- layered corpus of Italian, annotated at the syntactic and lexico-semantic levels, whose development is supported by dedicated software augmented with an intelligent interface. The issue of evaluating this type of resource is also addressed