A historical perspective on vascular plants endemic to Italy

A Historical Perspective on Vascular Plants Endemic to Italy. According to a recent review, Italian endemic vascular flora is made up by 1371 specific and subspecific taxa. Focussing on these taxa, in this paper we analyse the frequency of the names' authorities, the type and frequency of specific/infraspecific epithets, and their change over time. The most represented authorities, accounting for about 20% of the name descriptions, are Salvatore Brullo (1947-), Giovanni Gussone (1787-1866) and Michele Tenore (1780-1861). Geographical epithets are the most represented in the dataset. Despite a very slow increase in taxa description in the period 1929-1964, in the last decades we encountered an exponential increase, highlighting for the generalized use of new techniques as a tool to describe new species and for the increasing exploration of poorly known areas, but also for the urgent need to reconsider the past, present and future concept od species

Distribution of the genus Sternbergia Waldst. & Kit. (Amaryllidaceae) in Tuscany (central Italy)

The authors report an updated distribution of the genus Sternbergia Waldst. & Kit. (Amaryllidaceae) in Tuscany by the analysis of herbarium specimens, bibliographic references and records in the field. S. colchiciflora occurs in six localities, four in southern Tuscany and two in northern Tuscany. One out of them, the first in Firenze province, is here recorded. On the contrary, S. lutea is widespread in the region, but the distinction between natural populations and those escaped from cultivation is not always certain. Habitat suitability model at regional level for S. colchiciflora is also reported

Personal private herbaria: a valuable but neglected source of floristic data. The case of Italian collections today

Today private collections still represent an important source of information as is evident from the available literature, where, in many cases, private collections are mentioned both in floristic and taxonomic/systematic researches. We present a summary of the main information about private herbaria in Italy, whose collections are currently increasing. Based on our survey, we retrieved information on 34 personal herbaria where 156,361 specimens are preserved at present. Piedmont and Tuscany resulted the two Italian regions with the highest number of collections, whereas for 9 regions we obtained no answer. The most represented families resulted Asteraceae and Poaceae, whereas the most represented genera resulted Carex, Trifolium, and Hieracium. Taken all together, these collections rank 16th among the 68 institutional public herbaria officially recognised in Italy

Contribution to the vascular flora of Papasidero (north-western Calabria, Italy)

A floristic survey of the Papasidero municipality (54.65 km2) was carried out from 2008 to 2011, allowing us to list 580 specific and infraspecific taxa (567 verified by us), belonging to 353 genera and 89 families. Several species are rather interesting from a phytogeographic and/or conservation point of view. 14 exotic species were also recorded, 10 of which are considered invasive in the regional flora. The most represented families are Asteraceae (66 taxa), Fabaceae (56), Lamiaceae (40), Poaceae (31), while most represented genera are Trifolium (11), Euphorbia and Ophrys (9), Lathyrus and Geranium (8). Biological and chorological spectra show a clear dominance of Hemicriptophytes and Mediterranean elements respectively, as one can expect based on the climatic conditions of the area at issues

Proof-of-principle of a new geometry for sampling calorimetry using inorganic scintillator plates

A novel geometry for a sampling calorimeter employing inorganic scintillators as an active medium is presented. To overcome the mechanical challenges of construction, an innovative light collection geometry has been pioneered, that minimises the complexity of construction. First test results are presented, demonstrating a successful signal extraction. The geometry consists of a sampling calorimeter with passive absorber layers interleaved with layers of an active medium made of inorganic scintillating crystals. Wavelength-shifting (WLS) fibres run along the four long, chamfered edges of the stack, transporting the light to photodetectors at the rear. To maximise the amount of scintillation light reaching the WLS fibres, the scintillator chamfers are depolished. It is shown herein that this concept is working for cerium fluoride (CeF$_3$) as a scintillator. Coupled to it, several different types of materials have been tested as WLS medium. In particular, materials that might be sufficiently resistant to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider radiation environment, such as cerium-doped Lutetium-Yttrium Orthosilicate (LYSO) and cerium-doped quartz, are compared to conventional plastic WLS fibres. Finally, an outlook is presented on the possible optimisation of the different components, and the construction and commissioning of a full calorimeter cell prototype is presented.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings CALOR 2014, the 16th International Conference on Calorimetry in High-Energy Physics, Giessen (Germany) 6 - 11 April 2014. To be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (10 pages, 15 figures

Media Bias and Polarization through the Lens of a Markov Switching Latent Space Network Model

News outlets are now more than ever incentivized to provide their audience with slanted news, while the intrinsic homophilic nature of online social media may exacerbate polarized opinions. Here, we propose a new dynamic latent space model for time-varying online audience-duplication networks, which exploits social media content to conduct inference on media bias and polarization of news outlets. Our model contributes to the literature in several directions: 1) we provide a model-embedded data-driven interpretation for the latent leaning of news outlets in terms of media bias; 2) we endow our model with Markov-switching dynamics to capture polarization regimes while maintaining a parsimonious specification; 3) we contribute to the literature on the statistical properties of latent space network models. The proposed model is applied to a set of data on the online activity of national and local news outlets from four European countries in the years 2015 and 2016. We find evidence of a strong positive correlation between our media slant measure and a well-grounded external source of media bias. In addition, we provide insight into the polarization regimes across the four countries considered

Hantaviruses in agricultural and forestry workers: Knowledge, attitudes and practices in Italian physicians

Hantaviruses are viral pathogens usually endemic in rodent populations. Human exposure follows inhalation of dusts contaminated with rodent excreta, and most individuals have been in-fected in occupational settings heavily contaminated with rodent droppings, such as agricultural and forestry. To date, knowledge, attitudes and practices of medical professionals, especially occupational physicians (OP), regarding hantavirus disease in at-risk workers have been scarcely investigated. We investigated these topics through a structured questionnaire administered through an online survey of 223 medical professionals (42.2% of them working as OP). Adequate general knowledge of hantavirus disease was found in 48.9% of respondents, with OP exhibiting a better understanding of clinical features of human hantavirus infections. OP aware of the endemic status of hantavirus in North-Eastern Italy exhibited higher risk perception for agricultural workers (odds ratio 21,193, 95% confidence interval 3.666–122.505). On the contrary, a better knowledge of hantaviruses was association with acknowledging an increased risk of hantavirus infection in forestry workers (odds ratio 5.880, 95% confidence interval 1.620–21.343). Hantavirus in Italy represent an often-overlooked biological risk in occupational settings. The lack of preventive immunization, the inappropriate risk perception and the unsatisfying awareness of hantavirus issues collectively stress the importance of appropriate information campaigns among health care providers

The genus Sternbergia Waldst. & Kit. (Amaryllidaceae) in Italy. Contribution to the cytotaxonomical and morpho-anatomical knowledge

Abstract Morpho-anatomical and karyologial studies were carried out on plants from S Italy of the three Italian species of the genus Sternbergia: S. colchiciflora, S. lutea and S. sicula. The morpho-anatomical features of the leaves are good taxonomic markers, especially concerning their colour, general shape, width and morphology of the median adaxial keel. Karyological analysis revealed the following chromosome complements: Sternbergia colchiciflora, 2n = 20; Sternbergia lutea, 2n = 22; Sternbergia sicula, 2n = 22. Karyotype variability is discussed in the light of previous literature. According to our results S. colchiciflora is confirmed to be the most isolated species, while S. lutea and S. sicula, easily recognizable on morphological grounds, appear instead very close karyologically