San Fernando Batteries in Portobelo - Panama: building materials characterization and the environmental impact evaluation

[EN] The UNESCO site of San Fernando arises in the northern part of the Bay of Portobelo, on the Panamanian Caribbean coast, and belongs to a group of military fortifications erected during the XVIIXVIII centuries by the Spanish Empire. These defence structures were aimed at protecting the strategic outpost for the transoceanic trade, between the "New" and the "Old World", from the pirate attacks. In order to safeguard this impressive site, the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, ISACCNR (Bologna), the "Patronato de Portobelo y San Lorenzo" and the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences of the University of Ferrara have started a collaboration for characterizing and evaluating the state of conservation of the construction materials, considering the environmental impact on them. Specifically this paper shows preliminary results obtained by mineralogical and petrographic characterization carried out by Polarized Light Microscopy (PLM), Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy (ESEM-EDX) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) investigations.Ciantelli, C.; Bonazza, A.; Sabbioni, C.; Suñé Martínez, RA.; Vaccaro, C. (2015). San Fernando Batteries in Portobelo - Panama: building materials characterization and the environmental impact evaluation. En Defensive architecture of the mediterranean: XV to XVIII centuries. Vol. II. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 353-356. https://doi.org/10.4995/FORTMED2015.2015.1754OCS35335

Exploring the Italian equine gene pool via high-throughput genotyping

Introduction: The Italian peninsula is in the center of the Mediterranean area, and historically it has been a hub for numerous human populations, cultures, and also animal species that enriched the hosted biodiversity. Horses are no exception to this phenomenon, with the peculiarity that the gene pool has been impacted by warfare and subsequent “colonization”. In this study, using a comprehensive dataset for almost the entire Italian equine population, in addition to the most influential cosmopolitan breeds, we describe the current status of the modern Italian gene pool.Materials and Methods: The Italian dataset comprised 1,308 individuals and 22 breeds genotyped at a 70 k density that was merged with publicly available data to facilitate comparison with the global equine diversity. After quality control and supervised subsampling to ensure consistency among breeds, the merged dataset with the global equine diversity contained data for 1,333 individuals from 54 populations. Multidimensional scaling, admixture, gene flow, and effective population size were analyzed.Results and Discussion: The results show that some of the native Italian breeds preserve distinct gene pools, potentially because of adaptation to the different geographical contexts of the peninsula. Nevertheless, the comparison with international breeds highlights the presence of strong gene flow from renowned breeds into several Italian breeds, probably due to historical introgression. Coldblood breeds with stronger genetic identity were indeed well differentiated from warmblood breeds, which are highly admixed. Other breeds showed further peculiarities due to their breeding history. Finally, we observed some breeds that exist more on cultural, traditional, and geographical point of view than due to actual genetic distinctiveness