Reconstructing the impact of human activities in a NW Iberian Roman mining landscape for the last 2500 years

This article was made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Little is known about the impact of human activities during Roman times on NW Iberian mining landscapes beyond the geomorphological transformations brought about by the use of hydraulic power for gold extraction. We present the high-resolution pollen record of La Molina mire, located in an area intensely used for gold mining (Asturias, NW Spain), combined with other proxy data from the same peat core to identify different human activities, evaluate the strategies followed for the management of the resources and describe the landscape response to human disturbances. We reconstructed the timing and synchronicity of landscape changes of varying intensity and form occurred before, during and after Roman times. An open landscape was prevalent during the local Late Iron Age, a period of relatively environmental stability. During the Early Roman Empire more significant vegetation shifts took place, reflected by changes in both forest (Corylus and Quercus) and heathland cover, as mining/metallurgy peaked and grazing and cultivation increased. In the Late Roman Empire, the influence of mining/metallurgy on landscape change started to disappear. This decoupling was further consolidated in the Germanic period (i.e., Visigothic and Sueve domination of the region), with a sharp decrease in mining/metallurgy but continued grazing. Although human impact was intense in some periods, mostly during the Early Roman Empire, forest regeneration occurred afterwards: clearances were local and short-lived. However, the Roman mining landscape turned into an agrarian one at the onset of the Middle Ages, characterized by a profound deforestation at a regional level due to a myriad of human activities that resulted in an irreversible openness of the landscape. © 2014 The Authors

A community resource for paired genomic and metabolomic data mining

Genomics and metabolomics are widely used to explore specialized metabolite diversity. The Paired Omics Data Platform is a community initiative to systematically document links between metabolome and (meta)genome data, aiding identification of natural product biosynthetic origins and metabolite structures.Peer reviewe

Evaluation of hop (Humulus lupulus) as a repellent for the management of Drosophila suzukii

status: Published onlin

A MassQL-Integrated Molecular Networking Approach for the Discovery and Substructure Annotation of Bioactive Cyclic Peptides

The marine sponge-derived fungus Stachylidium bicolor 293 K04 is a prolific producer of specialized metabolites, including certain cyclic tetrapeptides called endolides, which are characterized by the presence of the unusual amino acid N-methyl-3-(3-furyl)-alanine. This rare feature can be used as bait to detect new endolide-like analogs through customized fragment pattern searches of tandem mass spectrometry data using the Mass Spec Query Language (MassQL). Here, we integrate endolide-specific MassQL queries with molecular networking to obtain substructural information guiding the targeted isolation and structure elucidation of the new proline-containing endolides E (1) and F (2). We showed that endolide F (but not E) is a moderate antagonist of the arginine vasopressin V1A receptor, a member of the G protein-coupled receptor superfamily

Testing the conditional resource-dilution hypothesis: the impact of sibship size and composition on infant and child mortality in the Netherlands, 1863–1910

Contains fulltext : 220870.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)32 p

Family organisation and human capital inequalities in historical Europe: testing the association anew

There has been a growing interest in the question of whether variation in family systems is a factor in the disparities in growth, development, and human capital formation. Studies by proponents of the field of new institutional economics have suggested that differences in family organisation could have considerable influence on regional developmental inequalities in today’s world, while a number of economic historians have argued that certain systems of marriage and household structure in the European past might have been more conducive than others to economic growth. Despite recent criticism of these ideas by Dennison and Ogilvie, who argued that the family has no exogenous effects on growth, the debate over this potential relationship continues. However, we believe that this discussion has suffered from a lack of historical data that would give a fuller picture of the rich diversity of family settings and from methodological shortcomings that have so far hindered the proper operationalisation of historical family systems and their potential effects on developmental outcomes. In this chapter, we apply a recently developed multidimensional measure of historical familial organisation, the Patriarchy Index (PI), and use spatially sensitive multivariate analyses to investigate its relationship with human capital levels, as approximated by numeracy across 115 populations of historical Europe. We find a strong negative association between the Patriarchy Index and regional numeracy patterns that remains significant even after controlling for a broad range of other important factors. Our observation that family-driven age- and gender-related inequalities, as captured by the index, are relevant for understanding variation in basic numeracy patterns in the past suggests that there are indeed important links between family organisation and human capital accumulation that merit further investigation