Taxonomic and functional plant diversity of the Santorini-Christiana island group (Aegean Sea, Greece)

This is the first attempt to analyse vascular plant diversity patterns regarding the seven vegetated islands of the Santorini archipelago (Aegean Sea, Greece) as a whole. Hitherto unpublished floristic records, combined with critical use of taxonomic and chorological information from previous and most recent literature, resulted in a total of 696 infrageneric taxa (species and subspecies) occurring in the area. Detailed qualitative and quantitative phytodiversity spectra per individual island are presented, and floristic dissimilarity (beta-diversity) between islands is considered. Spatial distribution of 28 chorological, ecological, vegetative and reproductive traits for each recorded taxon have been calculated in order to detect regional and fundamental patterns in functional biogeography beyond traditional species-based approaches, based on both taxonomic and functional components of diversity. Mediterranean species constitute the most abundant chorological element and therophytes the most abundant life-form element in the region. Surface area is the most influential variable contributing to species richness; very strong relationships in (1) species per area, (2) functional richness per area and (3) functional richness per species richness are revealed for the Santorini archipelago. Floristic cross-correlations revealed an overall high floristic heterogeneity among the individual islands. The phytodiversity assessment presented is undoubtedly of documentary value in consideration of expected future eruptive events in the area which may damage the plant cover at least on some of the involved islands to a yet unpredictable extent

Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project (3rd Revision)

This manual addresses the linguistic issues that arise in connection with annotating texts by part of speech ( tagging ). Section 2 is an alphabetical list of the parts of speech encoded in the annotation systems of the Penn Treebank Project, along with their corresponding abbreviations ( tags ) and some information concerning their definition. This section allows you to find an unfamiliar tag by looking up a familiar part of speech. Section 3 recapitulates the information in Section 2, but this time the information is alphabetically ordered by tags. This is the section to consult in order to find out what an unfamiliar tag means. Since the parts of speech are probably familiar to you from high school English, you should have little difficulty in assimilating the tags themselves. However, it is often quite difficult to decide which tag is appropriate in a particular context. The two sections 4 and 5 therefore include examples and guidelines on how to tag problematic cases. If you are uncertain about whether a given tag is correct or not, refer to these sections in order to ensure a consistently annotated text. Section 4 discusses parts of speech that are easily confused and gives guidelines on how to tag such cases, while Section 5 contains an alphabetical list of specific problematic words and collocations. Finally, Section 6 discusses some general tagging conventions. One general rule, however, is so important that we state it here. Many texts are not models of good prose, and some contain outright errors and slips of the pen. Do not be tempted to correct a tag to what it would be if the text were correct; rather, it is the incorrect word that should be tagged correctly

Near Surface Geophysical Archaeological Prospection at the Prehistoric Site of Akrotiri on Santorini/Thera

In February 2014 high-resolution ground penetrating radar and earth resistance tomography measurements have for the first time been used successfully for the distinct mapping of buried archaeological structures in the vicinity of the Bronze Age archaeological site of Akrotiri on Santorini/Thera in Greece

Advancing Santorini’s tephrostratigraphy: new glass geochemical data and improved marine-terrestrial tephra correlations for the past ∼360 kyrs

The island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea is one of the world’s most violent active volcanoes. Santorini has produced numerous highly explosive eruptions over at least the past ∼360 kyrs that are documented by the island’s unique proximal tephra record. However, the lack of precise eruption ages and comprehensive glass geochemical datasets for proximal tephras has long hindered the development of a detailed distal tephrostratigraphy for Santorini eruptions. In light of these requirements, this study develops a distal tephrostratigraphy for Santorini covering the past ∼360 kyrs, which represents a major step forward towards the establishment of a tephrostratigraphic framework for the Eastern Mediterranean region. We present new EPMA glass geochemical data of proximal tephra deposits from twelve Plinian and numerous Inter-Plinian Santorini eruptions and use this dataset to establish assignments of 28 distal marine tephras from three Aegean Sea cores (KL49, KL51 and LC21) to specific volcanic events. Based on interpolation of sapropel core chronologies we provide new eruption age estimates for correlated Santorini tephras, including dates for major Plinian eruptions, Upper Scoriae 1 (80.8 ± 2.9 ka), Vourvoulos (126.5 ± 2.9 ka), Middle Pumice (141.0 ± 2.6 ka), Cape Thera (156.9 ± 2.3 ka), Lower Pumice 2 (176.7 ± 0.6 ka), Lower Pumice 1 (185.7 ± 0.7 ka), and Cape Therma 3 (200.2 ± 0.9 ka), but also for 17 Inter-Plinian events. Older Plinian and Inter-Plinian activity between ∼310 ka and 370 ka, documented in the distal terrestrial setting of Tenaghi Philippon (NE Greece), is independently dated by palynostratigraphy and complements the distal Santorini tephrostratigraphic record

Robust seismic velocity change estimation using ambient noise recordings

We consider the problem of seismic velocity change estimation using ambient noise recordings. Motivated by [23] we study how the velocity change estimation is affected by seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources. More precisely, we consider a numerical model and introduce spatio-temporal seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources. We show that indeed, as pointed out in [23], the stretching method is affected by these fluctuations and produces misleading apparent velocity variations which reduce dramatically the signal to noise ratio of the method. We also show that these apparent velocity variations can be eliminated by an adequate normalization of the cross-correlation functions. Theoretically we expect our approach to work as long as the seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources are uniform, an assumption which holds for closely located seismic stations. We illustrate with numerical simulations and real measurements that the proposed normalization significantly improves the accuracy of the velocity change estimation

Evaluation of PV technology implementation in the building sector

This paper presents a simulation case that shows the impact on energy consumption of a building applying photovoltaic shading systems. In order to make photovoltaic application more economical, the effect of a photovoltaic facade as a passive cooling system can result in a considerable energy cost reduction, with positive influence on the payback time of the photovoltaic installation. Photovoltaic shading systems can be applied to both refurbishment of old buildings and to new-build, offering attractive and environmentally integrated architectural solutions