Search results for "CAPES"
showing 10 items of 75 documents
Land set-up systems in Italy: A long tradition of soil and water conservation sewed up to a variety of pedo-climatic environments
2020
Land set-up systems in Italy were and, in a few cases, still are integral parts of agricultural landscapes. The soils of Italy mirror a wide variety of climates and morphologies and derive from a great diversity of parent materials influenced by different soil temperature and moisture regimes. Furthermore, their development was influenced by several anthropogenic activities over time including land settings. Land set-up systems have been widely used throughout the Italian soilscape to regulate surface and underground water and to improve the physical soil features in a way that ensures mixed herbaceous and tree-crops cultivation. In recent times, new technologies have been introduced in agr…
Bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr in different environmental samples — Effects of anthropogenic contamination and implications for isoscapes in past migration s…
2012
(87)Sr/(86)Sr reference maps (isoscapes) are a key tool for investigating past human and animal migrations. However, there is little understanding of which biosphere samples are best proxies for local bioavailable Sr when dealing with movements of past populations. In this study, biological and geological samples (ground vegetation, tree leaves, rock leachates, water, soil extracts, as well as modern and archeological animal teeth and snail shells) were collected in the vicinity of two early medieval cemeteries ("Thuringians", 5-6th century AD) in central Germany, in order to characterize (87)Sr/(86)Sr of the local biosphere. Animal tooth enamel is not appropriate in this specific context t…
Brown bear behaviour in human-modified landscapes: The case of the endangered Cantabrian population, NW Spain
2018
Large carnivores are recolonizing parts of their historical range in Europe, a heavily modified human landscape. This calls for an improvement of our knowledge on how large carnivores manage to coexist with humans, and on the effects that human activity has on large carnivore behaviour, especially in areas where carnivore populations are still endangered. Brown bears Ursus arctos have been shown to be sensitive to the presence of people and their activities. Thus, bear conservation and management should take into account potential behavioural alterations related to living in human-modified landscapes. We studied the behaviour of brown bears in the Cantabrian Mountains, NW Spain, where an en…
An Updated Checklist of the Sicilian Native Edible Plants: Preserving the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Century-Old Agro-Pastoral Landscapes
2020
The traditional use of native wild food plants (NWFP) may represent a valuable supplementary food source for the present and future generations. In Sicily, the use of wild plants in the human diet dates back to very ancient times and still plays an important role in some rural communities. Moreover, in this regard, the natural and cultural inheritance of this island is wealthy and diversified for several reasons. First, Sicily hosts a rich vascular flora, with 3,000 native and 350 endemic plants. Second, due to its central position in the Mediterranean, the island has acted as a veritable melting pot for the ethnobotanical knowledge of the rural communities of the entire basin. We reviewed …
Female brown bears use areas with infanticide risk in a spatially confined population
2020
Areas used by female brown bears (Ursus arctos) with cubs-of-the-year (hereafter, FCOY) during the first months after den exit are crucial for offspring survival, primarily because of the risk of infanticide by male bears. Therefore, FCOY may avoid areas frequented by adult males during the mating season. The main aim of this study was to identify landscape features (i.e., structure, composition, and human footprint) that may differentiate the habitat use of FCOY in the small bear population of the Cantabrian Mountains (northwestern Spain; 2001–2016) from (a) areas frequented by females with yearlings, because older cubs are at less risk of infanticide than cubs-of-the-year, and (b) bear ma…
Pre and post-settlement movements of juvenile green turtles in the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean
2018
Abstract Detailed knowledge on migratory routes connecting distant breeding, developmental and foraging areas is a key prerequisite for the successful management of marine vertebrates. The present study combines stable isotopes analysis of carapace scutes and satellite tracking of juvenile green turtles as an experimental approach to understand the pre and post settlement (recruit to neritic habitats) movements in the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean. To this end, carapace scute biopsies were collected from 20 turtles foraging on coastal rocky outcrops in East Uruguay and sliced in successive 30-μm layers using a cryostat. The δ15N and δ13C values of the newest layer increased significantly with…
Farm Productions and Rural Landscapes
2017
Farm landscapes in the Philippines are dominated by rice and coconuts in most provinces. In a country of generally small farm holdings, rice, the staple food, is cultivated across the archipelago, even if corn plays a bigger role in the southern part of the country. In the mountains of northern Luzon, the Ifugao tribe have developed over several centuries a remarkable landscape of rice terraces on steep slopes, but most of the rice is grown in the plains of Central Luzon around Manila. The coconut “tree of life”, most abundant in Quezon and Bicol, is used in many different ways, from food to construction materials. Bananas and pineapple are the leading export productions, mostly grown on la…
Historical Suitability and Sustainability of Sicani Mountains Landscape (Western Sicily): An Integrated Approach of Phytosociology and Archaeobotany
2020
Since 2015, the ongoing project &ldquo
Oxygen and carbon isoscapes for the Baltic Sea : Testing their applicability in fish migration studies
2017
Conventional tags applied to individuals have been used to investigate animal movement, but these methods require tagged individuals be recaptured. Maps of regional isotopic variability known as “isoscapes” offer potential for various applications in migration research without tagging wherein isotope values of tissues are compared to environmental isotope values. In this study, we present the spatial variability in oxygen (δ18OH2O) and dissolved inorganic carbon (δ13CDIC) isotope values of Baltic Sea water. We also provide an example of how these isoscapes can reveal locations of individual animal via spatial probability surface maps, using the high-resolution salmon otolith isotope data fr…
Effect of Host Species on Topography of the Fitness Landscape for a Plant RNA Virus
2016
[EN] Adaptive fitness landscapes are a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology that relate the genotype of individuals with their fitness. At the end, the evolutionary fate of evolving populations depends on the topography of the landscape, that is, the number of accessible mutational pathways and of possible fitness peaks (i.e, adaptive solutions). For long time, fitness landscapes were only theoretical constructions due to a lack of precise information on the mapping between genotypes and phenotypes. In recent years, however, efforts have been devoted to characterize the properties of empirical fitness landscapes for individual proteins or for microbes adapting to artificial environme…