Search results for "Conservation"

Effets du bruit marin sur le changement des poissons sparidés juvéniles entre les espèces et les stades de développement

2023

International audience; Marine noise is an emerging pollutant inducing a variety of negative impacts on many animal taxa, including fish. Fish population persistence and dynamics rely on the supply of early life stages, which are often very sensitive to disturbance. Impacts of marine noise pollution (MNP) on juvenile fish have rarely been investigated in temperate regions. This is particularly true for the Mediterranean Sea, which is considered as an MNP hotspot due to intensive maritime traffic. In this study, we investigate the relationship between MNP related to boat traffic and (i) assemblage structure and (ii) the density of juvenile fishes (post-settlers at different stages) belonging…

Beware of contagion!

2003

Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics has ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and its ecological functions. This approach implies effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. Consequently, a large number of indices has been used to quantify the structure of categorical maps as a surrogate of actual landscapes and correlate them to ecological processes. In particular, the entropy-based contagion index has been extensively used to summarize the…

Recovering Sicilian Silk Heritage through Digital Technologies: The Case of Piraino’s Collection

2022

Textile conservation has given rise to small and medium-sized museums, usually with scarce resources. In Sicily, the little evidence that remains of silk production and opulent imports by the rich and powerful local aristocracy is kept in museums, parishes, and other cultural institutions. The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of such a fragile heritage is today possible by means of technological tools that provide novel means to preserve, analyze, and exploit digital information. In this paper, we present some outcomes of the SILKNOW project, a project that applies computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, educational institutions, the tourism industry, creativ…

Chimpanzees surviving in a fragmented high‐altitude forest landscape of the Congolese Albertine Rift

2021

This paper documents a community of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii Giglioli, 1872) inhabiting three relict forest fragments situated on the Lake Albert escarpment, down the Ituri highlands, of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The area explored had a combined forested surface of ±18.15 km2 in 2017, shrinking by 1.2% per year between 2010 and 2015. Between 2015 and 2017, we found 160 chimpanzee nests along 37.6 km of pilot walks, some up to 2,000 m altitude. Another 123 nests logged along 6.7 km transects led to an estimate of chimpanzee density of 4.62 weaned individuals per square kilometer of forest habitat. Camera‐trap images and direct observations rev…

Vegetation series as a marker of interactions between rural settlements and landscape: new insights from the archaeological record in Western Sicily

2020

[EN] Plant communities are complex and dynamic elements of the landscape, intertwined with both natural factors and human activities. Vegetation series reflect the environmental characteristics of the landscape, but also the anthropic impact, one of the exogenous forces that most profoundly affects the landscape formation process. This paper aims to investigate the interactions between long-term human settlement catchment areas and vegetation series. The case study area of the Sicani Mountains (Central-Western Sicily) proved to be an ideal place to perform GIS-based spatial analysis in order to compare a data set of rural archaeological sites and land units created through the mapping of ve…

A multifaceted field sampling approach for the management of extremely narrow endemic vascular plant species

2022

Extremely narrow endemic plant species (ENEs) are generally connected with micro- refugia characterized by particular environmental conditions. In-depth knowledge of the ecological requirements of ENEs is fundamental to plan appropriate conservation measures. Using cross-cutting technology, this paper gives a multifaceted approach to collect on-site data on the ecology of ENEs, defines the protocols for a correct sampling design and describes the type of equipment, the time and expenditure needed. Our sampling approach is based on two orthogonal transects, long enough to extrapolate the whole ecological gradient across the area of occupancy of the target species. Microclimatic data are reco…

Warning signalling in European vipers and their mimics : implications for conservation of the smooth snake

2014

Town, industry and city

1995

Une première partie regroupera quelques réflexions conceptuelles et méthodologiques sur les économies d'agglomération et le phénomène d'agglomération. On y trouvera des précisions sur les sources, la nature et le classement des économies d'agglomération et des forces qui peuvent les contrarier, ainsi que sur la dynamique propre du phénomène d'agglomération. Dans une deuxième partie, nous examinerons plus précisément l'intérêt et les limites de l'assimilation entre l'agglomération de la production et la ville, en analysant comment la dimension productive est liée aux autres dimensions de la ville, notamment la dimension sociale. Nous chercherons en particulier quelles représentations de la v…

Définir la ville

1996

The city can hardly be grasped by a simple definition. Most of the available definitions are statistical or descriptive and they fail to represent the complex, multidimensional and changing nature of the urban phenomenon. The definition proposed in this paper is related to economic theory of city formation and is based on the agglomeration process and the diversity of agents and activities.

Effective Practices in Mitigating Soil Erosion from Fields

2017

Soil erosion by water is a natural process that cannot be avoided. Soil erosion depends on many factors, and a distinction should be made between humanly unchangeable (e.g., rainfall) and modifiable (e.g., length of the field) soil erosion factors. Soil erosion has both on-site and off-site effects. Soil conservation tries to combine modifiable factors so as to maintain erosion in an area of interest to an acceptable level. Strategies to control soil erosion have to be adapted to the desired land use. Knowledge of soil loss tolerance, T, i.e., the maximum admissible erosion from a given field, allows technicians or farmers to establish whether soil conservation practices need to be applied …