Search results for "EEC"
showing 10 items of 1614 documents
Response of soil mites (Acari, Mesostigmata) to long-term Norway spruce plantation along a mountain stream
2018
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, coniferous monocultures were introduced, replacing natural broadleaved forests in Central Europe, mainly for economic benefits. In the mountains, Norway spruce [Picea abies (L.) H. Karst] was introduced in large areas previously covered with beech forests and also in natural riverside habitat corridors such as river valleys, despite its negative impact on the soil environment by e.g. organic matter accumulation, decrease of soil pH and changes in C/N ratio. We aimed to check how long-term Norway spruce plantations affect species richness and diversity of soil mites along a mountain river in former mixed and broadleaved forests. The study, based…
Effects of traditional coppice practices and microsite conditions on tree health in a European beech forest at its southernmost range
2016
Abstract: European beech (Fagus sylvatica) grows at the southern limit of its range in the mountain-Mediterranean vegetation belt up to the timberline. The southernmost beech forests of Sicily (southern Italy) show peculiar ecological, structural and silvicultural characteristics, growing in fragmented and isolated stands near the timberline and in topographically marginal unfavorable habitats. Past silvicultural practices increased the heterogeneity of stand structure at these sites. We compared stand structural characteristics and tree health in coppice-cut and control beech stands with respect to the local topographic gradient (bottom, slope and ridge) and canopy cover (clearing/border v…
New national and regional Annex I Habitat records: from #13 to #15
2020
New data on the distribution of the Annex I Habitats 3160, 7210* and 9320 are reported in this contribution. In detail, 24 new occurrences in Natura 2000 Sites are presented and 42 new cells in the EEA 10 km x 10 km Reference grid are added. The new data refer to Italy and in particular to the Administrative Regions Lombardy, Sardinia, and Sicily.
Statistical modelling and RCS detrending methods provide similar estimates of long-term trend in radial growth of common beech in north-eastern France
2011
International audience; Dendrochronological methods have greatly contributed to the documentation of past long-term trends in forest growth. These methods primarily focus on the high-frequency signals of tree ring chronologies. They require the removal of the ageing trend in tree growth, known as 'standardisation' or 'detrending', as a prerequisite to the estimation of such trends. Because the approach is sequential, it may however absorb part of the low-frequency historical signal. In this study, we investigate the effect of a sequential and a simultaneous estimation of the ageing trend on the chronology of growth. We formerly developed a method to estimate historical changes in growth, in…
Marginal fragmented beech stands and climate change in Sicily: effects of non-sustainable traditional silviculture practices in relation to micro-top…
2016
In Sicily where the southernmost beech forests of Europe are located, beech stands show peculiar ecological, characters. The ecological marginality of these forests is particularly evident in the fragmented and isolated beech stands, near the timberline and/or located on less favourable topographic conditions. In this study we analyzed stand-structural parameters and tree health comparing recently coppice felled beech stands and control plots. Additionally, these aspects have been related also to the local topographic gradient and the cover fragmentation. Results clearly show a pronounced tree health reduction (more crown and bark damages, higher percentage of dead trees, lower seedling den…
Species composition modulates seedling competitiveness of temperate tree species under hemiboreal conditions
2020
Abstract Mixed stands are advised for reduction of impacts of natural hazards, and species composition can largely affect sustainability and productivity of the stands. Early development of a stands after a stand-replacing disturbance can have considerable legacy effects on growth via alterations in the diversity-productivity relationships. Accordingly compatibility of growth and competitiveness of different species is one of the key issues for susceptibility of mixed stands. A two-year chamber experiment was conducted to assess early growth and intra- and inter-specific competition for light and soil resources among the seedlings of temperate tree species simulating the predicted effect of…
An annotated checklist of the leech (Annelida: Hirudinida) species of the Moulouya River basin, Morocco, with several new distribution records and a …
2019
A historical overview of the leech fauna of Morocco, based on both literature data, museum collections and new material, sampled in more than 100 sites in the Moulouya River basin (eastern region of Morocco), is provided. Twenty species from five families and ten genera are currently known, of which Helobdella europea Kutschera, 1987, is a new record for the country and North Africa as a whole. Herein, we add many new distribution records. The current list will need to be revised as new species distributions are recorded in the region. Notes on the species distribution are given along with comments on their habitat preferences. A concise biogeographic analysis outlines the similarities in t…
Effects of local forest continuity on the diversity of fungi on standing dead pines
2018
Human-induced fragmentation affects forest continuity, i.e. availability of a suitable habitat for the target species over a time period. The dependence of wood-inhabiting fungi on landscape level continuity has been well demonstrated, but the importance of local continuity has remained controversial. In this study, we explored the effects of local forest continuity (microhabitat and stand level) on the diversity of wood-inhabiting fungi on standing dead trunks of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.). We studied species richness and community composition of decomposers and Micarea lichens on 70 trunks in 14 forests in central Finland that differed in their state of continuity. We used dendrochr…
Body Gestures and Spoken Sentences: A Novel Approach for Revealing User’s Emotions
2017
In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in emotion analysis research, which has been applied in several areas of computer science. Many authors have con- tributed to the development of emotion recognition algorithms, considering textual or non verbal data as input, such as facial expressions, gestures or, in the case of multi-modal emotion recognition, a combination of them. In this paper, we describe a method to detect emotions from gestures using the skeletal data obtained from Kinect-like devices as input, as well as a textual description of their meaning. The experimental results show that the correlation existing between body movements and spoken user sentence(s) can be u…
Regularized LMS methods for baseline wandering removal in wearable ECG devices
2016
The acquisition of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals by means of light and reduced size devices can be usefully exploited in several health-care applications, e.g., in remote monitoring of patients. ECG signals, however, are affected by several artifacts due to noise and other disturbances. One of the major ECG degradation is represented by the baseline wandering (BW), a slowly varying change of the signal trend. Several BW removal algorithms have been proposed into the literature, even though their complexity often hinders their implementation into wearable devices characterized by limited computational and memory resources. In this study, we formalize the BW removal problem as a mean-square…