Search results for "Function"
showing 10 items of 14432 documents
Trophic level modulates carabid beetle responses to habitat and landscape structure: a pan-European study
2010
1. Anthropogenic pressures have produced heterogeneous landscapes expected to influence diversity differently across trophic levels and spatial scales. 2. We tested how activity density and species richness of carabid trophic groups responded to local habitat and landscape structure (forest percentage cover and habitat richness) in 48 landscape parcels (1 km2) across eight European countries. 3. Local habitat affected activity density, but not species richness, of both trophic groups. Activity densities were greater in rotational cropping compared with other habitats; phytophage densities were also greater in grassland than forest habitats. 4. Controlling for country and habitat effects we …
Functional responses of multitaxa communities to disturbance and stress gradients in a restored floodplain
2015
Trait-based approaches can reveal the mechanisms through which disturbances or stress impact communities, allowing comparisons of the role of different mechanisms in shaping communities among taxonomic groups. Such information can lead to higher comparability, transferability and predictability of the outcome of restoration projects. However, multitaxa trait-based approaches were rarely used in the context of ecosystem restoration. We investigated the responses to environmental gradients of seven taxa (vascular plants, staphylinid and carabid beetles, spiders, isopods, diplopods and earthworms) in a restored floodplain using a species traits approach. We assessed the impact of flood disturb…
The Reproductive Strategy as an Important Trait for the Distribution of Lower-Trunk Epiphytic Lichens in Old-Growth vs. Non-Old Growth Forests
2021
(1) Research Highlights: The work studied the beta diversity patterns of epiphytic lichens as a function of their reproductive strategies in old-growth and non-old growth forests from the Mediterranean area. (2) Background and Objectives: The reproductive strategies of lichens can drive the dispersal and distribution of species assemblages in forest ecosystems. To further investigate this issue, we analyzed data on epiphytic lichen diversity collected from old-growth and non-old growth forest sites (36 plots) located in Cilento National Park (South Italy). Our working hypothesis was that the dispersal abilities due to the different reproductive strategies drove species beta diversity depend…
Rootstock and Arbuscular Mycorrhiza Combinatorial Effects on Eggplant Crop Performance and Fruit Quality under Greenhouse Conditions
2020
The herbaceous grafting of fruiting vegetables is considered a toolbox for safeguarding yield stability under various distresses and for improving fruit quality. Inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) fungi seems also to be an efficient tool for increasing the assimilation, uptake and translocation of macroelements and microelements, for modulating plant secondary metabolism and for overcoming several forms of plant distress. The present work evaluated the combined effect of grafting the &ldquo
Limnology and Aquatic Microbial Ecology of Byers Peninsula: A Main Freshwater Biodiversity Hotspot in Maritime Antarctica
2019
Here we present a comprehensive review of the diversity revealed by research in limnology and microbial ecology conducted in Byers Peninsula (Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica) during the last two decades. The site constitutes one of the largest ice-free areas within the Antarctic Peninsula region. Since it has a high level of environmental protection, it is less human-impacted compared to other sites within the South Shetland archipelago. The main investigations in Byers Peninsula focused on the physical and chemical limnology of the lakes, ponds, rivers, and wetlands, as well as on the structure of their planktonic and benthic microbial communities, and on the function…
Effect of Metal Complexation on the Conductance of Single-Molecular Wires Measured at Room Temperature
2014
The present work aims to give insight into the effect that metal coordination has on the room-temperature conductance of molecular wires. For that purpose, we have designed a family of rigid, highly conductive ligands functionalized with different terminations (acetylthiols, pyridines, and ethynyl groups), in which the conformational changes induced by metal coordination are negligible. The single-molecule conductance features of this series of molecular wires and their corresponding Cu(I) complexes have been measured in break-junction setups at room temperature. Experimental and theoretical data show that no matter the anchoring group, in all cases metal coordination leads to a shift towar…
Functionalized halloysite nanotubes: Efficient carrier systems for antifungine drugs
2018
Abstract Halloysite-cyclodextrin hybrid was employed as carrier for sustained release of clotrimazole for vaginal or buccal treatment of Candidiasis. The nanocarrier was obtained by functionalization of halloysite surface with cyclodextrin moieties by means of microwave irradiation, with the final goal to obtain a scaffold for the covalent linkage of cysteamine hydrochloride. The interaction between clotrimazole and the pristine components, namely cyclodextrin and halloysite, was thoroughly investigated by several techniques such as DSC, TGA, UV–vis spectroscopy and some adsorption studies were, also, carried out. The release of the antifungine molecule was finally investigated in a medium …
WarpDrive: Massively Parallel Hashing on Multi-GPU Nodes
2018
Hash maps are among the most versatile data structures in computer science because of their compact data layout and expected constant time complexity for insertion and querying. However, associated memory access patterns during the probing phase are highly irregular resulting in strongly memory-bound implementations. Massively parallel accelerators such as CUDA-enabled GPUs may overcome this limitation by virtue of their fast video memory featuring almost one TB/s bandwidth in comparison to main memory modules of state-of-the-art CPUs with less than 100 GB/s. Unfortunately, the size of hash maps supported by existing single-GPU hashing implementations is restricted by the limited amount of …
SWMapper: Scalable Read Mapper on SunWay TaihuLight
2020
With the rapid development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, high throughput sequencing platforms continuously produce large amounts of short read DNA data at low cost. Read mapping is a performance-critical task, being one of the first stages required for many different types of NGS analysis pipelines. We present SWMapper — a scalable and efficient read mapper for the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. A number of optimization techniques are proposed to achieve high performance on its heterogeneous architecture which are centered around a memory-efficient succinct hash index data structure including seed filtration, duplicate removal, dynamic scheduling, asynchronous data tra…
Reviewing the role of ecosystems services in the sustainability of the urban environment: A multi-country analysis
2020
The urban environment is characterised by many pressures caused by population growth, transport (and its related emissions), and the damage to green areas. Yet, there is a variety of ecosystem services available in urban areas, which may be deployed to ameliorate the current problems and foster their sustainability. This paper reviews the role of ecosystem services as tools for sustainability, based on an urban setting. It also describes a series of multi-country case studies, where an assessment of their functions using a set of benefits valuation approaches such as health benefits, economic benefits, social benefits and benefits to climate resilience, are provided, along with an appraisal…