1,721,028 research outputs found
Agroecological strategies for innovation and sustainability of agriculture production in the climate change context: a comparative analysis between California and Italy
Full text linkAgriculture is profoundly affected by climate change, with regions like California and Italy experiencing significant challenges due to rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Climate change is expected to reduce yields of specialty crops by up to 30% due to lower productivity and crop failure. To cope with climate change, farmers need to modify production and farm management practices, especially adopting agroecological principles. This mini review explores climate change impacts on agriculture through an innovative approach that seeks to compare possible response strategies in two distant regions, California and Italy, which share similar climate conditions and crops. California's agriculture, renowned for its specialty crops like nuts, fruits, and vegetables, faces intensifying droughts, reduced snowpack, and increased potential evapotranspiration, threatening water availability and crop yields. Similarly, Italy, a Mediterranean climate change hotspot, endures higher temperatures, declining rainfall, and frequent extreme events, impacting key crops like grapes, olives, and tomatoes. Both regions see vulnerabilities compounded by climate-induced pest pressures and water scarcity. Agroecology emerges as a promising solution to mitigate these impacts by enhancing soil health, conserving water, and promoting biodiversity. Practices such as cover cropping, crop diversification, organic mulching, and precision irrigation bolster resilience. Site-specific strategies and policy support are crucial for adoption, especially in small-scale farms. Collaborative knowledge-sharing between California and Italy can foster innovative solutions, ensuring sustainable and resilient agricultural systems in the face of climate change
Nutritional characterization of Italian common bean landraces (Phaseolus vulgaris L.): Fatty acid profiles for "genotype-niche diversity" fingerprints
No full textMajor problems facing common bean production in the European Union include the significant and consistent decrease in legume consumption and the potential risk to local landraces by commercial cultivars. With the need to both increase local Phaseolus vulgaris L. ecotype production and to expand studies on potential genetic diversity impacts on nutritional components, the aim was to investigate a range of nutritional constituents in the Italian landraces, "Zolfino del Pratomagno" (Tuscany), "Fagiolo di Sarconi" (Basilicata) and "Fagiolo di Lamon (Veneto). Zolfino landraces were distinctive for significantly higher levels of amino acids, G2 protein fraction (lectin), ash, as well as total lipid and Monounsaturated Fatty Acid (MUFA) content, with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) depicting a divergence of Zolfino from the Sarconi and Lamon landraces, respectively. Fatty acid profiles were distinctive for landrace. An equivalent ratio of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA) to MUFA was evident for Zolfino. LDA showed distinctive, separate cluster groupings for the landraces, with Zolfino differentiated by the combined increased levels of oleic and palmitoleic acids, and the presence of heptadecanoic acid. The Sarconi landraces were characterized by the combined higher palmitic and linolenic acids and the absence of both myristic and tridecanoic acids, whereas the Lamon landraces were characterized by combination of higher linolenic acid, lower palmitic acid and the presence of both myristic and tridecanoic acids. The potential of expanding studies to include fatty acid profiles as possible sources of "genotype-niche diversity" fingerprints for common bean is shown to be feasible
Amylase Trypsin Inhibitors (ATIs) in a Selection of Ancient and Modern Wheat: Effect of Genotype and Growing Environment on Inhibitory Activities
Full text linkWheat amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs) are a family of plant defense proteins with an important role in human health for their involvement in allergies, celiac disease and non-celiac wheat sensitivity. Information about the differences in ATI activities among wheat genotypes and the influence of the growing environment is scarce. Therefore, ten selected wheat accessions with different ploidy level and year of release, previously characterized for their ATI gene sequences, were grown during three consecutive crop years at two growing areas and used for in vitro ATI activities. The contributions of the genotype and the crop year were significant for both activities. The hexaploid wheat genotypes showed the highest inhibitory activities. Einkorn had a peculiar behavior showing the lowest alpha-amylase inhibitory activity, but the highest trypsin inhibitory activity. It was not possible to observe any trend in ATI activities as a function of the release year of the wheat samples. The two inhibitory activities were differently affected by the growing conditions and were negatively correlated with the protein content. This information can be important in understanding the extent of variation of ATI inhibitory properties in relation to the wheat genotype and the growing environment and the impact of ATIs, if any, on human health and nutrition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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