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PREVENZIONE DELLA CONTAMINAZIONE DEI SUOLI ATTRAVERSO L’IMPIEGO DI OLI ESSENZIALI COME ALTERNATIVA AD ERBICIDI E ANTIPARASSITARI - VALUTAZIONE DELLA SOSTENIBILITA’ DEGLI OLI ESSENZIALI SULLA NEMATOFAUNA A VITA LIBERA
No full textIntensive agriculture has over-exploited natural resources and altered soil system functions, primarily due to the excessive use of phytochemical products designed to ensure highquality and high-yield crop production. To promote more sustainable practices, new European guidelines aim to reduce pesticide usage by 50%. Natural products, such as essential oils (EOs), are considered promising green alternatives and are assumed to pose a low risk to the environment. However, before their widespread application, it is essential to evaluate their potential effects on suitable bioindicator organisms, such as nematodes. For this purpose, in a first step, the state of the art, current trends and future directions in
the application of the EOs in agriculture have been investigated using the software VOSviewer. The software allowed us to select the most used EOs in crop protection and underlined that the main current scientific research focus is on plant-parasitic nematodes (PPNs) or, to a lesser extent, on model organisms. Therefore, it has been clearly emerged the need for broader-scale investigations to evaluate their eco-friendly nature. For this
reason, a field study was conducted to evaluate the impact of EOs on the taxonomic and functional structure of nematode communities. Specifically, the experiment was carried out on chickpea crops from an organic farm and aimed to assess the potential influence of one
of the most promising EOs, basil on free-living nematodes, thereby providing evidence of EOs’ contribution to preserving biodiversity and natural capital. Chickpea crops are often exposed to various biotic stresses, among which Fusarium wilt causes significant yield losses. Literature data suggest that coating chickpea seeds with basil EO can reduce Fusarium fungal infections. The seed coating has been obtained using chitosan (CHI), a natural, non-toxic, and edible polymer derived from the deacetylation of chitin, which is widely used in combination with EOs to reduce their high volatility and form a protective coating on seeds. The experiment was performed according to a BACI (BeforeAfter-Control-Impact) strategy that permits to distinguish the biological community changes related to differences in time elapsed or space vs. the changes caused by an environmental disturbance. The results obtained in this survey demonstrated that basil EO and chitosan seed coatings had no significant negative impact on nematode taxonomic diversity or functional indices. Additionally, the taxonomic community structure, considered one of the most sensitive detection metrics, revealed that observed effects were predominantly influenced by temporal changes, likely reflecting the natural progression of the crop system rather than the EO treatment itself. These findings are particularly promising, as they suggest that EO basil-based coating can preserve soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning providing a new potential green alternative for crop protection
Essential Oils as Nematicides in Plant Protection—A Review
Get PDFBy 2030, the European Commission intends to halve chemical pesticide use and its consequent risks. Among pesticides, nematicides are chemical agents used to control parasitic roundworms in agriculture. In recent decades, researchers have been looking for more sustainable alternatives with the same effectiveness but a limited impact on the environment and ecosystems. Essential oils (EOs) are similar bioactive compounds and potential substitutes. Different studies on the use of EOs as nematicides are available in the Scopus database in the scientific literature. These works show a wider exploration of EO effects in vitro than in vivo on different nematode populations. Nevertheless, a review of which EOs have been used on different target nematodes, and how, is still not available. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent of EO testing on nematodes and which of them have nematicidal effects (e.g., mortality, effects on motility, inhibition of egg production). Particularly, the review aims to identify which EOs have been used the most, on which nematodes, and which formulations have been applied. This study provides an overview of the available reports and data to date, downloaded from Scopus, through (a) network maps created by VOSviewer software (version 1.6.8, Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman, Leiden, The Netherlands) and (b) a systematic analysis of all scientific papers. VOSviewer created maps with keywords derived from co-occurrence analysis to understand the main keywords used and the countries and journals which have published most on the topic, while the systematic analysis investigated all the documents downloaded. The main goal is to offer a comprehensive understanding of the potential use of EOs in agriculture as well as which directions future research should move toward
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
Analisi della letteratura scientifica sui nematodi a vita libera in ambienti terrestri, marini e di acqua dolce
No full textSi stima che i nematodi rappresentino circa il 90% di tutti i metazoi del nostro pianeta, e sono dominanti per biomassa e abbondanza sia negli ambienti terrestri che in quelli acquatici (marini e d'acqua dolce). Sebbene i nematodi parassiti destino un maggior interesse negli studiosi, in quanto sono in grado di interferire con la salute umana, l'allevamento e le colture, tuttavia, quelli a vita libera costituiscono una comunità altamente diversificata anche da un punto di vista trofico. Questi organismi contribuiscono a fornire importanti servizi ecosistemici partecipando a molteplici processi sedimentari ed ecologici. Per comprendere meglio come si è evoluto lo studio dei nematodi a vita libera in ambienti terrestri, marini e di acqua dolce, è stata eseguita un'analisi bibliometrica sulla letteratura scientifica utilizzando il software VOSviewer. L'analisi della tendenza temporale delle pubblicazioni, la co-authorship (tra ricercatori e paesi) e la co-occurrence di parole chiave mostrano una crescente attenzione al tema in tutto il mondo, in particolare per quanto riguarda gli effetti dell'inquinamento. Tuttavia i nematodi a vita libera rimangono relativamente poco studiati, come si può notare dall’analisi delle citazioni delle riviste, nonostante la loro importanza ecologica e la loro potenzialità come indicatori biologici
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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