1,720,999 research outputs found
I piccoli invasi collinari: una risorsa e un problema per il territorio agro-forestale.
No full textI piccoli invasi rappresentano una risorsa d'acqua, soprattutto nella pratica irrigua, ampiamente diffusa, che ha stimolato nuovamente l'attenzione di molti soggetti coinvolti nella gestione della risorsa idrica alla luce dei sempre più frequenti periodi estivi siccitosi.
In considerazione delle piccole dimensioni sono estremamente diffusi sul territorio, spesso però non si hanno dati certi sulla loro potenzialità in termini di volumi invasati e quindi disponibili per l'utilizzo. Nella bibliografia recente sono presenti studi che descrivono approcci innovativi per la stima del volume invasato, che si basano essenzialmente su tecniche di remote sensing e GIS (Rodrigues et al., 2012; Sawunyama et al., 2006). Per lo stesso motivo legato alla numerosità, di frequente non è semplice valutare il loro effetto in termini di efficacia sulla gestione della risorsa idrica (Venot & Krishnan, 2011; Wisser et al., 2010), ma anche di impatto sul territorio (Habets et al., 2014).
La situazione in Italia è fotografata nell'Annuario dei Dati Ambientali, Edizione 2016 (ISPRA, 2016), in cui si stima, all'anno 1998, in 8288 il numero degli invasi con altezza della diga inferiore o uguale a 15 m e volume di invaso fino a 106 m3. Tale stima è stata poi aggiornata nell'anno 2015 in 6333 invasi, con un dato conseguente ad un censimento regionale dove tuttavia molte regioni non hanno fornito dati attendibili. Il Comitato Italiano Grandi Dighe, sulla base dei dati di un censimento da satellite eseguito nel 1988 e dei corrispondenti dati ottenuti da un censimento parziale condotto a livello regionale nel 2010, stima un incremento nel numero dei piccoli invasi del 60% nel periodo esaminato. Estrapolando tale dato su tutte le regioni, si ipotizza un possibile numero complessivo di 12.000÷14.000 piccoli invasi presenti attualmente sul territorio nazionale (ITCOLD, 2017).
Alla luce di queste incertezze, nel presente studio è stato condotto un approfondimento della situazione dei piccoli invasi nella Regione Umbria sulla base di un database regionale, che è stato analizzato e georeferenziato su mappa. Tale operazione ha permesso di evidenziare la densità degli invasi sul territorio, inoltre i dati sui volumi di invaso complessivi sui sottobacini sono stati interfacciati con i corrispondenti dati delle concessioni al prelievo irriguo, con la possibilità di confrontare i valori totali e valutare il contributo effettivo o potenziale dei piccoli invasi
Open source WEB applications for spatial data management and for water resource analysis
No full textMany problems of water resource management are strongly related to their spatial distribution and due to a use that is usually uncontrolled, such as water withdrawals. For these reasons, web procedures have been developed in order to manage spatial data of interest and to analyze information on water resources, so that this tool can be widely used and shared freely and easily by all stakeholders.
A prototype of this instrument is the web tool "Water Resources Management and Evaluation" (WRME). The main features of this project can be summarized as follows:
- is easy to use, both for the database like and the map-based consultation;
- uses synthetic indicators simplifying the hydrological and hydraulic information;
- integrates tools for the update and the exchange of data between different databases of different stakeholders;
- integrates the possibility to implement and update, in a distributed manner over the basin and the drainage network, all constraints arising from the different legislations and management plans;
- provides synthetic information on the sustainability of scenarios;
- provides synthetic information on the sustainability of new water withdrawals;
- software is open source, therefore economic resources can be invested on training and development.
The methodology of this project can also be applied in other areas of sustainable management of environmental resources
Innovative technologies for transparent building envelopes: experimental assessment of energy and thermal comfort data to facilitate the decision-making process
No full textIn the last years, energy use for building heating, cooling, lighting and ventilation still accounts for more than one third of the total, primary energy demand in the industrialized countries. In this context, the Directive 2010/31/EU EPBD recast was developed, with the purpose of reducing the EU energy consumption, improving the exploitation of renewables and reducing the greenhouse gas emission. In this perspective, the building envelope system needs to be improved. A number of
innovative technologies have been developed but they need to penetrate the market moving from
being prototypes and samples in laboratory to be available and usable technologies.
In this work it is presented a research aimed at facilitating the decisions making process during the
design phase related to building transparent envelopesIndeed, within the national project called
"Bâtiville", a configurator library has been conceived to optimize the choice of envelope
components to design new near-zero energy districts.
The research started with a state of the art and a market survey of some recent innovative solutions
for fenestration. Therefore, some of them have been analysed in-field and in test cells: PCM material to improve the poor thermal inertia of the glass and self-switchable technologies such as thermotropic. Experiments were carried out by means of a test cell located on the roof and exposed
to real boundary condition in order to continuously monitor the thermal behaviour of the transparent prototypes during different seasons. Results concerning the thermal and energy performance of the different technologies have been used to implement the library of the design configurator and they are presented in this work. Some criticism is underlined when dealing with highly dynamic transparent technologies, due to the fact that it is not possible to characterize their behaviour with conventional synthetic parameters. This difficulty was met particularly for the glazing with PCM and the thermotropic glazing.
A new methodology for the design phase is proposed to simplify and optimize the designers' choice among innovative envelope technologies, besides encourage their spread. The experimental results of innovative transparent glazing are presented and discussed, showing promising performances of the innovative technologies analysed
Prediction of subcellular localization in eukaryotes at the basis of large scale genome annotation
No full textIn this work we present an integrated platform for large-scale eukaryotic genome annotation based on the prediction of subcellular localization, GPI-anchor prediction and membrane protein discrimination into inner and outer classes.
Large scale proteomic projects have determined a huge number of aminoacidic sequences whose functions are, in the largest part, still unknown. In eukaryotes compartmentalization plays a major role in intracellular biochemical pathways. However the determination of subcellular localization with experimental high-throughput procedures is a difficult task and computational procedures are needed.
We developed BaCelLo (1), a predictor for five classes of subcellular localizations (secretory pathway, cytoplasm, nucleus, mitochondrion and chloroplast) that is based on different SVMs organized in a decision tree. The system exploits the information derived from the aminoacidic sequence and from the evolutionary information contained in alignment profiles. It analyzes the whole sequence composition and the compositions of both the N- and C-termini. The training set is curated in order to avoid redundancy. For
the first time a balancing procedure is introduced in order to mitigate the effect of biased training sets.
Three kingdom-specific predictors are implemented: for animals, plants and fungi, respectively. When distributing the proteins from animals and fungi into four classes, accuracy of BaCelLo reach 74% and 76%, respectively; a score of 67% is obtained when proteins from plants are distributed into five classes.
BaCelLo outperforms the other presently available methods for the same task and gives more balanced accuracy and coverage values for each class. BaCelLo is also described in Nature Protocols, in the Bioinformatics section (2) BaCelLo can be accessed at http://www.biocomp.unibo.it/bacello/.
BaCelLo is currently under integration in a workflow which will allow GO functional integration, prediction of GPI-anchors and discrimination between inner and outer membrane proteins. The workflow will be tested on large-scale genome annotation.
With a suite of machine learning based methods, developed in house (BaCelLo, SpepLip (3) and ENSEMBLE (4)), we presently built eSLDB (eukaryotic Subcellular Localization DataBase) (5) an online database collecting the annotations of subcellular localization of eukaryotic proteomes. So far five proteomes have been processed and stored: Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Caenorhabditis elegans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Arabidospis thaliana. For each sequence, the database lists localization
obtained adopting three different approaches: 1) experimentally determined (when available); 2) homology based (when possible); 3) predicted. All the data are available at the website and can be searched by sequence, by protein code and/or by protein description.
Furthermore a more complex search can be performed combining different search fields and keys. All the data contained in the database can be freely downloaded in flat file format. The Database is available at: http://gpcr.biocomp.unibo.it/esldb/
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
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