Carbon and Biodiversity Policies Martins Pacheco, Renata
U.Porto Journal of Engineering,
07/2022, Letnik:
8, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Wildfires are a concern in many European countries, and they might occur more frequently given climate change. Carbon sequestration is an ecosystem service provided by forests that is affected by ...fires and is neglected in traditional markets. Recently, the European Union (EU) has created environmental policies that address climate change, wildfires, and biodiversity conservation through payment for ecosystem services schemes. This study aims to estimate the monetary carbon savings of avoiding wildfires in five Mediterranean countries using historical wildfire emissions data and the auction prices in the EU Carbon Market. Portugal is further studied since the country has a new ecosystem services payment policy. The results indicate that, by avoiding fires, the countries could have annual benefits in the order of millions of euros. For Portugal, the value of the policy incentive is inferior to the value of the carbon sequestration service provided by avoiding fires and could be reexamined.
Germ cell tumors (GCTs) comprise a rare and heterogeneous group of neoplasms presenting different clinical and histological characteristics, leading to a challenging scenario in clinical practice. ...Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has been suggested as an indirect marker of tumor density and cellularity and could be used to monitor therapeutic response. However, its role in pediatric GCTs needs to be clarified. Here, we evaluated the features of DWI in pediatric extracranial GCTs in a reference Brazilian institution. We included 43 pediatric patients with primary GCTs treated between 2008 and 2022 in Hospital de Amor de Barretos. The patients' MRI images included T1-weighted without contrast, T2-weighted, DWI and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps. DWI was evaluated in the section that exhibited the greatest restricted diffusion in the largest hypersignal area of the image. The lowest ADC value was determined to define the region of interest (ROI). We used a small ROI, avoiding necrotic, adipose tissue, noisy or nonenhancing lesion voxels as recommended. ROI determination was established by visual inspection by two radiologists in accordance. We used two values of b (b = 50 mm.sup.2 /s or b = 800) for ADC values. The highest mean ADC (mADC) value was observed in pure teratomas (1,403.50 ± 161.76 x10.sup.-3 mm.sup.2 /s; mean ± SD) compared to other histologies (yolk sac, mixed teratoma, dysgerminoma and mixed GCT) of GCT (p<0.001). Furthermore, ROC analysis determined a cutoff mADC value of 1,179.00 x 10.sup.-3 mm.sup.2 /s that differentiated pure teratomas from the other GCT histologies with a sensitivity of 95.8% and a specificity of 92.9% (AUC = 0.979; p<0.01). A significant increase in mADC was observed for malignant GCTs in treatment (1,197.00 ± 372.00 mm.sup.2 /s; p<0.001) compared to that exhibited at the time of diagnosis (780.00 ± 168.00 mm.sup.2 /s; mean ± SD. Our findings suggest that mADC assessment could be used as a tool to distinguish pure teratomas from malignant CGT histologies at diagnosis. Additionally, we demonstrated reasonable evidence that it could be used as a complementary tool to monitor treatment response in patients with malignant GCT.
Otolith shape is widely used as a taxonomic feature in fish systematics. In Siluriformes, the lapillus otolith is the most relevant character for taxonomic purposes, although its discriminant ...potential has not been assessed quantitatively. Our study model were sea catfishes of the family Ariidae from the north‐eastern Pacific as representatives of Siluriformes, a taxon with increased taxonomic complexity. The lapillus otolith shape obtained by geometric morphometrics showed high discrimination potential both at the genus and species levels with an overall classification accuracy of c. 93% (K = 0.92). Due to the strong species delimitation exhibited by lapillus otolith shape, the descriptions and identification keys provided here are the most useful materials to recognize the eight sea catfish species evaluated. The shared similarities in lapillus otolith shape among species seem to be more influenced by phylogenetic relationships than other factors such as habitat. The lapillus otolith shape is the most powerful taxonomic feature discovered so far for the identification of sea catfishes from the north‐eastern Pacific.
Landslide occurrence has become increasingly influenced by human activities. Accordingly, changing land use and land cover (LULC) is an important conditioning factor in landslide susceptibility ...models. We present a bibliometric analysis and review of how LULC was explored in the context of landslide susceptibility in 536 scientific articles from 2001 to 2020. The pattern of publications and citations reveals that most articles hardly focus on the relationship between LULC and landslides despite a growing interest in this topic. Most research outputs came from Asian countries (some of which are frequently affected by landslides), and mostly with prominent international collaboration. We recognised three major research themes regarding the characteristics of LULC data, different simulated scenarios of LULC changes, and the role of future scenarios for both LULC and landslide susceptibility. The most frequently studied LULC classes included roads, soils (in the broadest sense), and forests, often to approximate the negative impacts of expanding infrastructure, deforestation, or major land use changes involving agricultural practice. We highlight several articles concerned primarily with current practice and future scenarios of changing land use in the context of landslides. The relevance of LULC in landslide susceptibility analysis is growing slowly, though with much potential to be explored for future LULC scenario analysis and to close gaps in many study areas.
Abstract We aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of traditional clinical predictors in osteosarcoma through an international collaboration of 10 teams of investigators (2680 patients) who ...participated. In multivariate models the mortality risk increased with older age, presence of metastatic disease at diagnosis, development of local recurrence when the patient was first seen, use of amputation instead of limb salvage/wide resection, employment of unusual treatments, use of chemotherapeutic regimens other than anthracycline and platinum and use of methotrexate. It was also influenced by the site of the tumour. The risk of metastasis increased when metastatic disease was present at the time the patient was first seen and also increased with use of amputation or unusual treatment combinations or chemotherapy regimens not including anthracycline and platinum. Local recurrence risk was higher in older patients, in those who had local recurrence when first seen and when no anthracycline and platinum were used in chemotherapy. Results were similar when limited to patients seen after 1990 and treated with surgery plus combination chemotherapy. This large-scale international collaboration identifies strong predictors of major clinical outcomes in osteosarcoma.
Gully erosion is one of the main natural hazards, especially in arid and semi-arid regions, destroying ecosystem service and human well-being. Thus, gully erosion susceptibility maps (GESM) are ...urgently needed for identifying priority areas on which appropriate measurements should be considered. Here, we proposed four new hybrid Machine learning models, namely weight of evidence -Multilayer Perceptron (MLP- WoE), weight of evidence –K Nearest neighbours (KNN- WoE), weight of evidence - Logistic regression (LR- WoE), and weight of evidence - Random Forest (RF- WoE), for mapping gully erosion exploring the opportunities of GIS tools and Remote sensing techniques in the El Ouaar watershed located in the Souss plain in Morocco. Inputs of the developed models are composed of the dependent (i.e., gully erosion points) and a set of independent variables. In this study, a total of 314 gully erosion points were randomly split into 70% for the training stage (220 gullies) and 30% for the validation stage (94 gullies) sets were identified in the study area. 12 conditioning variables including elevation, slope, plane curvature, rainfall, distance to road, distance to stream, distance to fault, TWI, lithology, NDVI, and LU/LC were used based on their importance for gully erosion susceptibility mapping. We evaluate the performance of the above models based on the following statistical metrics: Accuracy, precision, and Area under curve (AUC) values of receiver operating characteristics (ROC). The results indicate the RF- WoE model showed good accuracy with (AUC = 0.8), followed by KNN-WoE (AUC = 0.796), then MLP-WoE (AUC = 0.729) and LR-WoE (AUC = 0.655), respectively. Gully erosion susceptibility maps provide information and valuable tool for decision-makers and planners to identify areas where urgent and appropriate interventions should be applied.
In recent years the focus in ecology has shifted from species to a greater emphasis on functional traits. In tandem with this shift, a number of trait databases have been developed covering a range ...of taxa. Here, we introduce the GlobalAnts database.
Globally, ants are dominant, diverse and provide a range of ecosystem functions. The database represents a significant tool for ecology in that it (i) contributes to a global archive of ant traits (morphology, ecology and life history) which complements existing ant databases and (ii) promotes a trait‐based approach in ant and other insect ecology through a broad set of standardised traits.
The GlobalAnts database is unique in that it represents the largest online database of functional traits with associated georeferenced assemblage‐level data (abundance and/or occupancy) for any animal group with 9056 ant species and morphospecies records for entire local assemblages across 4416 sites.
We describe the structure of the database, types of traits included and present a summary of data coverage. The value of the database is demonstrated through an initial examination of trait distributions across subfamilies, continents and biomes.
Striking biogeographic differences in ant traits are highlighted which raise intriguing questions as to the mechanisms generating them.
Enquadramento: A perceção dos idosos acerca da sua qualidade de vida (QdV) é decorrente de uma multiplicidade de fatores, podendo ser avaliada através de escalas genéricas e/ou específicas. ...Objetivos: Avaliar a QdV de uma amostra de idosos não institucionalizados e analisar a sua relação com variáveis sociodemográficas e clínicas. Metodologia: Estudo descritivo-correlacional, transversal, de cariz quantitativo. Obteve-se uma amostra de 250 idosos. Aplicou-se um instrumento de recolha de dados que integrava duas escalas que avaliavam a QdV, uma genérica (EUROHIS-QOL-8) e outra específica para a população idosa (WHOQOL-OLD). Resultados: Ambas as escalas, numa classificação 0-100, revelaram, para o global, um índice médio de QdV acima do ponto médio (67,19 ±17,95 na EUROHIS-QOL-8 e 67,49±15,46 na WHOQOL-OLD). Revelaram ainda diferenças estatisticamente significativas da perceção da QdV com o sexo, escolaridade e estado civil. A WHOQOL-OLD não revelou a existência de diferenças estatisticamente significativas em função da variável “presença ou não de patologias”, contrariamente à EUROHIS-QOL-8. Conclusão: A perceção da QdV dos idosos estava associada às variáveis: sexo, escolaridade e estado civil.
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