The agricultural sector, the largest and least efficient water user, is facing important challenges in sustaining food production and careful water use. The objective of this study is to improve farm ...and irrigation district water use efficiency by developing an operational procedure for smart irrigation and optimizing the exact water use and relative water productivity. The SIM (smart irrigation monitoring and forecasting) optimization irrigation strategy, based on soil moisture (SM) and crop stress thresholds, was implemented in the Chiese (North Italy) and Capitanata (South Italy) Irrigation Consortia. The system is based on the energy–water balance model FEST-EWB (Flashflood Event-based Spatially distributed rainfall runoff Transformation Energy–Water Balance model), which was pixelwise calibrated with remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST), with mean areal absolute errors of approximately 3 °C, and then validated against local measured SM and latent heat flux (LE) with RMSE values of approximately 0.07 and 40 Wm
−2
, respectively. The effect of the optimization strategy was evaluated on the reductions in irrigation volume and on the different timing, from approximately 500 mm over the crop season in the Capitanata area to approximately 1000 mm in the Chiese district, as well as on cumulated drainage and ET fluxes. The irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE) indicator appears to be higher when applying the SIM strategy than when applying the traditional irrigation strategy: greater than 35% for the tomato fields in southern Italy and 80% for maize fields in northern Italy.
In recent years, gasification gained attention again, both as an industrial application and as a research topic. This trend has led to the necessity to understand the process and optimize reactors ...for various materials and configurations. In this article, the thermal structure of a counter-current reactor is investigated to demonstrate that constraints on the temperature mainly determine the oxidation and the pyrolysis region. A non-dimensional set of equations is written and numerically solved using the method of lines (MOL) with spatial discretization based on a spectral algorithm. The results show that four thermal structures can be identified, two of which are the most common ones found in reactors of practical applications. Two stationary operation positions have been determined, one in the upper and one in the lower part of the reactor. Existence and stability conditions have been discussed based on non-dimensional parameters. The knowledge derived from this analysis was applied to two configurations, one typical of a biomass gasifier and one proposed for waste gasification.
Improving the use of water in irrigated agriculture is meaningful in a period of increasing water scarcity conditions. A more accurate estimate of evapotranspiration (ET) and its components thus ...becomes fundamental to better quantify the irrigation water volumes. Many existing models, based on different remote sensing data, provide daily estimates of latent heat flux (LE) from correlation between net radiation and instantaneous estimates of LE, computed as residual component of the energy balance equation or from a correlation of land surface temperature (LST) with vegetation indices., However, they mainly lack of solutions which are continuous in time (e.g. hourly), independent from satellite LST availability and a simultaneous estimation of soil moisture. Addressing this gap, a double two-sources energy-water balance model (FEST‐2×2‐EWB) is developed based on the decoupling of both water and energy fluxes between the bare soil or grass interrow and the trees rows. This novel parameterization approach enables the differentiation of water uptake from the root zone, which varies between tall trees and grass, considering the dynamics of soil moisture (SM) in the superficial and deep layers. Additionally, it provides partitioned values for transpiration and evaporation. The new model has been evaluated in two irrigated trees fields in the North of Italy, a walnut trees field from 2019 to 2021 and a pear trees field, for the year 2022. Results of the study showcased a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of about 55 W m− 2 and a bias of about 40 W m− 2 for hourly latent and sensible heat fluxes when compared to the eddy covariance stations located in the fields, while a RMSE of 2 °C (bias of 1.5 °C) for LST and of 0.04 for SM. The FEST‐2×2‐EWB model significantly enhances the accuracy of ET simulation in fruits trees areas in respect to the original one source and one-layer version of the same model. Finally, the application of an irrigation optimization strategy with this new model, allowed to demonstrate its potentiality in water saving (about 90 mm in a year) in respect to farmers applied irrigation, and with a difference of about 60 mm between using the double two-sources model and single source one.
•New double two-sources energy-water balance model for fruits trees.•Time continuous estimates of evapotranspiration and soil moisture.•The double two-sources scheme outperforms the single-source and single-layer models.•Potentiality of the double two-sources model for irrigation water saving.
Neutrinos play an important role in compact star astrophysics: neutrino-heating is one of the main ingredients in core-collapse supernovae, neutrino-matter interactions determine the composition of ...matter in binary neutron star mergers and have among others a strong impact on conditions for heavy element nucleosynthesis and neutron star cooling is dominated by neutrino emission except for very old stars. Many works in the last decades have shown that in dense matter medium effects considerably change the neutrino-matter interaction rates, whereas many astrophysical simulations use analytic approximations which are often far from reproducing more complete calculations. In this work we present a scheme which allows to incorporate improved rates, for charged current interactions, into simulations and show as an example some results for core-collapse supernovae, where a noticeable difference is found in the location of the neutrinospheres of the low-energy neutrinos in the early post-bounce phase.
The Late Pleistocene/Holocene Tiber delta succession represents the most recent and one of the best preserved, high‐frequency/low‐rank depositional sequences developed along the Latium continental ...margin of the Italian peninsula. Several previous studies have established a robust data set from which it has been possible to describe the stratigraphic architecture of the entire Tiber depositional sequence from the landward to seaward sectors and over a distance of 60 km. The Tiber depositional sequence shows many characteristics found in other Late Pleistocene to Holocene deltaic and coastal successions of the Mediterranean area. The stratigraphic architecture of the Tiber depositional sequence is controlled mainly by glacioeustasy, although factors such as tectonic uplift, volcanism and subsidence, exert an influence at a local scale. The resulting depositional model allowed discussion of some important points such as: (1) the genesis of the Tiber mixed bedrock‐alluvial valley, extending from the coastal plain to the innermost portion of the shelf, recording (i) multiple episodes of incision during relative sea‐level fall, and (ii) a downstream increase of depth and width of the valley during the base‐level fall and the subsequent base‐level rise; (2) the different physical expression of the Tiber depositional sequence boundary from landward to seaward, and its diachronous and composite character; (3) the maximum depth reached by the Tiber early lowstand delta at the end of the sea‐level fall is estimated at ca 90 m below the present sea‐level and not at 120 m as suggested by previous works; (4) the backward position of the Tiber late lowstand delta relative to the deposit of early lowstand; (5) the change of the channel pattern and of the stacking pattern of fluvial deposits within the Lowstand Systems Tract, Transgressive Systems Tract and Highstand Systems Tract. All of these features indicate that the Late Pleistocene/Holocene Tiber delta succession, even if deposited in a short period of time from a geological point of view, represents the result of the close interaction among many autogenic and allogenic factors. However, global eustatic variations and sediment supply under the control of climatic changes can be considered the main factors responsible for the stratigraphic architecture of this sedimentary succession, which has been heavily modified by human activity only in the last 3000 years.
The taxonomic assemblage and functions of the plant bacterial community are strongly influenced by soil and host plant genotype. Crop breeding, especially after the massive use of nitrogen ...fertilizers which led to varieties responding better to nitrogen fertilization, has implicitly modified the ability of the plant root to recruit an effective bacterial community. Among the priorities for harnessing the plant bacterial community, plant genotype-by-microbiome interactions are stirring attention. Here, we analyzed the effect of plant variety and fertilization on the rhizosphere bacterial community. In particular, we clarified the presence in the bacterial community of a varietal effect of N and P fertilization treatment. 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequence analysis of rhizospheric soil, collected from four wheat varieties grown under four N-P fertilization regimes, and quantification of functional bacterial genes involved in the nitrogen cycle (
;
;
and
) were performed. Results showed that variety played the most important role and that treatments did not affect either bacterial community diversity or bacterial phyla abundance. Variety-specific response of rhizosphere bacterial community was detected, both in relation to taxa (Nitrospira) and metabolic functions. In particular, the changes related to amino acid and aerobic metabolism and abundance of genes involved in the nitrogen cycle (
and
), suggested that plant variety may lead to functional changes in the cycling of the plant-assimilable nitrogen.
A skull of Hippopotamus recovered from the area of Tor di Quinto, within the urban area of Rome (central Italy) is here redescribed. Despite being one of the most complete specimens of hippopotamuses ...of the European Pleistocene, the Tor di Quinto skull did not attract much research interest, due to long-standing uncertainties on its provenance. This work begun in 2021, when the skull was restored, within a large renovation project on the vertebrate exposed at the Earth Science University Museum of Sapienza University of Rome. Original sediments were found inside the cranial and mandible cavities during the restoration work, which were sampled for petrographic analyses. By combining a review of the old paleontological, archeological and geological literature published during the 19.sup.th and 20.sup.th century on the Rome basin and the correlation of these new sedimentological and petrographic information with the lithostratigraphic and synthemic units of the national geological cartography, we clarify that the Hippopotamus skull was most likely to have been collected from a quarry called Cava Montanari, from a formation dated between 560 and 460 ka. Morphological and biometric analyses clearly support an attribution of the Cava Montanari specimen to the extant species Hippopotamus amphibius. The reassessment of the stratigraphic and geological data on Cava Montanari implies that the studied specimen is the earliest confirmed occurrence of Hippopotamus amphibius in the European fossil record.
We report on the investigation of the three-dimensional single-atom-resolved distributions of bosonic Mott insulators in momentum space. First, we measure the two-body and three-body correlations ...deep in the Mott regime, finding a perfectly contrasted bunching whose periodicity reproduces the reciprocal lattice. In addition, we show that the two-body correlation length is inversely proportional to the in-trap size of the Mott state with a prefactor in agreement with the prediction for an incoherent state occupying a uniformly filled lattice. Our findings indicate that the momentum-space correlations of a Mott insulator at small tunneling are those of a many-body ground state with Gaussian statistics. Second, in the Mott insulating regime with increasing tunneling, we extract the spectral weight of the quasiparticles from the momentum-density profiles. On approaching the transition towards a superfluid, the momentum spread of the spectral weight is found to decrease as a result of the increased mobility of the quasiparticles. While the shapes of the observed spectral weight agree with those predicted by perturbative many-body calculations for homogeneous systems, the fitted mobilities are larger than the theoretical ones, mostly because of the coexistence of various phases in the trap.
The subject of this work is the mathematical modelling of a counter-current moving-bed gasifier fuelled by wood-pellets. Two versions of the model have been developed: the one-dimensional (1D) ...version-solving a set of Ordinary Differential Equations along the gasifier height-and the three-dimensional (3D) version where the balanced equations are solved using Computational Fluid Dynamics. Unique procedures have been developed to provide unconditionally stable solutions and remove difficulties occurring by using conventional numerical methods for modelling counter-current reactors.The procedures reduce the uncertainties introduced by other mathematical approaches, and they open up the possibility of straightforward application to more complex software, including commercial CFD packages. Previous models of Hobbs et al., Di Blasi and Mandl et al. used a correction factor to tune calculated temperatures to measured values. In this work, the factor is not required. Using the 1D model, the Mandl et al. 16.6 kW gasifier was scaled to 9.5 MW input; the 89% cold-gas efficiency, observed at 16.6 kW input, decreases only slightly to 84% at the 9.5 MW scale.
Flour from old varieties are usually considered very weak flours, and thus difficult to use in breadmaking especially when processed as Italian “Tipo 2” flour. Hence, the aim of our study was to ...understand if agronomic treatments can be used to improve flour processability and the quality of three old wheat varieties. An experimental strip-plot scheme was used: three old wheat varieties (Andriolo, Sieve, Verna), two seeding densities, three levels of nitrogen fertilization (N35, N80, and N135), and two levels of foliar sulfur fertilization. Analyzed parameters related to kernel composition, dough rheology and bread quality. Sulfur and nitrogen treatments significantly affected protein composition and dough alveograph strength, which increased by about 34% with nitrogen fertilization, and by about 14% with the sulfur treatment. However, only nitrogen fertilization affected bread characteristics. Crumb density significantly decreased from N35 to N135, while springiness and cohesiveness increased. On the other hand, sulfur did not improve breads. This highlight the importance of performing breadmaking tests in addition to the rheological determinations. The poor technological performance of old wheat flours can be improved with agronomical treatments designed to obtain higher-quality bread.
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