Ricerc@Sapienza

Landscapes are becoming increasingly urbanized, causing loss and fragmentation of natural habitats, with potentially negative effects on biodiversity. Insects are among the organisms with the largest diversity in urbanized environments. Here, we sampled predator (Ampulicidae, Sphecidae and Crabronidae) and parasitoid (Tachinidae) flower-visiting insects in 36 sites in the city of Rome (Italy).

Plants grow in communities where they interact with other plants and with other living organisms such as pollinators. On the one hand, studies of plant-plant interactions rarely consider how plants interact with other trophic levels such as pollinators. On the other, studies of plant-animal interactions rarely deal with interactions within trophic levels such as plant-plant competition and facilitation. Thus, to what degree plant interactions affect biodiversity and ecological networks across trophic levels is poorly understood.

Targets for human development are increasingly connected with targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.

It is well established that different factors affect milk composition in cows and that milk composition, in turn, affect both technological and nutritional qualities. In this respect the comprehension of the metabolic variability of milk composition in relation to the lactation time as well as to the genetic background may be of paramount importance for the agri-food industries. In the present study we investigated the variations of the metabolic profiles during lactation in milks obtained from Friesian and autochthonous races from Northern Italy by 1H NMR metabolomics.

Recently, the Albanian Government started the process to join the European Union. This process also involves matching the EU parameters in protecting its biodiversity. In order to support the Albanian authorities, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, General Directorate for Development Cooperation (DGCS) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) joined efforts in the project “Institutional Support to the Albanian Ministry of Environment, Forest and Water Administration for Sustainable Biodiversity Conservation and Use in Protected Areas”.

Aims Vegetation-plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level.

A central issue in ecology is understanding how complex and biodiverse food webs persist in the face of disturbance, and which structural properties affect disturbance propagation among species. However, our comprehension of assemblage mechanisms and disturbance propagation in food webs is limited by the multitude of stressors affecting ecosystems, impairing ecosystem management.

Beta-diversity has been repeatedly shown to decline with increasing elevation, but the causes of this pattern remain unclear, partly because they are confounded by coincident variation in alpha- and gamma-diversity. We used 8795 forest vegetation-plot records from the Czech National Phytosociological Database to compare the observed patterns of beta diversity to null-model expectations (beta-deviation) controlling for the effects of alpha- and gamma-diversity.

Aim: Biodiversity monitoring and conservation are extremely complex, and surrogate taxa may represent proxies to test methods and solutions. However, cross-taxon correlations in species diversity (i.e., cross-taxon congruence) may vary widely with spatial scale. Our goal is to assess how cross-taxon congruence varies with spatial scale in European temperate forests. We expect that congruence in species diversity increases when shifting from fine to coarse spatial scales, with differences between species richness and composition, and across pairs of taxonomic groups.

Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic scales. However, it remains unclear whether this holds at the scales relevant for management, and particularly large knowledge gaps exist for temperate forests and for taxa other than trees.