Ricerc@Sapienza

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling.

The interest in the ecological role of weed communities within arable fields has increased greatly in recent years. The aim of this work was to provide an original tool for arable land naturalness estimation, based on the many features of plants that colonize crops. Taking account of taxonomic, structural, chorological and ecological features of weed taxa as exoticism, Raunkier life-form and edaphic preference, a new index (Arable Land Naturalness Index – ALNI) was developed, which allowed for an evaluation score to be obtained for a given field.

The weed vegetation of the bean “Fagiolo Cannellino di Atina” (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and the red pepper “Peperone di Pontecorvo”
(Capsicum annuum L.) PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) crops was surveyed by means of 16 relevés, sampled in four farms of
southern Latium during July 2019. The relevés were subjected to multivariate analysis, which revealed that the two crops are weeded
by vegetation types referable to two different subassociations of Panico-Polygonetum persicariae (Spergulo-Erodion, Eragrostietalia,

A fungal collection has been recently established at the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology (SPST), Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. The collection is mainly based on strains of filamentous fungi preserved under water or mineral oil and by cryoconservation, but also includes some yeasts and bacteria of particular interest for human health. The strains are also kept as actively growing cultures on special low nutrient agar.

An enormous number of measures based on different criteria have been proposed to quantify evenness or unevenness among species relative abundances in an assemblage. However, a unified approach that can encompass most of the widely used indices is still lacking. Here, we first present some basic requirements for an evenness measure.

Understanding biodiversity changes in time is crucial to promptly provide management practices against diversity loss. This is overall true when considering global scales, since human-induced global change is expected to make significant changes on the Earth's biota. Biodiversity management and planning is mainly based on field observations related to community diversity, considering different taxa. However, such methods are time and cost demanding and do not allow in most cases to get temporal replicates.

Forests cover about 30% of the Earth surface, they are among the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems and represent the bulk of many ecological processes and services. The assessment of biodiversity is an important and essential goal to achieve but it can results difficult, time consuming and expensive when based on field data. Remote sensing covers large areas and provides consistent quality and standardized data, which can be used to estimate species diversity.

Measures of phylogenetic diversity have two main objectives: first disentangling the processes that drive species assemblages and second defining priorities of conservation while considering how much each species might contribute to biodiversity. A now widely used approach for measuring phylogenetic diversity consists in summing branch lengths on phylogenetic trees.

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is the leading cause of bronchiolitis, and the severity may be influenced by the bacterial ecosystem. Our aim was to analyze the nasal microbiota from 48 infants affected by bronchiolitis from RSV virus and 28 infants with bronchiolitis but negative for the virus.