Ricerc@Sapienza

La Necropoli di Monterozzi a Tarquinia (VT), con le tombe ipogee dipinte del VII-II sec. a.C., rappresenta una eccezionale testimonianza della vita e dei costumi del popolo etrusco. Nel corso dell’anno 2017, in alcune tombe del confine Nord della necropoli si sono manifestate evidenti lesioni. In seguito alla richiesta della Soprintendenza competente, l’ISPRA (Dip. per il Servizio Geologico d’Italia) e l’Università di Bologna (DICAM) hanno avviato uno studio delle condizioni di stabilità delle tombe più a rischio.

Human pressure on the environment is driving a global decline of biodiversity. Anticipating whether this trend can be reverted under future scenarios is key to supporting policy decisions. We used the InSiGHTS framework to model the impacts of land-use and climate change on future habitat availability for 2,827 terrestrial mammals at 15 arcmin resolution under five contrasting global scenarios based on combinations of representative concentration pathways and shared socio-economic pathways between 2015 and 2050. Mammal habitat declined globally by 5%–16% depending on the scenario.

In the Ross Sea, biodiversity organisation is strongly influenced by sea-ice cover, which is characterised by marked spatio-temporal variations. Expected changes in seasonal sea-ice dynamics will be reflected in food web architecture, providing a unique opportunity to study effects of climate change. Based on individual stable isotope analyses and the high taxonomic resolution of sampled specimens, we described benthic food webs in contrasting conditions of seasonal sea-ice persistence (early vs. late sea-ice break up) in medium-depth waters in Terra Nova Bay (Ross Sea).

Italy is among the European countries with the greatest plant diversity due to both a great environmental heterogeneity and a long history of man–environment interactions. Trait-based approaches to ecological studies have developed greatly over recent decades worldwide, although several issues concerning the relationships between plant functional traits and the environment still lack sufficient empirical evaluation.

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.

Forests in the Mediterranean region have been subject to environmental changes since time immemorial. The region’s geography and location has made it a conducive environment between biomes, resulting in significant biodiversity. Since the beginning of human history, forests have adapted to pressures caused by human development, resulting in a complex socio-ecological balance. These pressures, however, have never been more extreme than they are today.

Across the 28 EU member states there were nearly half a million premature deaths in 2015 as a result of exposure to PM2.5, O3 and NO2. To set the target for air quality levels and avoid negative impacts for human and ecosystems health, the National Emission Ceilings Directive (NECD, 2016/2284/EU) sets objectives for emission reduction for SO2, NOx, NMVOCs, NH3 and PM2.5 for each Member State as percentages of reduction to be reached in 2020 and 2030 compared to the emission levels into 2005.

Leaf functional traits and their relationships can differ between leaf flushes, particularly for species characterized by an extended growing season such as Mediterranean ones. Among them, Cistus spp. are generally reported to display two different leaf cohorts (i.e. summer and winter leaves) during the same growing season. We tested the generality of such leaf cohort classification by analyzing the diachronic adjustments of relationships between different leaf functional traits in 3 Cistus spp.

Climate change significantly modifies terrestrial ecosystems and vegetation activity, yet little is known about how climate change and ozone pollution interact to affect forest health. Here we compared the trends of two metrics widely used to protect forests against negative impacts of ozone pollution, the AOT40 (Accumulated Ozone over Threshold of 40 ppb) which only depends on surface air ozone concentrations, and the POD (Phytotoxic Ozone Dose) which relies on the amount of ozone uptaken by plants through stomata.

This paper collects design experiments elaborated in research and teaching activities developed on case studies in Sudan, Italy and Puerto Rico. They propose comparable design solutions for different conditions with respect to scale, geography and climate. At least, they try to define design methodologies useful in other design contexts with similar economic conditions. This paper represent a preliminary reflection which deserves further and more extended analysis.