Ricerc@Sapienza

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.

This special issue features a collection of ten contributions focusing on urban remote sensing applications.

Rising of the sea level and/or heavy rainfall intensification significantly enhance the risk of flooding in low-lying coastal reclamation areas. Therefore, there is a necessity to assess whether channel hydraulic networks and pumping systems are still efficient and reliable in managing risks of flooding in such areas in the future. This study addresses these issues for the pumping system of the Mazzocchio area, which is the most depressed area within the Pontina plain, a large reclamation region in the south of Lazio (Italy).

In Italy, the summer of 2017 was characterized by serious problems related to the water crisis that affected the entire national territory. The Municipality of Formia, as well as many other territories in the Latina Province, had to face heavy rationing of the water supply during the summer, with consequent inconvenience for the population. In this paper, two spring and their relative aquifers were studied: the Mazzoccolo Spring and the Capodacqua di Spigno Spring.