Ricerc@Sapienza

Melittio-Quercion frainetto and Melittio-Quercion confertae are two alliances, which were proposed
about simultaneously 40 years ago through two different papers regarding southern Italy and southern
Greece, respectively. The aims of this paper are to establish valid name, nomenclatural type and distribution
range of these two alliances and to verify whether they display a sufficient degree of syntaxonomic
autonomy when compared to the ecologically and geographically neighbouring alliances. A

To support the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models is carrying out an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized scenarios (BES-SIM).

In this study, we compare two community modelling approaches to determine their ability to predict the taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic properties of plant assemblages along a broad elevation gradient and at a fine resolution. The first method is the standard stacking individual species distribution modelling (SSDM) approach, which applies a simple environmental filter to predict species assemblages. The second method couples the SSDM and macroecological modelling (MEM—SSDM‐MEM) approaches to impose a limit on the number of species co‐occurring at each site.

The estimation of aboveground biomass is commonly recognized for global relevance because of the vegetation role in the carbon cycle. Both active and passive microwave sensors can significantly contribute to this goal because of their high sensitivity to water content and high penetration at lower frequencies (L-/P-bands).

This paper compares changes in vegetation structure and composition (using synthetic fossil pollen data) with proxy data for population levels (including settlements and radiocarbon dates) over the course of the last 10 millennia in Tyrrhenian central Italy. These data show generalised patterns of clearance of woodland in response both to early agriculturalists and urbanism, as well as the specific adoption of tree crops and variations in stock grazing.

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.

Climatic and environmental changes of the Middle Pleistocene in Europe provide the context for an important phase in the evolution and dispersal of early hominins. Pollen records from terrestrial and marine sediment sequences reveal patterns not usually visible in palaeoenvironmental reconstructions from archaeological sites alone and show that hominin evolution took place against a background of marked environmental change as forests expanded and contracted in concert with global and regional climatic shifts.