Suchergebnisse

Most countries of Mediterranean Europe are strongly affected by forest fires, with major socio-economic and environmental impacts that can spread over several regions and countries. A transnational approach allows creating synergies regarding resource sharing and problem-solving strategies. The access to high quality and up-to-date information is critical to improve fire hazard mitigation measures and promote comparable appraisals between different regions. Several collaborative initiatives have been implemented in Europe to foster research and service development, focusing on common issues amongst countries. The PREFER project was one of these initiatives, with the purpose of contributing to protect human communities and forests from fire hazard, by providing cartographic products through the implementation of a new systematic framework. The participation of end users, such as civil protection organizations and forest services, covering the Euro-Mediterranean region, was crucial to ensure the operational application of the mapping products. Fuel classification, daily fire hazard indices, vulnerability assessment and damage severity levels were some of the mapping applications developed for several test areas in Mediterranean Europe. This chapter illustrates the potential enhancements for forest fire management offered by this framework, bearing in mind the benefits of applying shared and harmonized approaches for common issues.

Abstract
Background
Antibiotics used to treat livestock species enter agricultural fields when they are excreted by grazing animals or are present in manure that is added to fields as fertiliser. In the European Union, the potential effects of such antibiotics on terrestrial plants must be evaluated following the standardised OECD 208 method, which specifies the crop and wild species that should serve as "sentinels" for assessing antibiotic exposure. The present study aimed to compare this approved list of sentinel species against crop and wild plant species actually present in agricultural and pasture lands in Mediterranean Europe in order to identify the most appropriate sentinel plants for the region. The study focused on Spain as a region representative of Mediterranean Europe. Georeferenced layers for wild plant species and cultivated areas (crops), livestock density and land cover were combined, and then selection criteria were applied, leading to the identification of sentinel crop and wild species for crop land and pasture scenarios.

Results
In the crop land scenario, the sentinel crop species were barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), wheat (Triticum spp.), corn (Zea mays L), sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), dried pea (Pisum sativum L.), alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), vetch (Vicia sativa L.), oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) and sugar beet (Saccharum officinarum L.), all of them listed in the OECD 208 method with the exception of alfalfa; the sentinel wild species were Papaver rhoeas L., Galium aparine L. and Chenopodium album L. In the pasture scenario, sentinel wild species were Bromus tectorum L., Agrostis capillaris L., Trifolium pratense L., Lotus corniculatus L. and Galium aparine L. The following common weed species in field boundaries or in pasture lands also emerged as potential sentinel species for risk assessment, even though they are not listed in the OECD 208 method: Sonchus oleraceus L., Avena sterilis L., Dactylis glomerata L., Hordeum murinum L. and Lolium rigidum Gaudin.

Conclusions
The sentinel species identified in this study may be useful in risk assessment procedures covering the Mediterranean Europe. The method developed for this study could be applied to identify sentinel species for other representative agroclimatic regions in Europe (such as Atlantic and Continental).

The climate crisis in Mediterranean Europe: cross-border and multidisciplinary issues on climate change" collects 8 original essays by different authors concerning socio-environmental issues related to climate change in a historical border area of Southern Europe. This volume, fostering the current scientific debate on the consequences of climate change, becomes a valuable element for its better understanding from a multidisciplinary perspective, as it shows several studies both theoretical and empirical on different topics: contaminant emissions, social and population dynamics across borders, education and perception of climate change by teenagers, the diffusion of alien vegetation in European ecosystems, and current models of natural and agrarian management. These topics put forward the facets of a complex multiscale process, which requires a necessary discussion between different scientific, political and social stakeholders. We need now to achieve a better collective awareness about the vulnerabilities arising and threatened by climate change in the Mediterranean Basin. ; open

16 Pág. ; Background: Antibiotics used to treat livestock species enter agricultural fields when they are excreted by grazing animals or are present in manure that is added to fields as fertiliser. In the European Union, the potential effects of such antibiotics on terrestrial plants must be evaluated following the standardised OECD 208 method, which specifies the crop and wild species that should serve as "sentinels" for assessing antibiotic exposure. The present study aimed to compare this approved list of sentinel species against crop and wild plant species actually present in agricultural and pasture lands in Mediterranean Europe in order to identify the most appropriate sentinel plants for the region. The study focused on Spain as a region representative of Mediterranean Europe. Georeferenced layers for wild plant species and cultivated areas (crops), livestock density and land cover were combined, and then selection criteria were applied, leading to the identification of sentinel crop and wild species for crop land and pasture scenarios. Results: In the crop land scenario, the sentinel crop species were barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), wheat (Triticum spp.), corn (Zea mays L), sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), dried pea (Pisum sativum L.), alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), vetch (Vicia sativa L.), oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) and sugar beet (Saccharum officinarum L.), all of them listed in the OECD 208 method with the exception of alfalfa; the sentinel wild species were Papaver rhoeas L., Galium aparine L. and Chenopodium album L. In the pasture scenario, sentinel wild species were Bromus tectorum L., Agrostis capillaris L., Trifolium pratense L., Lotus corniculatus L. and Galium aparine L. The following common weed species in field boundaries or in pasture lands also emerged as potential sentinel species for risk assessment, even though they are not listed in the OECD 208 method: Sonchus oleraceus L., Avena sterilis L., Dactylis glomerata L., Hordeum murinum L. and Lolium rigidum Gaudin. Conclusions: The ...

Quantitative estimate of observational uncertainty is an essential ingredient to correctly interpret changes in climatic and environmental variables such as wildfires. In this work we compare four state-of-the-art satellite fire products with the gridded, ground-based EFFIS dataset for Mediterranean Europe and analyse their statistical differences. The data are compared for spatial and temporal similarities at different aggregations to identify a spatial scale at which most of the observations provide equivalent results. The results of the analysis indicate that the datasets show high temporal correlation with each other (0.5/0.6) when aggregating the data at resolution of at least 1.0° or at NUTS3 level. However, burned area estimates vary widely between datasets. Filtering out satellite fires located on urban and crop land cover classes greatly improves the agreement with EFFIS data. Finally, in spite of the differences found in the area estimates, the spatial pattern is similar for all the datasets, with spatial correlation increasing as the resolution decreases. Also, the general reasonable agreement between satellite products builds confidence in using these datasets and in particular the most-recent developed dataset, FireCCI51, shows the best agreement with EFFIS overall. As a result, the main conclusion of the study is that users should carefully consider the limitations of the satellite fire estimates currently available, as their uncertainties cannot be neglected in the overall uncertainty estimate/cascade that should accompany global or regional change studies and that removing fires on human-dominated land areas is key to analyze forest fires estimation from satellite products. ; The authors thank EFFIS (European Forest Fire Information System of the European Commission Joint Research Centre, http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu) for providing access to fire series EFFIS. M.T. and E.T. have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 740073 (CLIM4CROP project) and grant agreement No. 748750 (SPFireSD project), respectively. The work of A.P. has been supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 ECOPOTENTIAL project (grant agreement No. 641762).

This book depicts the Early Modern book markets in Europe and colonial Latin America. The nature of book production and distribution in this period resulted in the development of a truly international market. The integration of the book market was facilitated by networks of printers and booksellers, who were responsible for the connection of distant places, as well as local producers and merchants. At the same time, due to the particular nature of books, political and religious institutions intervened in book markets. Printers and booksellers lived in a politically fragmented world where religious boundaries often shifted. This book explores both the development of commercial networks as well as how the changing institutional settings shaped relationships in the book market. Montserrat Cachero has been teaching Economic History at Pablo de Olavide University, Spain, since 2004 as part of the Economics department where she received her tenure track in 2012. She was distinguished academic visitor at Queens College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 2005 and visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University, USA, in 2016. She is an expert in sixteenth century Atlantic Trade, focusing on contracts, conflicts, and institutions for contract enforcement. She has also been involved in the development of Historical Network Analysis and has published articles on both the theoretical side (Vinculos en Historia, JCR) and its application (The Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, JCR Q1). Natalia Maillard-Alvarez has been teaching Early Modern History at the University Pablo de Olavide, Spain, since 2012. She has been Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow there since 2016 and Associate Professor of Early Modern History since 2021. She was also Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence from 2010 to 2012 and EURIAS fellow at the Collegium de Lyon from 2015 to 2016. Her research field is book history, especially the history of the book trade and the history of readers in the Hispanic Monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She edited Books in the Catholic World during the Early Modern Period (2014) and coedited Bibliotecas de la Monarquia Hispanica en la Primera Globalizacion (2021). .

"The book aims rethinking the cultural history of Mediterranean nationalisms between 19th and 20th centuries by tracing their specific approach to antiquity in the forging of a national past. By focusing on how national imaginaries dealt with this topic and how history and archaeology relied on antiquity, this collection of essays introduces a comparative approach presenting several cases studies concerning many regions including Spain, Italy and Slovenia as well as Albania, Greece and Turkey. By adopting the perspective of a dialogue among all these Mediterranean political cultures, this book breaks significantly new ground, because it shifts attention on how Southern Europe nationalisms are an interconnected political and cultural experience, directly related to the intellectual examples of Northern Europe, but also developing its own particular trends. Contributors are: Çiğdem Atakuman, Filippo Carlà, Francisco Garcia Alonso, Maja Gori, Eleni Stefanou, Rok Stergar, Katia Visconti"--Provided by publisher

Abstract. We present a procedure that allows the operational generation of daily
forecasts of fire danger over Mediterranean Europe. The procedure combines
historical information about radiative energy released by fire events with
daily meteorological forecasts, as provided by the Satellite Application
Facility for Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) and the European Centre for
Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Fire danger is estimated based on
daily probabilities of exceedance of daily energy released by fires occurring
at the pixel level. Daily probability considers meteorological factors by
means of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) and is estimated using a daily
model based on a generalized Pareto distribution. Five classes of fire danger
are then associated with daily probability estimated by the daily model. The
model is calibrated using 13 years of data (2004–2016) and validated
against the period of January–September 2017. Results obtained show that
about 72 % of events releasing daily energy above 10 000 GJ belong to the
"extreme" class of fire danger, a considerably high fraction that is more
than 1.5 times the values obtained when using the currently
operational Fire Danger Forecast module of the European Forest Fire
Information System (EFFIS) or the Fire Risk Map (FRM) product disseminated by
the LSA SAF. Besides assisting in wildfire management, the procedure is
expected to help in decision making on prescribed burning within the
framework of agricultural and forest management practices.

Managers of wildfire-prone landscapes in the Euro-Mediterranean region would greatly benefit from fire weather predictions a few months in advance, and particularly from the reliable prediction of extreme fire seasons. However, in some cases model biases prevent from a direct application of these predictions in an operational context. Fire risk management requires precise knowledge of the likely consequences of climate on fire risk, and the interest for decision-makers is focused on multi-variable fire danger indices, calculated through the combination of different model output variables. In this paper we consider whether the skill in dynamical seasonal predictions of one of the most widely applied of such indices (the Canadian Fire Weather Index, FWI) is sufficient to inform management decisions, and we examine various methodological aspects regarding the calibration of model outputs prior to its verification and operational applicability. We find that there is significant skill in predicting above average summer FWI in parts of SE Europe at 1 month lead time, but poor skill elsewhere. These results are largely linked to the predictability of relative humidity. Moreover, practical recommendations are given for the use of empirical quantile mapping in probabilistic seasonal FWI forecasts. Furthermore, we show how researchers, fire managers and other stakeholders can take advantage of a new open-source climate service in order to undertake all the necessary steps for data download, post-processing, analysis and verification in a straightforward and fully reproducible manner. ; Open Access funded by European Research Council. We thank the European Union's Seventh Framework Program [FP7/2007–2013] under Grant Agreement 308291 (EUPORIAS Project), in which this study was undertaken, and also for partially funding the 'ECOMS User Data Gateway' (ECOMS-UDG, http://meteo.unican.es/ecoms-udg), making available the System 4 hindcast, including derived variables from the raw model outputs required for this study (relative humidity, wind speed and deaccumulated precipitation). M. Iturbide thanks research funding from SODERCAN S.A. through the "Contrata" Programme (budget Ref. 12.04.461A.740.14). The first author thanks the FP7 Project SPECS (grant agreement 308378) for funding his current research contract and for supporting the development of the R package downscaleR for statistical downscaling and bias correction. ; Peer Reviewed