The transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settled agriculture is arguably the most fundamental change in the development of human society (Lev-Yadun et al., 2000). The establishment of agricultural economies, emerging initially in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East (Nesbitt, 2002), required the domestication of crops; ancient plant remains recovered from early farming sites provide direct evidence for this process of domestication.

In this study we assessed carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in soil and soil microbial biomass subject to conventional farming and three different organic farming practices. The results showed that microbial biomass was P-limited in soils subject to conventional farming and to organic farming with alfalfa green manure. Organic farming with compost amendment showed the best results in terms of microbial performance.

This study evaluated the efficiency of the protected areas (PAs) from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest on the conservation of threatened amphibian species. This brief overview highlights not only the crisis faced by unprotected amphibians, but it also sounds the alarm regarding the situation of species covered by the PAs network. Such context can improve the environmental actions for the PAs integrity and reduce the extinction risk of threatened amphibian species in this region.

The relations between environmental gradients and traditional diversity indices (taxonomic richness, diversity and evenness) of benthic macroinvertebrate communities in the lotic systems of northern Italy were analyzed. Redundancy analysis (RDA) was used to describe the response of taxa to environmental gradients. Diversity indices were analyzed using generalized linear models (GLMs) with explanatory variables the first two major RDA axes.

We show areas for extending current protected areas and creating new ones for endangered sub-species of the Lynx lynx martinoi in the Albania–Macedonia–Kosovo and Montenegro–Albania–Kosovo cross-border areas. Our results highlight the importance international cooperation can have for lynx conservation. We used local knowledge on forests in the study area, our analytical skills, and our full interest in the lynx conservation. We did this study working remotely.

Lophodermium needle cast is a common disease in the genus Pinus. Our analyses relating needle cast to climate in central Siberia showed that the disease depended most on precipitation and summer temperatures were important to trigger the disease in wetter years. In a warming climate needle cast outbreaks would have damaged the largest forest areas by 2020. In 2080 the outbreak progression would slow down because the Scots pine (the host tree) shift would be halted by the slow permafrost retreat.

Habitat fragmentation caused by urbanization is considered a prominent threat to biodiversity. Urban development creates a mosaic of natural fragments which can be occupied by organisms able to survive in small spaces. These fragments are a set of habitat islands interspersed in a "sea" of built up areas. Hypotheses developed in the field of island biogeography can be used to preserve the insect communities inhabiting urban green spaces.

Tropical forests are faced with a loss of forest cover with effects on ecosystem processes. We quantified decomposition within forest fragments and sites affected by increasing levels of agricultural land-use intensity. Mass loss increased with the area of forest fragments and decreased with land-use intensification. Fragmentation has negative effects on litter decomposition. However, the magnitude of this negative effect was not as large as expected.

Evaluating socio-economic losses due to natural disasters is challenging because of the complexity of the social and ecological systems affected (also under pressure from the expected effects of climate change). This paper suggests a general framework encompassing all the important concepts needed in the assessment of natural disasters. In particular, we propose a set of relationships among vulnerability, resilience, hazard, risk, damage, and loss which can guide socio-economic assessment.

An unexpected high biodiversity can be found even in densely inhabited areas, possibly as a result of a tendency of human settlements to be located in sites particularly favourable also for other organisms. We studied the relationship between human density and tenebrionid beetle richness in Italian islands. Tenebrionid richness increased with human population density. This suggests that islands that are more hospitable to humans are also those that can be more favourable for tenebrionids.

I use primary empirical data obtained through interviews in case studies around England to explore the neoliberal character of biodiversity offsetting, its interrelationship with governance rescaling, and the way the latter influences the distribution of offsetting’s costs and benefits. My results show that biodiversity offsetting in England has been a reactionary neoliberal policy characterized by important deficits from an environmental and socio-spatial justice perspective.

The identification of potential zones for offshore wind farm development is a delicate and multifaceted procedure. For this aim, a holistic approach has been adopted integrating technical and environmental criteria related to the offshore wind energy exploitation. The integration is made feasible through the Smart Wind Chart that aims to maintain and secure the sustainable blue growth in the Mediterranean Sea through the support of offshore wind energy projects and marine habitat conservation.

This research compares the heavy-metal contents in Pinus pinaster, P. sylvestris, Quercus robur, and Q. rotundifolium in contaminated Cu deposits from Italy (Libiola, Caporciano), Portugal (São Domingos), and Slovakia (Ľubietová). The bioavailability of the heavy metals is not pH controlled, but high Ca and Mg contents in soil inhibit the metal incorporation to the plants. The plants are excluders (bioconcentration factor < 1), so they are suitable only for phytostabilization.

In this work the effects of warming on phytoplankton communities was investigated. An indoor experiment was performed in which water from a Mediterranean lagoon was incubated at different temperatures. A shift towards smaller taxa resulted in a higher total biomass but lower chlorophyll a concentrations at the highest temperature. This study contributes to the knowledge on the responses of phytoplankton to warming, which is still scarce in Mediterranean marine and brackish environments.

The Serra do Rola Moça State Park is located in Brazil and is home to Canga vegetation. The objective of the study was to conserve biodiversity. The species present mainly belong to the Asteraceae, Rubiaceae, Myrtaceae, Velloziaceae, Bromeliaceae, and Orchidaceae families. Approximately 15 000 individuals of Canga species were translocated and planted. This study indicates the possibility of nursery breeding of some of the native species and their use in the recovery of areas in mining regions.

The aim of the study was to determine the species diversity, as wel as the metallophytisation, synanthropisation, invasive alien taxa and native-non apophytes proportion and naturalness of the vegetation composition for the represented sites and habitats. The correlation analysis has uncovered several significant associations between some of these indicators and climatic or edaphic variables. The knowledge of the succession stages in extreme environments may improve their management process.