Alessandro Ferrarini - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alessandro Ferrarini

Empirical works to assist in choosing climatically relevant variables in the attempt to predict c... more Empirical works to assist in choosing climatically relevant variables in the attempt to predict climate change impacts on plant species are limited. Further uncertainties arise in choice of an appropriate niche model. In this study we devised and tested a sharp methodological framework, based on stringent variable ranking and filtering and flexible model selection, to minimize uncertainty in both niche modelling and successive projection of plant species distributions. We used our approach to develop an accurate, parsimonious model of Silene acaulis (L.) presence/absence on the British Isles and to project its presence/absence under climate change. The approach suggests the importance of (a) defining a reduced set of climate variables , actually relevant to species presence/absence, from an extensive list of climate predictors, and (b) considering climate extremes instead of, or together with, climate averages in projections of plant species presence/absence under future climate scenarios. Our methodological approach reduced the number of relevant climate predictors by 95.23% (from 84 to only 4), while simultaneously achieving high cross-validated accuracy (97.84%) confirming enhanced model performance. Projections produced under different climate scenarios suggest that S. acaulis will likely face climate-driven fast decline in suitable areas on the British Isles, and that upward and northward shifts to occupy new climatically suitable areas are improbable in the future. Our results also imply that conservation measures for S. acaulis based upon assisted colonization are unlikely to succeed on the British Isles due to the absence of climatically suitable habitat, so different conservation actions (seed banks and/or botanical gardens) are needed. Keywords British Isles · Climate-driven niche modelling · Climate extremes · Model selection · Parsimonious modelling · Silene acaulis · Variable ranking · Variable selection

New models are required to predict the impacts of future climate change on biodiversity. A move m... more New models are required to predict the impacts of future climate change on biodiversity. A move must be made away from individual models of single species toward approaches with synergistically interacting species. The focus should be on indirect effects due to biotic interactions. Here we propose a new parsimonious approach to simulate direct and indirect effects of global warming on plant communities. The methodology consists of five steps: a) field survey of species abundances, b) quantitative assessment of species co-occurrences, c) assignment of a theorised effect of increased temperature on each species, d) creation of a community model to project community dynamics, and e) exploration of the potential range of temperature change effects on plant communities. We explored the possible climate-driven dynamics in an alpine vegetation community and gained insights into the role of biotic interactions as determinants of plant species response to climate change at local scale. The study area was the uppermost portion of Alpe delle Tre Potenze (Northern Apennines, Italy) from 1500 m up to the summit at 1940 m. Our work shows that: 1) unexpected climate-driven dynamics can emerge, 2) interactive communities with indirect effects among species can overcome direct effects induced by global warming; 3) if just one or few species react to global warming the new community configuration could be unexpected and counter-intuitive; 4) timing of species reactions to global warming is an important driver of community dynamics; 5) using simulation models with a limited amount of data in input, it is possible to explore the full range of potential changes in plant communities induced by climate warming.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been recently introduced to allow the control of any kind ... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been recently introduced to allow the control of any kind of ecological and biological networks, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links, acting from inside and/or outside. To date, ENC has been applied using a centralized approach where an arbitrary number of network nodes and links could be tamed. This approach has shown to be effective in the control of ecological and biological networks. However a decentralized control, where only one node and the correspondent input/output links are controlled, could be more economic from a computational viewpoint, in particular when the network is very large (i.e. big data). In this view, ENC is upgraded here to realize the decentralized control of ecological and biological nets.

Landscape heterogeneity and fragmentation affect how organisms are distributed in the landscape, ... more Landscape heterogeneity and fragmentation affect how organisms are distributed in the landscape, determine the chance of a patch being colonized, reduce inbreeding in small populations and maintain evolutionary potential. Predicting the way in which animals disperse is pivotal for management and conservation purposes. I discuss here the conceptual and methodological weak points of circuit theory and least-cost modelling, the two most commonly-used methods in the scientific literature. I argue that these two methods, although very brilliant and very well supported by freely-available softwares, make use of six axiomatic assumptions: 1) any landscape can be divided into source and sink areas for any considered species; 2) source-sink areas can be a priori defined by the users; 3) any species adopt a global optimization of its dispersal over any landscape; 4) biotic movements are undirected; 5) stability points along dispersal paths are absent; 6) frictional values based on expert opinion are true-to-life. I argue that these axioms are only realistic for a limited number of species with short-range shifts over lowland (or, at least, patchy) landscapes, and for which frictional values can be realistically defined. I also describe an alternative theoretical and methodological approach, called Flow Connectivity, which can fix such weak points.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological ne... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological network, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links, acting from inside and/or from outside. To date, ENC has been applied to drive the dynamics of ecological and biological networks so that the target variable can reach the desired equilibrium value. In this work, ENC has been expanded to incorporate the multipurpose control of any kind of ecological and biological network. The rationale here is that, not one, but at least two, or even more than two, variables can be contemporaneously driven towards the desired equilibrium values. In theory, multipurpose ENC can lead an arbitrary number of network actors towards the desired equilibrium values. It is useful whenever ecological and biological networks present several taxonomic resolutions that are worthy to be controlled simultaneously.

Flow connectivity (FC) is a methodology, alternative and in opposition to both circuit theory and... more Flow connectivity (FC) is a methodology, alternative and in opposition to both circuit theory and least-cost modelling, first introduced in 2013 to realistically forecast biotic flows over real landscapes. FC turns a static frictional map into a dynamical simulation of biotic flows from any source points indicated by the user. In this work, FC is further developed to find a solution to the problem of detecting the true corridors of species dispersals and gene flows. The output of this method is the realistic map of biotic corridors, determined in a bottom-up way by considering the interaction between landscape properties and species requirements, and not in a top-down approach based on the supposed expert knowledge of some researcher. Not only true corridors are mapped, but they are also automatically weighted based on their importance to support biotic flows. The same corridor can bear different levels of importance in different portions of its length. This outcome is pivotal from both conservation and management viewpoints. An applicative example is provided.

We present here the first description of recorded sexual differences in flight behaviour and spac... more We present here the first description of recorded sexual differences in flight behaviour and space use of lesser kestrel Falco naumanni. Lesser kestrel is a migratory, colonial, small falcon breeding mainly in holes and crevices in large historic buildings within towns and villages, or in abandoned farm houses across the countryside. Using accurate GPS data-loggers, we gathered data on the activities of lesser kestrels in the two of main colonies of lesser kestrels in Italy, i.e. Gravina in Puglia and Altamura (Apulia, Southern Italy) and the surrounding rural areas in a 20-days monitoring during the reproductive period. We tested for sex differences in space use (home range's circularity ratio) and flight attributes (5-minute flight length, instantaneous speed, distance from nest, flight altitude above ground level) of 9 monitored individuals (4 males and 5 females). We found significant sexual differences for all the observed traits. Our results demonstrate that female lesser kestrels during the monitoring period employed a lower amount of energy in local movements as measured by four flight attributes that resulted significantly different (and lower) than for males. Compact home ranges for females could represent a maximization of the benefit-cost ratio between prospected surface and distance from nest, i.e. the optimal trade-off between foraging requirements (explored surface) and costs in terms of time and energy (distance from nest). On the contrary, males showed a significantly different space use with very elongated home ranges and mean distance from nest almost three times as elevated as females' one. We argue that the detected sexual divergence was the product of their respective ways to optimize the relationship between resource acquisition and reproductive activity.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological ne... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological network, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links. In this work, ENC has been further expanded to incorporate the structural control of any kind of ecological and biological network. The rationale behind Structural ENC is that during field experiments and manipulations it could result difficult to quantitatively control stocks and flows in order to drive the ecological or biological network towards the desired state. In these cases, similar results can be achieved using a more parsimonious approach based on the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges. Although network control through the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges is a kind of structural control that acts impolitely if compared to the functional control previously used by ENC, it is more parsimonious from a feasibility (i.e. in situ application) viewpoint, hence in some cases it could be the most feasible solution for the control of the real networks.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been first introduced in 2013 to effectively subdue networ... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been first introduced in 2013 to effectively subdue network-like systems. ENC opposes the idea, very common in the scientific literature, that controllability of networks should be based on the identification of the set of driver nodes that can guide the system's dynamics, in other words on the choice of a subset of nodes that should be selected to be permanently controlled. ENC has proven to be effective in the global control (i.e. the focus is on mastery of the final state of network dynamics) of linear and nonlinear networks, and in the local (i.e. the focus is on the step-by-step ascendancy of network dynamics) control of linear networks. In this work, ENC is applied to the local control of nonlinear networks. Using the Lotka-Volterra model as a case study, I show here that ENC is capable of locally driving nonlinear networks as well, so that also intermediate steps (not only the final state) are under our strict control. ENC can be readily applied to any kind of ecological, biological, economic and network-like system.

A soccer match is a very complex, apparently chaotic, human event. However, order clearly emerges... more A soccer match is a very complex, apparently chaotic, human event. However, order clearly emerges from such chaos if we have at hand the right tools to extract pattern configurations. In this work, a new algorithm called Soccer-Decompiler is presented, which is able to analyze soccer matches and extract emerging patterns from apparently chaotic sequences of events. Detecting and filtering the frequencies of events is used by Soccer-Decompiler to discover such patterns. The application of Soccer-Decompiler to a real soccer match shows that order out of chaos in complex human events can be effectively extracted by isolating highly frequent events. An applicative example is given.

Network Biology, 2011

Landscape (i.e., land cover, land use or vegetation maps) is a very complex mosaic of thousands o... more Landscape (i.e., land cover, land use or vegetation maps) is a very complex mosaic of thousands of patches, and this makes its interpretation very challenging. Class areas and shared perimeters between classes are two pivotal properties of its structure. In addition, landscape structure changes over time as a consequence of many interacting processes. Hence, there's an urgent need for a synthetic and intuitive representation of its structural attributes. I advocate here network graphs as an aid to interpreting and checking temporal and spatial properties of landscapes. I also suggest several hints to fitter use network graphs in landscape representation. As a case study, I apply network graphs to the Ceno valley (Parma, Italy), but the proposed approach is suitable for any landscape maps.

Computational Ecology and Software, 2012

Ecological ranking and environmental decision making require that a set of "objects" (e.g., compe... more Ecological ranking and environmental decision making require that a set of "objects" (e.g., competing sites for species introduction, or alternative sites for the allocation of man-made features) are listed from the best to the worst one. The resulting ranking is then used to choose which actions to implement; worse and intermediate solutions are immediately excluded, while optimal and sub-optimal solutions are taken into account, discussed and then applied. In this paper, WORTHY is presented as a new model for ecological ranking and evaluation of competing alternatives based on a set of weighted criteria. I have developed WORTHY model with the goal of employing a TOPSIS-like algorithm for worthy solutions in situations of environmental and ecological conflict management. Compared to TOPSIS algorithm, WORTHY allows to: a) decide the type of normalization, b) build an user-defined decision function, c) perform what-if analysis and d) sensitivity analysis.

Computational Ecology and Software, 2011

Ecological ranking is a prerequisite to many kinds of environmental decisions. It requires a set ... more Ecological ranking is a prerequisite to many kinds of environmental decisions. It requires a set of "objects" (e.g., competing sites for species reintroduction, or competing alternatives of environmental management) to be evaluated on the basis of multiple weighted criteria, and then ranked from the best to the worst, or vice versa. The resulting ranking is then used to choose the course of an action (e.g., the optimal sites where a species can be reintroduced, or the optimal management scenario for a protected area).

L'utilizzazione più diffusa è stata quella dell'impasto dell'amianto con cemento, comunemente det... more L'utilizzazione più diffusa è stata quella dell'impasto dell'amianto con cemento, comunemente detto eternit. Con l'eternit (amianto-cemento) è stato possibile realizzare numerosi manufatti : o lastre piane o ondulate Le lastre ondulate sono utilizzate per coperture di edifici industriali e civili e anche prefabbricati.

A forest fire can be a true ecological calamity, regardless of whether it is caused by natural fo... more A forest fire can be a true ecological calamity, regardless of whether it is caused by natural forces or human actions. Although it is impossible to control nature, it is possible to map wildfire risk zones, and thence minimize the frequency of wildfires and prevent damages. Wildfire risk zones are locations where a fire is likely to start, and from where it can spread to other areas. Predictions of wildfires ignitions are critical aspects of biodiversity conservation and management, and they are only possible when a reliable fire risk zone map is available. I suggest in this paper that wildfire ignition risk computed from points of past wildfires obeys the same conceptual and mathematical rules of niche models commonly applied to points of sampled plants or animals. Therefore, niche modeling can also be an inductive approach for an effective and inexpensive computation of wildfires ignition and spreading likelihood.

Simple linear regression tries to determine a linear relationship between a given variable X (pre... more Simple linear regression tries to determine a linear relationship between a given variable X (predictor) and a dependent variable Y. Since most of the environmental problems involve complex relationships, X-Y relationship is often better modeled through a regression where, instead of fitting a single straight line to the data, the algorithm allows the fitting to bend. Piecewise regressions just do it, since they allow emphasize local, instead of global, rules connecting predictor and dependent variables. In this work, a tool called RolReg is proposed as an implementation of Krummel's method to detect breakpoints in regression models. RolReg, which is freely available upon request from the author, could useful to detect proper breakpoints in ecological laws.

Empirical works to assist in choosing climatically relevant variables in the attempt to predict c... more Empirical works to assist in choosing climatically relevant variables in the attempt to predict climate change impacts on plant species are limited. Further uncertainties arise in choice of an appropriate niche model. In this study we devised and tested a sharp methodological framework, based on stringent variable ranking and filtering and flexible model selection, to minimize uncertainty in both niche modelling and successive projection of plant species distributions. We used our approach to develop an accurate, parsimonious model of Silene acaulis (L.) presence/absence on the British Isles and to project its presence/absence under climate change. The approach suggests the importance of (a) defining a reduced set of climate variables , actually relevant to species presence/absence, from an extensive list of climate predictors, and (b) considering climate extremes instead of, or together with, climate averages in projections of plant species presence/absence under future climate scenarios. Our methodological approach reduced the number of relevant climate predictors by 95.23% (from 84 to only 4), while simultaneously achieving high cross-validated accuracy (97.84%) confirming enhanced model performance. Projections produced under different climate scenarios suggest that S. acaulis will likely face climate-driven fast decline in suitable areas on the British Isles, and that upward and northward shifts to occupy new climatically suitable areas are improbable in the future. Our results also imply that conservation measures for S. acaulis based upon assisted colonization are unlikely to succeed on the British Isles due to the absence of climatically suitable habitat, so different conservation actions (seed banks and/or botanical gardens) are needed. Keywords British Isles · Climate-driven niche modelling · Climate extremes · Model selection · Parsimonious modelling · Silene acaulis · Variable ranking · Variable selection

New models are required to predict the impacts of future climate change on biodiversity. A move m... more New models are required to predict the impacts of future climate change on biodiversity. A move must be made away from individual models of single species toward approaches with synergistically interacting species. The focus should be on indirect effects due to biotic interactions. Here we propose a new parsimonious approach to simulate direct and indirect effects of global warming on plant communities. The methodology consists of five steps: a) field survey of species abundances, b) quantitative assessment of species co-occurrences, c) assignment of a theorised effect of increased temperature on each species, d) creation of a community model to project community dynamics, and e) exploration of the potential range of temperature change effects on plant communities. We explored the possible climate-driven dynamics in an alpine vegetation community and gained insights into the role of biotic interactions as determinants of plant species response to climate change at local scale. The study area was the uppermost portion of Alpe delle Tre Potenze (Northern Apennines, Italy) from 1500 m up to the summit at 1940 m. Our work shows that: 1) unexpected climate-driven dynamics can emerge, 2) interactive communities with indirect effects among species can overcome direct effects induced by global warming; 3) if just one or few species react to global warming the new community configuration could be unexpected and counter-intuitive; 4) timing of species reactions to global warming is an important driver of community dynamics; 5) using simulation models with a limited amount of data in input, it is possible to explore the full range of potential changes in plant communities induced by climate warming.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been recently introduced to allow the control of any kind ... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been recently introduced to allow the control of any kind of ecological and biological networks, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links, acting from inside and/or outside. To date, ENC has been applied using a centralized approach where an arbitrary number of network nodes and links could be tamed. This approach has shown to be effective in the control of ecological and biological networks. However a decentralized control, where only one node and the correspondent input/output links are controlled, could be more economic from a computational viewpoint, in particular when the network is very large (i.e. big data). In this view, ENC is upgraded here to realize the decentralized control of ecological and biological nets.

Landscape heterogeneity and fragmentation affect how organisms are distributed in the landscape, ... more Landscape heterogeneity and fragmentation affect how organisms are distributed in the landscape, determine the chance of a patch being colonized, reduce inbreeding in small populations and maintain evolutionary potential. Predicting the way in which animals disperse is pivotal for management and conservation purposes. I discuss here the conceptual and methodological weak points of circuit theory and least-cost modelling, the two most commonly-used methods in the scientific literature. I argue that these two methods, although very brilliant and very well supported by freely-available softwares, make use of six axiomatic assumptions: 1) any landscape can be divided into source and sink areas for any considered species; 2) source-sink areas can be a priori defined by the users; 3) any species adopt a global optimization of its dispersal over any landscape; 4) biotic movements are undirected; 5) stability points along dispersal paths are absent; 6) frictional values based on expert opinion are true-to-life. I argue that these axioms are only realistic for a limited number of species with short-range shifts over lowland (or, at least, patchy) landscapes, and for which frictional values can be realistically defined. I also describe an alternative theoretical and methodological approach, called Flow Connectivity, which can fix such weak points.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological ne... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological network, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links, acting from inside and/or from outside. To date, ENC has been applied to drive the dynamics of ecological and biological networks so that the target variable can reach the desired equilibrium value. In this work, ENC has been expanded to incorporate the multipurpose control of any kind of ecological and biological network. The rationale here is that, not one, but at least two, or even more than two, variables can be contemporaneously driven towards the desired equilibrium values. In theory, multipurpose ENC can lead an arbitrary number of network actors towards the desired equilibrium values. It is useful whenever ecological and biological networks present several taxonomic resolutions that are worthy to be controlled simultaneously.

Flow connectivity (FC) is a methodology, alternative and in opposition to both circuit theory and... more Flow connectivity (FC) is a methodology, alternative and in opposition to both circuit theory and least-cost modelling, first introduced in 2013 to realistically forecast biotic flows over real landscapes. FC turns a static frictional map into a dynamical simulation of biotic flows from any source points indicated by the user. In this work, FC is further developed to find a solution to the problem of detecting the true corridors of species dispersals and gene flows. The output of this method is the realistic map of biotic corridors, determined in a bottom-up way by considering the interaction between landscape properties and species requirements, and not in a top-down approach based on the supposed expert knowledge of some researcher. Not only true corridors are mapped, but they are also automatically weighted based on their importance to support biotic flows. The same corridor can bear different levels of importance in different portions of its length. This outcome is pivotal from both conservation and management viewpoints. An applicative example is provided.

We present here the first description of recorded sexual differences in flight behaviour and spac... more We present here the first description of recorded sexual differences in flight behaviour and space use of lesser kestrel Falco naumanni. Lesser kestrel is a migratory, colonial, small falcon breeding mainly in holes and crevices in large historic buildings within towns and villages, or in abandoned farm houses across the countryside. Using accurate GPS data-loggers, we gathered data on the activities of lesser kestrels in the two of main colonies of lesser kestrels in Italy, i.e. Gravina in Puglia and Altamura (Apulia, Southern Italy) and the surrounding rural areas in a 20-days monitoring during the reproductive period. We tested for sex differences in space use (home range's circularity ratio) and flight attributes (5-minute flight length, instantaneous speed, distance from nest, flight altitude above ground level) of 9 monitored individuals (4 males and 5 females). We found significant sexual differences for all the observed traits. Our results demonstrate that female lesser kestrels during the monitoring period employed a lower amount of energy in local movements as measured by four flight attributes that resulted significantly different (and lower) than for males. Compact home ranges for females could represent a maximization of the benefit-cost ratio between prospected surface and distance from nest, i.e. the optimal trade-off between foraging requirements (explored surface) and costs in terms of time and energy (distance from nest). On the contrary, males showed a significantly different space use with very elongated home ranges and mean distance from nest almost three times as elevated as females' one. We argue that the detected sexual divergence was the product of their respective ways to optimize the relationship between resource acquisition and reproductive activity.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological ne... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological network, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links. In this work, ENC has been further expanded to incorporate the structural control of any kind of ecological and biological network. The rationale behind Structural ENC is that during field experiments and manipulations it could result difficult to quantitatively control stocks and flows in order to drive the ecological or biological network towards the desired state. In these cases, similar results can be achieved using a more parsimonious approach based on the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges. Although network control through the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges is a kind of structural control that acts impolitely if compared to the functional control previously used by ENC, it is more parsimonious from a feasibility (i.e. in situ application) viewpoint, hence in some cases it could be the most feasible solution for the control of the real networks.

Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been first introduced in 2013 to effectively subdue networ... more Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) has been first introduced in 2013 to effectively subdue network-like systems. ENC opposes the idea, very common in the scientific literature, that controllability of networks should be based on the identification of the set of driver nodes that can guide the system's dynamics, in other words on the choice of a subset of nodes that should be selected to be permanently controlled. ENC has proven to be effective in the global control (i.e. the focus is on mastery of the final state of network dynamics) of linear and nonlinear networks, and in the local (i.e. the focus is on the step-by-step ascendancy of network dynamics) control of linear networks. In this work, ENC is applied to the local control of nonlinear networks. Using the Lotka-Volterra model as a case study, I show here that ENC is capable of locally driving nonlinear networks as well, so that also intermediate steps (not only the final state) are under our strict control. ENC can be readily applied to any kind of ecological, biological, economic and network-like system.

A soccer match is a very complex, apparently chaotic, human event. However, order clearly emerges... more A soccer match is a very complex, apparently chaotic, human event. However, order clearly emerges from such chaos if we have at hand the right tools to extract pattern configurations. In this work, a new algorithm called Soccer-Decompiler is presented, which is able to analyze soccer matches and extract emerging patterns from apparently chaotic sequences of events. Detecting and filtering the frequencies of events is used by Soccer-Decompiler to discover such patterns. The application of Soccer-Decompiler to a real soccer match shows that order out of chaos in complex human events can be effectively extracted by isolating highly frequent events. An applicative example is given.

Network Biology, 2011

Landscape (i.e., land cover, land use or vegetation maps) is a very complex mosaic of thousands o... more Landscape (i.e., land cover, land use or vegetation maps) is a very complex mosaic of thousands of patches, and this makes its interpretation very challenging. Class areas and shared perimeters between classes are two pivotal properties of its structure. In addition, landscape structure changes over time as a consequence of many interacting processes. Hence, there's an urgent need for a synthetic and intuitive representation of its structural attributes. I advocate here network graphs as an aid to interpreting and checking temporal and spatial properties of landscapes. I also suggest several hints to fitter use network graphs in landscape representation. As a case study, I apply network graphs to the Ceno valley (Parma, Italy), but the proposed approach is suitable for any landscape maps.

Computational Ecology and Software, 2012

Ecological ranking and environmental decision making require that a set of "objects" (e.g., compe... more Ecological ranking and environmental decision making require that a set of "objects" (e.g., competing sites for species introduction, or alternative sites for the allocation of man-made features) are listed from the best to the worst one. The resulting ranking is then used to choose which actions to implement; worse and intermediate solutions are immediately excluded, while optimal and sub-optimal solutions are taken into account, discussed and then applied. In this paper, WORTHY is presented as a new model for ecological ranking and evaluation of competing alternatives based on a set of weighted criteria. I have developed WORTHY model with the goal of employing a TOPSIS-like algorithm for worthy solutions in situations of environmental and ecological conflict management. Compared to TOPSIS algorithm, WORTHY allows to: a) decide the type of normalization, b) build an user-defined decision function, c) perform what-if analysis and d) sensitivity analysis.

Computational Ecology and Software, 2011

Ecological ranking is a prerequisite to many kinds of environmental decisions. It requires a set ... more Ecological ranking is a prerequisite to many kinds of environmental decisions. It requires a set of "objects" (e.g., competing sites for species reintroduction, or competing alternatives of environmental management) to be evaluated on the basis of multiple weighted criteria, and then ranked from the best to the worst, or vice versa. The resulting ranking is then used to choose the course of an action (e.g., the optimal sites where a species can be reintroduced, or the optimal management scenario for a protected area).

L'utilizzazione più diffusa è stata quella dell'impasto dell'amianto con cemento, comunemente det... more L'utilizzazione più diffusa è stata quella dell'impasto dell'amianto con cemento, comunemente detto eternit. Con l'eternit (amianto-cemento) è stato possibile realizzare numerosi manufatti : o lastre piane o ondulate Le lastre ondulate sono utilizzate per coperture di edifici industriali e civili e anche prefabbricati.

A forest fire can be a true ecological calamity, regardless of whether it is caused by natural fo... more A forest fire can be a true ecological calamity, regardless of whether it is caused by natural forces or human actions. Although it is impossible to control nature, it is possible to map wildfire risk zones, and thence minimize the frequency of wildfires and prevent damages. Wildfire risk zones are locations where a fire is likely to start, and from where it can spread to other areas. Predictions of wildfires ignitions are critical aspects of biodiversity conservation and management, and they are only possible when a reliable fire risk zone map is available. I suggest in this paper that wildfire ignition risk computed from points of past wildfires obeys the same conceptual and mathematical rules of niche models commonly applied to points of sampled plants or animals. Therefore, niche modeling can also be an inductive approach for an effective and inexpensive computation of wildfires ignition and spreading likelihood.

Simple linear regression tries to determine a linear relationship between a given variable X (pre... more Simple linear regression tries to determine a linear relationship between a given variable X (predictor) and a dependent variable Y. Since most of the environmental problems involve complex relationships, X-Y relationship is often better modeled through a regression where, instead of fitting a single straight line to the data, the algorithm allows the fitting to bend. Piecewise regressions just do it, since they allow emphasize local, instead of global, rules connecting predictor and dependent variables. In this work, a tool called RolReg is proposed as an implementation of Krummel's method to detect breakpoints in regression models. RolReg, which is freely available upon request from the author, could useful to detect proper breakpoints in ecological laws.