Explore the vast range of titles available.

Marine habitat-forming species provide crucial ecosystem functions and services worldwide. Still, the individual and combined long-term effects of ocean acidification and warming on bryozoan populations, structures, and microbiomes remain unexplored. Here, we investigate the skeletal properties, microbiome shifts, and population trends of two bryozoan species living inside and outside a volcanic CO 2 vent, a natural analog to future ocean acidification conditions. We show that bryozoans can acclimatize to acidification by adjusting skeletal properties and maintaining stable microbiomes. However, we document a decrease in microbial genera playing essential functions under acidified conditions. Moreover, we show that ocean acidification exacerbates bryozoan cover loss and mortality caused by ocean warming. The observed shifts in the microbiome and cover suggest that, despite their morphological plasticity, bryozoan species will be heavily impacted by future ocean conditions, posing a threat to many benthic ecosystems in which they play a pivotal role. Ocean acidification and warming threaten bryozoan populations by altering skeletal properties, disrupting key microbial communities, and increasing mortality, with consequences for the benthic ecosystems they support.

Phylogenetic relatedness is a key diversity measure for the analysis and understanding of how species and communities evolve across time and space. Understanding the nonrandom loss of species with respect to phylogeny is also essential for better-informed conservation decisions. However, several factors are known to influence phylogenetic reconstruction and, ultimately, phylogenetic diversity metrics. In this study, we empirically tested how some of these factors (topological constraint, taxon sampling, genetic markers and calibration) affect phylogenetic resolution and uncertainty. We built a densely sampled, species-level phylogenetic tree for spiders, combining Sanger sequencing of species from local communities of two biogeographical regions (Iberian Peninsula and Macaronesia) with a taxon-rich backbone matrix of Genbank sequences and a topological constraint derived from recent phylogenomic studies. The resulting tree constitutes the most complete spider phylogeny to date, both in terms of terminals and background information, and may serve as a standard reference for the analysis of phylogenetic diversity patterns at the community level. We then used this tree to investigate how partial data affect phylogenetic reconstruction, phylogenetic diversity estimates and their rankings, and, ultimately, the ecological processes inferred for each community. We found that the incorporation of a single slowly evolving marker (28S) to the DNA barcode sequences from local communities, had the highest impact on tree topology, closely followed by the use of a backbone matrix. The increase in missing data resulting from combining partial sequences from local communities only had a moderate impact on the resulting trees, similar to the difference observed when using topological constraints. Our study further revealed substantial differences in both the phylogenetic structure and diversity rankings of the analyzed communities estimated from the different phylogenetic treatments, especially when using non-ultrametric trees (phylograms) instead of time-stamped trees (chronograms). Finally, we provide some recommendations on reconstructing phylogenetic trees to infer phylogenetic diversity within ecological studies.

Background There is a pressing need for scalable healthcare solutions and a shift in the rehabilitation paradigm from hospitals to homes to tackle the increase in stroke incidence while reducing the practical and economic burden for patients, hospitals, and society. Digital health technologies can contribute to addressing this challenge; however, little is known about their effectiveness in at-home settings. In response, we have designed the RGS@home study to investigate the effectiveness, acceptance, and cost of a deep tech solution called the Rehabilitation Gaming System (RGS). RGS is a cloud-based system for delivering AI-enhanced rehabilitation using virtual reality, motion capture, and wearables that can be used in the hospital and at home. The core principles of the brain theory-based RGS intervention are to deliver rehabilitation exercises in the form of embodied, goal-oriented, and task-specific action. Methods The RGS@home study is a randomized longitudinal clinical trial designed to assess whether the combination of the RGS intervention with standard care is superior to standard care alone for the functional recovery of stroke patients at the hospital and at home. The study is conducted in collaboration with hospitals in Spain, Sweden, and France and includes inpatients and outpatients at subacute and chronic stages post-stroke. The intervention duration is 3 months with assessment at baseline and after 3, 6, and 12 months. The impact of RGS is evaluated in terms of quality of life measurements, usability, and acceptance using standardized clinical scales, together with health economic analysis. So far, one-third of the patients expected to participate in the study have been recruited ( N = 90, mean age 60, days after stroke ≥ 30 days). The trial will end in July 2023. Discussion We predict an improvement in the patients’ recovery, high acceptance, and reduced costs due to a soft landing from the clinic to home rehabilitation. In addition, the data provided will allow us to assess whether the prescription of therapy at home can counteract deterioration and improve quality of life while also identifying new standards for online and remote assessment, diagnostics, and intervention across European hospitals. Trial registration C linicalTrials.gov NCT04620707. Registered on November 3, 2020

The adoption of algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been rapidly increasing during the last few years. However, some aspects of AI techniques are under heavy scrutiny. For instance, in many use cases, it is not clear whether the decisions of an algorithm are well informed and conforming to human understanding. Having ways to address these concerns is crucial in many domains, especially whenever humans and intelligent (physical or virtual) agents must cooperate in a shared environment. In this paper, we apply an explainability method based on the creation of a Policy Graph (PG) based on discrete predicates that represent and explain a trained agent’s behaviour in a multi-agent cooperative environment. We show that from these policy graphs, policies for surrogate interpretable agents can be automatically generated. These policies can be used to measure the reliability of the explanations enabled by the PGs through a fair behavioural comparison between the original opaque agent and the surrogate one. The contributions of this paper represent the first use case of policy graphs in the context of explaining agent behaviour in cooperative multi-agent scenarios and present experimental results that sets this kind of scenario apart from previous implementations in single-agent scenarios: when requiring cooperative behaviour, predicates that allow representing observations about the other agents are crucial to replicate the opaque agent’s behaviour and increase the reliability of explanations.

Understanding the causes behind species richness and endemicity is fundamental to explain biodiversity and assist conservation management, especially in biodiversity hotspots like the Mediterranean Basin. Here we investigate the patterns in Iberian forest spider communities and the processes behind their assembly, by testing hypotheses about the effects of climate and habitat on species richness, endemicity and structure of communities at different spatial scales, and about how microhabitat and dispersal affect the level of endemicity of species. We studied 16 spider communities in Iberian Quercus forests from different climatic zones, applying a standardised sampling protocol. We examined the contribution of habitat, climate, and geography to the differences in the composition of spider communities across spatial scales using distance-based redundancy analysis models (dbRDA) and principal coordinates of neighbour matrices (PCNM). We assessed the effects of the same variables on the endemicity of communities (measured by a weighted index), and tested the correlation between the microhabitat and the ballooning frequency (obtained from bibliography), and the endemicity of species through generalised linear models. Spider communities formed two groups—one southern and one northern—based on similarity in species composition. Precipitation and temperature were inversely related with the number of species while geography and forest type explained the compositional similarities between communities at different spatial scales. Endemicity of communities increased with temperature and decreased with precipitation, whereas species endemicity decreased with ballooning frequency. Our findings illustrate how niche-related processes may drive spider diversity while dispersal determines species distribution and identity and, ultimately, community composition. From a conservation viewpoint, when maximising species richness is incompatible with prioritising endemicity, the criteria to follow may depend on the geographic scale at which decisions are made.

A large scale semi-quantitative biodiversity assessment was conducted in white oak woodlands in areas included in the Spanish Network of National Parks, as part of a project aimed at revealing biogeographic patterns and identify biodiversity drivers. The semi-quantitative COBRA sampling protocol was conducted in sixteen 1-ha plots across six national parks using a nested design. All adult specimens were identified to species level based on morphology. Uncertain delimitations and identifications due to either limited information of diagnostic characters or conflicting taxonomy were further investigated using DNA barcode information. We identified 376 species belonging to 190 genera in 39 families, from the 8,521 adults found amongst the 20,539 collected specimens. Faunistic results include the discovery of 7 new species to the Iberian Peninsula, 3 new species to Spain and 11 putative new species to science. As largely expected by environmental features, the southern parks showed a higher proportion of Iberian and Mediterranean species than the northern parks, where the Palearctic elements were largely dominant. The analysis of approximately 3,200 DNA barcodes generated in the present study, corroborated and provided finer resolution to the morphologically based delimitation and identification of specimens in some taxonomically challenging families. Specifically, molecular data confirmed putative new species with diagnosable morphology, identified overlooked lineages that may constitute new species, confirmed assignment of specimens of unknown sexes to species and identified cases of misidentifications and phenotypic polymorphisms.

Aim The main aims were to determine: (a) the relative contribution of species replacement and richness difference from components to overall taxonomic (TDβ) and functional (FDβ) beta diversity of spider communities; (b) the degree to which TDβ and FDβ components can be explained by the environmental or geographic predictors; (c) whether FDβ components were lower than expected given the underlying TDβ variation. Location This study was carried out in 22 oak forest sites across the Iberian Peninsula. The area comprises two biogeographic regions, Eurosiberian (North) and Mediterranean (Centre and South). Methods Spiders were sampled using a standardized protocol. A species x traits matrix was constructed. Total taxonomic (TDβtotal) and total functional (FDβtotal) beta diversity were calculated, by pairwise comparisons, and partitioned into their replacement (βrepl) and richness difference (βrich) components. Mantel tests were used to relate taxonomic and functional dissimilarity with environmental and geographic distances. A spatial eigenfunction model was constructed and the variation in TDβ and FDβ explained by environment and geographic predictors was quantified. Null models were used to test if FDβ was higher or lower than expected given TDβ. Results βrepl was the dominant component contributing to 84.2% and 72.8% for TDβtotal and FDβtotal, respectively. TDβtotal and FDβtotal (and their replacement components) were higher between‐ than within‐biogeographic regions. TDβtotal and TDβrepl were positively correlated with environmental and geographic distances, even when controlling for a biogeographic effect, but their functional counterparts were only correlated with environmental distance. Variation partitioning showed that pure environmental and spatially structured environmental effects had a small contribution to beta diversity, except for TDβrich. The observed slopes of the regressions of FDβtotal and FDβrepl in relation to environmental distance were slower than the null model expectations. Main Conclusions Spider assemblage variation was mainly determined by the replacement, and not the net loss, of species and traits. TDβ was influenced by niche filtering and dispersal limitation, whereas FDβ was mainly generated by niche filtering. A high level of functional convergence among spider communities, despite the high taxonomic divergence, revealed the signal of replacement of species performing similar functions across sites.

The present work analyzes the development of scientific production in the economics of finance between 1995 and 2006. Research in capital structure was identified as the most productive line during this period. The most significant contributions and seminal papers in this area are discussed, as are the main research lines that remain open. Adapted from the source document.

En el presente trabajo se analiza la evolución de la producción científica en economía financiera entre los años 1995 y 2006. Se ha concluido que la línea de investigación que más publicaciones ha recibido ha sido la estructura de capital de la empresa. A continuación se ha estudiado, para esta línea, y para el período analizado, los trabajos sobre los que se ha fundamentado la investigación actual, las aportaciones científicas más relevantes y las principales líneas de investigación que siguen abiertas.

Dense shelf water cascading (DSWC) is an oceanographic process that occurs when dense shelf water overflows over the shelf edge downslope toward the deep sea. Monitored in the northwestern Mediterranean by moorings since 1993 in the Lacaze-Duthiers Canyon and since 2005 in the Cap de Creus Canyon, numerical modeling with reanalysis extends this timeline further into the past. This study investigates a regional reanalysis (1987–2021) validated against mooring observations at 750–1000 m depth. The reanalysis successfully reproduces observed intense DSWC (IDSWC) events from 1999, 2000, 2005, 2006, 2012, 2013, and 2018 while identifying one previously unreported event in 1987 and detecting no IDSWC between 1988 and 1998. The reanalysis effectively matches 84 % of observed IDSWC days within the same week and 56 % on the exact date. Instead of assimilating IDSWC events from mooring observations to resolve the cascading process, the model relies solely on the seawater density on the shelf and revealed the seawater properties along the canyon that caused IDSWC. This work highlights the importance of high-resolution reanalyses in investigating the impacts of mesoscale processes on larger scales in the deep ocean.