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Digital Annex for the following thesis: Vila-Viçosa, C. (2023). Natural History, Biogeography and Evolution of the Iberian white oak syngameon (Quercus L. Sect. Quercus). Ph.D. Thesis, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal Abstract: The genus Quercus L. is one of the most diverse and important group of woody plants, particularly when considering that they are the trees that rule the Northern Hemisphere forests. Oaks have an intricate Biogeography that criss-crosses diverse climatic and edaphic gradients, encompassing a huge ambiguity in terms of species delimitation. Frequently, the taxonomic proposals brought by traditional Linnaean Botany are either insufficient or rather inflate the number of species and nomenclatural assignments, which are further diluted into inconsistent taxonomic ranks, varying from species to subspecies and varieties. The supremacy given to morphological characters that are inherently fragile and plastic, spread across the distribution areas of distinct lineages, may carry ambiguity on the identification and proper species delimitation. From the oaks that are distributed across the Western Palearctic region, the ones that are deciduous or brevi-deciduous present higher levels of ambiguity in terms of species number and their delimitation. This ambiguity is particularly strong in the circummediterranean region and in the transitional areas between the two major biogeographic Regions of the western Palearctic region, the Euro-Siberian and Mediterranean. This degree of uncertainty, which increases towards the Southern European Peninsulas, is amplified by the ease that the different species of oaks tend to hybridize among them. The present work provides a holistic framework that covers multiple areas, from the taxonomic and evolutive study of this genus, to biogeography and molecular characterization. Its major objective was to resolve the species delimitation of the Iberian deciduous and marcescent oaks and putative introgression among them, enhancing the available knowledge about species diversity, which can foster suitable species and forest conservation. A specific objective was to cross-reference the natural history revision and the different taxonomic treatments brought by distinct authors, with personal observations. These data were then incorporated into ecological modelling and molecular characterization, which in the end fed a newly updated taxonomic proposal. In Section A we obtained results from extensive field, herbaria, and literature review, updating the nomenclature of the Portuguese and western Mediterranean oaks. Section B was supported by Section A’s in-depth review and enabled finer species distribution models, nurturing both hindcast (since ca. 20 Kyr) and forecast (2070-2100) exercises of the range dynamics of Mediterranean oaks species. The study of past and future range shifts solved important pending biogeographic questions, especially related to past range-shifts. Such past-range shifts improved our knowledge on species responses to climate dynamics and allowed a better anticipation of future responses of range shifts driven by climate change. Section C encompassed the molecular characterization of Iberian white oak species and their hybrids, whose delimitation is often faltering when one intends to infer about species rank, or hypothesize about the participation of parent taxon in natural hybrid swarms. This work allowed us to solve the phylogenetic backbone of western Palearctic white oaks, suggesting a significant segregation of the Iberian pedunculate oaks and unveiling two subsections inside Section Quercus. These subsections are biogeographically well-segregated and present diverse levels of introgression among species. Results demonstrated the efficiency of RADSeq for rebuilding the reticulate phylogeny of the Eurasian white oaks, showcasing the significance of the Iberian Peninsula as a major hotspot for oak diversity. We implemented a circular approach to these methods, which retro-fed themselves in terms of insight generation, enabling a powerful strategy to solve the evolutionary history of this difficult groups of plants. We estimate that the reticulate historical biogeography of the western Palearctic white oaks deserves further scrutiny by adding vicariant oak populations from northern Africa, the Near East and southern European Peninsulas. Methods should again follow this similar additive and sequential process of adjoining deep Natural History examination, with extensive fieldwork in type populations and genome-wide molecular surveys, in order to solve this group of plants. With the present work, we were able to significantly improve on the depiction of the basic unit of Biodiversity (the Species), in the complex Quercus genus. We provided tools to enable further efforts for the conservation of the Mediterranean oak forests, which overwhelm one of the most important (and one of the most threatened) Biomes for plant conservation at the global scale.

High energy consumption is a challenging issue that an ever increasing number of mobile applications face today.However, energy consumption is being tested in an ad hoc way, despite being an important non-functional requirement of an application.Such limitation becomes particularly disconcerting during software testing: on the one hand, developers do not really know how to measure energy; on the other hand, there is no knowledge as to what is the energy overhead imposed by the testing framework.In this paper, as we evaluate eight popular mobile UI automation frameworks, we have discovered that there are automation frameworks that increase energy consumption up to roughly 2200%.While limited in the interactions one can do, Espresso is the most energy efficient framework.However, depending on the needs of the tester, Appium, Monkeyrunner, or UIAutomator are good alternatives.In practice, results show that deciding which is the most suitable framework is vital. We provide a decision tree to help developers make an educated decision on which framework suits best their testing needs.

Species distribution models (SDMs) are becoming an important tool for marine conservation and management. Yet while there is an increasing diversity and volume of marine biodiversity data for training SDMs, little practical guidance is available on how to leverage distinct data types to build robust models. We explored the effect of different data types on the fit, performance and predictive ability of SDMs by comparing models trained with four data types for a heavily exploited pelagic fish, the blue shark (Prionace glauca), in the Northwest Atlantic: two fishery-dependent (conventional mark-recapture tags, fisheries observer records) and two fishery-independent (satellite-linked electronic tags, pop-up archival tags). We found that all four data types can result in robust models, but differences among spatial predictions highlighted the need to consider ecological realism in model selection and interpretation regardless of data type. Differences among models were primarily attributed to biases in how each data type, and the associated representation of absences, sampled the environment and summarized the resulting species distributions. Outputs from model ensembles and a model trained on all pooled data both proved effective for combining inferences across data types and provided more ecologically realistic predictions than individual models. Our results provide valuable guidance for practitioners developing SDMs. With increasing access to diverse data sources, future work should further develop truly integrative modeling approaches that can explicitly leverage strengths of individual data types while statistically accounting for limitations, such as sampling biases.  Please see the README document ("README.md") and the accompanying published article: Braun, C. D., M. C. Arostegui, N. Farchadi, M. Alexander, P. Afonso, A. Allyn, S. J. Bograd, S. Brodie, D. P. Crear, E. F. Culhane, T. H. Curtis, E. L. Hazen, A. Kerney, N. Lezama-Ochoa, K. E. Mills, D. Pugh, N. Queiroz, J. D. Scott, G. B. Skomal, D. W. Sims, S. R. Thorrold, H. Welch, R. Young-Morse, R. Lewison. In press. Building use-inspired species distribution models: using multiple data types to examine and improve model performance. Ecological Applications. Accepted. DOI: < article DOI will be added when it is assigned >

Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB) are complex to manage due to their intermittent nature and their severe impact on the economy and human health. The conditions which promote HAB have not yet been fully explained, though climate change and anthropogenic intervention are pointed as significant factors. The rise of water temperature, the opening of new sea canals and the introduction of ship ballast waters all contribute to the dispersion and establishment of toxin-producing invasive species that promote the settling of emergent toxins in the food-chain. Tetrodotoxin, ciguatoxin, palytoxin and cyclic imines are commonly reported in warm waters but have also caused poisoning incidents in temperate zones. There is evidence that monitoring for these toxins exclusively in bivalves is simplistic and underestimates the risk to public health, since new vectors have been reported for these toxins and as well for regulated toxins such as PSTs and DSTs. In order to avoid public health impacts, there is a need for adequate monitoring programs, a need for establishing appropriate legislation, and a need for optimizing effective methods of analysis. In this review, we will compile evidence concerning emergent marine toxins and provide data that may indicate the need to restructure the current monitoring programs of HAB.

Nowadays, the use of a drug to modify a person's behavior with criminal intentions has become a growing public concern. In fact, stealthy drink spiking with certain drugs can cause the incapacitation of a potential victim of assault and in extreme cases can even lead to death. Belonging to the group of drugs used to commit drug-facilitated crimes is glibenclamide, which not only exhibits high sedation secondary effects but when subject to an overdose intake can lead to intense hypoglycemic episodes that could end with death. Suicide attempts and homicides through overdose with glibenclamide have already been reported. In this work and for the first time, it was developed a new methodology for detection of glibenclamide in spiked liquid samples (teas) by fluorometry (λ(ex)=300 nm; λ(em)=404 nm). The novel methodology was also implemented in a miniaturized and portable automatic flow system based in the concept of multipumping with an in-line pre-separation unit. The separation of the drug from the liquid samples was achieved through adsorption of the drug into activated charcoal packed within a mini column followed by elution with a solution composed by ethanol, hydrochloric acid and the surfactant CTAB (70%, 1.0 mol L(-1), 0.01 mol L(-1), respectively). The results allowed to obtain a linear working range for glibenclamide concentrations of up to 50 mg L(-1) (r=0.9999) and the detection limit was about 0.81 mg L(-1) of glibenclamide.

This paper presents a new framework for optimal planning of electrical, heating, and cooling distributed energy resources and networks considering smart buildings' contribution scenarios in normal and external shock conditions. The main contribution of this paper is that the impacts of smart buildings' commitment scenarios on the planning of electrical, heating, and cooling systems are explored. The proposed iterative four-stage optimization framework is another contribution of this paper, which utilizes a self-healing performance index to assess the level of resiliency of the multi-carrier energy system. In the first stage, the optimal decision variables of planning are determined. Then, in the second stage, the smart buildings and parking lots contribution scenarios are explored. In the third stage, the optimal hourly scheduling of the energy system for the normal condition is performed considering the self-healing performance index. Finally, in the fourth stage, the optimization process determines the optimal scheduling of system resources and the switching status of electrical switches, heating, and cooling pipelines’ control valves. The proposed method was successfully assessed for the 123-bus IEEE test system. The proposed framework reduced the expected values of aggregated system costs and energy not supplied costs by about 49.92% and 93.64%, respectively, concerning the custom planning exercise. ; © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ; fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed|

Abstract Morphological studies and chemical surface characterization have been used, together with the evaluation of optical properties, to determine the modifications occurring in solar selective coatings on three different metallic substrates during artificial ageing. Black nickel coatings on aluminum had the most selective properties prior to ageing, while back chromium coatings were less affected by ageing. Heat-treating to 350°C has shown to improve the performance of all coatings tested.