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Background: Nowadays there is a worldwide consensus on the importance of conducting wildlife disease surveillance. Indeed, 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in nature, and the majority of these (71.8%) originate in wildlife. Surveillance of wildlife diseases is crucial to prevent negative effects on human and animal health. Data digitization and sharing are among the main goals for the present and coming years. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly used to analyze the geographical distribution of diseases and the relationships between pathogenic factors and their geographic environments. Methods: Wild animal's samples collected in the Abruzzo and Molise regions and delivered to our laboratory are entered in our Laboratory Information System and processed to be displayed through the Web-GIS mash-up presented in this paper. We built it using both open source and proprietary solutions, to produce data driven interactive maps, charts and tables to help to understand the epidemiology of wild animal diseases, their spread and trend. Results: Since 2013, 9.606 samples collected from wild animals have been analyzed in the laboratories of the IZS-Teramo and have been recorded in the system, facilitating the reporting to the judicial authorities and the identification of highly risky areas to set up control and repression measures. Moreover, thanks to the monitoring health protocol, a canine distemper epidemic in wolves has been detected and monitored in its temporal and spatial evolution, as well as cases of bovine tuberculosis in wild boars. Conclusions: While it is more evident that the starting point is to choose the right sampling method, it is for sure less obvious that the information system in which data is stored is equally important. In fact, it should give the possibility to consult it in an easy and instructive way. GIS allows immediately grasping the spatial relationships between the data itself and those between the data and the territory; it is an important tool to support veterinary services in managing epidemic and non-epidemic emergencies and performing epidemiological investigations, but also to examine control plans and identify new gaps and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) represents a very powerful tool to assess the health condition of buildings. In recent years, the growing availability of high-resolution SAR satellite images has made possible the application of multi-temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) techniques for structural monitoring purposes, with high precision, low costs, timesaving, and the possibility to investigate wide areas. However, a comprehensive validation of the effectiveness of MT-InSAR in this application field has not been achieved yet. For this reason, in this paper a comparison between interferometric data and on-site measurement of displacements is proposed. The application case study is the Civic Tower of the city of L'Aquila (Abruzzo Region, Italy). After the seismic events that affected the area in 2009, an on-site monitoring system was installed on the tower to detect any changes in the damage pattern in the period 2010–2013. Furthermore, images acquired by COSMO-SkyMed constellation in Stripmap mode (~3 m resolution) during the same period were processed by the Permanent Scatterer-InSAR (PSI) technique to estimate the deformation of the structure and the surrounding area. The obtained results indicate that both methods are consistent in the measurement of displacement trends of the building and a slight rotation/displacement of the tower was detected. Such evidence highlights both the huge potential and the limitations of using InSAR techniques for SHM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper illustrates the construction of abacuses for the semi-quantitative assessment of stratigraphic seismic amplification phenomena, applicable in the eastern Abruzzo region (central Italy). The abacuses provide three expected Amplification Factors (Fas): Fa0.1-0.5, Fa0.4-0.8, Fa0.7-1.1, performed as the ratio between the integral of output and input, in the mentioned time intervals, considering the acceleration response spectra. The choice derives from the fact that these parameters are better correlated to the response of the buildings, characterised by their own different periods. To prepare the abacuses, a procedure was adopted that took into consideration the geological analysis of the area, the collection of all the available geophysical and geotechnical data, the choice of the seismic inputs representative of the seismic hazard, the identification of the main seismic stratigraphic sequences and the numerical analysis aimed at evaluating the Fa. The abacus consists of a series of tables prepared in order to take account of the stratigraphic variability in the area, as a function of the basic seismic hazard level and the vibration period interval to calculate the Fa. By knowing the stratigraphic and mechanical characteristics of the site and using the abacuses, the values of the Fa are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on socio-psychology and economics literature contributions, this paper provides an original conceptual framework examining whether and how natural disasters exert any influence on nuptiality. Scholars suggest that disasters remind people about the transience of life and mortality. This feature triggers shifting towards intrinsic meaningful goals — such as commitment to relationships; at the same time, it fosters people's proximity and support-seeking from their security providing attachment figures and leads to accelerate life transition choices. In this view, disasters are expected to positively impact on people's intentions to marry. Such an effect is evident in case of natural hazards determining slight damage to physical capital (buildings, productive locations, etc.) which have limited economic consequences that do not hamper marriage intentions. Meanwhile, in the case of highly disruptive disasters, these positive psychological pushes are counterbalanced or even exceeded by the negative economic consequences of the disaster, which inhibit marriage intentions. These predictions are supported by an empirical analysis that relies on a difference-in-differences investigation of municipality-level nuptiality data collected in the Abruzzo region of Italy before and after the major 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particular Matter (PM) data are the most used for the assessment of air quality, but it is also useful to monitor VOC and CO. The health impact of PM increases with decreasing aerodynamic dimensions, therefore most of the monitoring is aimed at PM10 (fraction of PM with aerodynamic dimensions smaller than 10 µm) and PM2.5 (fraction with aerodynamic dimensions lower than 2.5 µm). Generally, anthropogenic emissions contribute mainly to PM2.5 levels, whereas natural sources can largely affect PM10 concentrations. PM2.5/PM10 ratio can be used as a proxy of the origin (anthropogenic vs natural) of the PM, providing a useful indication about the main sources of PM that characterizes a specific geographical or urban setting. This paper presents the results of the analysis of continuous measurements of PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations at eight stations of the regional air quality monitoring network in Abruzzo (Central Italy), in the period 2017–2018. The application of models based on machine learning technique shows that PM2.5/PM10 ratio can be used to classify PM emissions and to know the nature of the emission source (natural and anthropogenic), under determinate conditions, and properly taking into account the meteorological parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]