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As littoral and riparian environments are in decline and survival of many aquatic plants is threatened by anthropic activities all over the globe, the conservation of macrophyte diversity should be considered a priority, because of their key role in freshwater ecosystems. High-throughput techniques, such as remote sensing spectroscopy, genetics and phylogenetics, have been explored in the last decade to support and enhance operational diversity monitoring. These techniques have opened new ways of measuring biodiversity, especially in forest and grassland systems, but a sound link between spectral and phylogenetic features with plant functional characteristics has yet to be established. The idea behind macroDIVERSITY, a new national project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (2020-2023), is that phylogenetic and spectral diversity measures can be integrated into a multidimensional data-driven framework for mapping plant traits and functions across scales and gradients. To this objective, we will collect data on macrophyte traits, diversity, and spectral reflectance from plots sampled over selected lakes and wetlands in Italy, according to robust experimental design. A fully resolved supertree, obtained from DNA markers analysis integrating available data and new sequencing, will be used for assessing the evolutionary diversity of the species assemblage, highlighting the phylogenetic signal in the context of the community traits information. Hyperspectral imaging data acquired from proximal platforms and airborne drones at centimetre scale will be used for modelling bio-chemical and functional macrophyte traits (e.g. canopy morphology, productivity, pigments and nutrients content). Environmental parameters collected and diversity metrics derived will be eventually merged into a machine-learning framework for mapping macrophyte functional diversity (richness and divergence). The project outcomes are expected to impact on applied ecology studies focusing on delineating plant diversity using remote sensing data, and investigating the role played by species interactions and community complexity in regulating aquatic ecosystem quality.

Over the past decades, several studies elucidated the effect of the loss of aquatic plant diversity in freshwater ecosystems. Several strategies and approaches for macrophytes diversity conservation have considered taxonomical or functional features, and only in the last years the evolutive dimension of plant communities was also considered [1]. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) dimension, reflecting the accumulation of genetic, phenotypic and phenological differences between evolutionary lineages, may have an important role in the biodiversity conservation. It reflects. Consequently, preserving sites with the greatest amount of phylogenetic variability will, in turn, preserve the greatest variation.in organismal features and, in some cases, functions [2]. Developing from 2020 and 2023, macroDIVERSITY project (PRIN 2017) aims at integrate spectral (SD) and phylogenetic (PD) diversity to map the functional diversity of freshwater macrophyte communities at different spatial scales and trophic gradients. Within the framework of macroDIVERSITY, , we will collect data on macrophyte diversity from plots sampled over selected lakes in Central and Northern Ital, based on robust experimental design. The PD of each plot will be quantified using the Faith's metric. The Net Relatedness index (NRI) and the Nearest Taxon Index (NTI) will also be used to quantify the degree of the community phylogenetic clustering/overdispersion among species within each plot [3]. Using the described approach, we aim to 1) delineate the evolutionary relationships within the wetland communities; 2) obtain PD metrics of each macrophyte community/ecosystem; 3) achieve a feedback on wetlands genetic sustainability of Central and Northern Italy.

The major morphological features of a galaxy are thought to be determined by the assembly history and net spin of its surrounding dark halo. In the simplest scenario, disc galaxies form predominantly in haloes with high angular momentum and quiet recent assembly history, whereas spheroids are the slowly rotating remnants of repeated merging events. We explore these assumptions using 100 systems with halo masses similar to that of the Milky Way, identified in a series of cosmological gasdynamical simulations: the GalaxiesIntergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (gimic). At z= 0, the simulated galaxies exhibit a wide variety of morphologies, from dispersion-dominated spheroids to pure disc galaxies. Surprisingly, these morphological features are very poorly correlated with their halo properties: discs form in haloes with high and low net spin, and mergers play a negligible role in the formation of spheroids, whose stars form primarily in situ. With hindsight, this weak correlation between halo and galaxy properties is unsurprising given that a minority of the available baryons (similar to 40 per cent) end up in galaxies. More important to morphology is the coherent alignment of the angular momentum of baryons that accrete over time to form a galaxy. Spheroids tend to form when the spin of newly accreted gas is misaligned with that of the extant galaxy, leading to the episodic formation of stars with different kinematics that cancel out the net rotation of the system. Discs, on the other hand, form out of gas that flows in with similar angular momentum to that of earlier accreted material. Gas accretion from a hot corona thus favours disc formation, whereas gas that flows cold, often along separate, misaligned filaments, favours the formation of spheroids. In this scenario, many spheroids consist of the superposition of stellar components with distinct kinematics, age and metallicity, an arrangement that might survive to the present day given the paucity of major mergers. Since angular momentum is acquired largely at turnaround, morphology depends on the early interplay between the tidal field and the shape of the material destined to form a galaxy.

We investigate the physical state of H?i absorbing gas at low redshift (z = 0.25) using a subset of cosmological, hydrodynamic simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project, focusing in particular on broad (bHI=40 km s-1) H?i Lya absorbers (BLAs), which are believed to originate in shock-heated gas in the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). Our fiducial model, which includes radiative cooling by heavy elements and feedback by supernovae and active galactic nuclei, predicts that by z = 0.25 nearly 60?per cent of the gas mass ends up at densities and temperatures characteristic of the WHIM and we find that half of this fraction is due to outflows. The standard H?i observables (distribution of H?i column densities NH?I, distribution of Doppler parameters bHI, bHINH?I correlation) and the BLA line number density predicted by our simulations are in remarkably good agreement with observations. BLAs arise in gas that is hotter, more highly ionized and more enriched than the gas giving rise to typical Lya forest absorbers. The majority of the BLAs arise in warm-hot [log?(T/?K) similar to 5] gas at low (log?? < 1.5) overdensities. On average, thermal broadening accounts for at least 60?per cent of the BLA linewidth, which in turn can be used as a rough indicator of the thermal state of the gas. Detectable BLAs account for only a small fraction of the true baryon content of the WHIM at low redshift. In order to detect the bulk of the mass in this gas phase, a sensitivity at least one order of magnitude better than achieved by current ultraviolet spectrographs is required. We argue that BLAs mostly trace gas that has been shock heated and enriched by outflows and that they therefore provide an important window on a poorly understood feedback process.

We use the Galaxies-Intergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (GIMIC) suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the formation of stellar spheroids of Milky Way-mass disc galaxies. The simulations contain accurate treatments of metal-dependent radiative cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and chemodynamics, and the large volumes that have been simulated yield an unprecedentedly large sample of ~400 simulated L_* disc galaxies. The simulated galaxies are surrounded by low-mass, low-surface brightness stellar haloes that extend out to ~100 kpc and beyond. The diffuse stellar distributions bear a remarkable resemblance to those observed around the Milky Way, M31 and other nearby galaxies, in terms of mass density, surface brightness, and metallicity profiles. We show that in situ star formation typically dominates the stellar spheroids by mass at radii of r < 30 kpc, whereas accretion of stars dominates at larger radii and this change in origin induces a change in slope of the surface brightness and metallicity profiles, which is also present in the observational data. The system-to-system scatter in the in situ mass fractions of the spheroid, however, is large and spans over a factor of 4. Consequently, there is a large degree of scatter in the shape and normalisation of the spheroid density profile within r < 30 kpc (e.g., when fit by a spherical powerlaw profile the indices range from -2.6 to -3.4). We show that the in situ mass fraction of the spheroid is linked to the formation epoch of the system. Dynamically older systems have, on average, larger contributions from in situ star formation, although there is significant system-to-system scatter in this relationship. Thus, in situ star formation likely represents the solution to the longstanding failure of pure accretion-based models to reproduce the observed properties of the inner spheroid., The paper contains 22 pages and 14 figures. Accepted to MNRAS (2011 June 13)

[Abridged] The relatively recent insight that energy input from supermassive black holes (BHs) can have a substantial effect on the star formation rates (SFRs) of galaxies motivates us to examine its effects on the scale of galaxy groups. At present, groups contain most of the galaxies and a significant fraction of the overall baryon content of the universe. To explore the effects of BH feedback on groups, we analyse two high resolution cosmological hydro simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project. While both include galactic winds driven by supernovae, only one includes feedback from BHs. We compare the properties of the simulated groups to a wide range of observational data, including hot gas radial profiles and gas mass fractions (fgas), luminosity-mass-temperature (L-M-T) scaling relations, K-band luminosity of the group and its central brightest galaxy (CBG), SFRs and ages of the CBG, and gas/stellar metallicities. Both runs yield entropy profiles similar to the data, while the run without AGN feedback yields highly peaked temperature profiles, in discord with the observations. Energy input from BHs significantly reduces fgas for groups with masses less than ~10^14 Msun, yielding fgas-T and L-T relations that are in agreement with the data. The run without AGN feedback suffers from the well known overcooling problem; the resulting K-band luminosities are much larger than observed. By contrast, the run that includes BH feedback yields K-band luminosities and CBG SFRs and ages in agreement with current estimates. Both runs yield very similar gas-phase metallicities that match X-ray data, but they predict very different stellar metallicities. Based on the above, galaxy groups provide a compelling case that BH feedback is a crucial ingredient in the formation of massive galaxies., 21 pages, 13 figures - to match the accepted MNRAS version. Clarifications made to text, results and conclusions unchanged.

We report the discovery of BOSS-EUVLG1 at z = 2.469, by far the most luminous, almost un-obscured star-forming galaxy known at any redshift. First classified as a QSO within the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, follow-up observations with the Gran Telescopio Canarias reveal that its large luminosity, MUV ≃ -24.40 and log(LLyα/erg s-1) ≃ 44.0, is due to an intense burst of star formation, and not to an active galactic nucleus or gravitational lensing. BOSS-EUVLG1 is a compact (reff ≃ 1.2 kpc), young (4-5 Myr) starburst with a stellar mass log(Mz.ast;/M) = 10.0-0.1 and a prodigious star formation rate of ≃1000 M yr-1. However, it is metal- and dust-poor [12 + log(O/H) = 8.13 ± 0.19, E(B - V) ≃ 0.07, log(LIR/LUV) < -1.2], indicating that we are witnessing the very early phase of an intense starburst that has had no time to enrich the ISM. BOSS-EUVLG1 might represent a short-lived (, With funding from the Spanish government through the "María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence" accreditation (MDM-2017-0737)

Dwarfs are the largest population of galaxies in number in the nearby Universe. Deep spectroscopic data are still missing to obtain a better understanding of their formation and evolution processes. This study shows the results obtained from a spectroscopic campaign in the Perseus cluster. We have obtained 963 new galaxy spectra. We have measured the recessional velocity of the galaxies by using a cross-correlation technique. These data have been used to obtain the cluster membership, the dynamics of the galaxies, and the spectroscopic luminosity function (LF) of the cluster. The cluster membership was obtained by using the peak + gap technique, reporting a total of 403 galaxies as cluster members within 1.4r200. The mean velocity and velocity dispersion of the cluster galaxies are Vc = 5258 km s−1 and σc = 1040 km s−1, respectively. We obtained M200 = 1.2 × 1015 M⊙ and r200 = 2.2 Mpc for this cluster. The clusters members were classified blue and red according to their g − r stellar colour. The velocity dispersion of these two families of galaxies is different, indicating that the blue galaxies can be classified as recently accreted into the cluster. We present the spectroscopic galaxy LF of the cluster. This function turned to be flat: α = 0.99 ± 0.06. In addition, blue and red galaxies show similar densities in the faint end of the LF. This indicates that Perseus does not have a population of red dwarf galaxias as large as other nearby clusters. We have compared the LF of the Perseus cluster with other spectroscopic LFs of nearby clusters and those from cosmological simulations. This comparison shows that the spectroscopic LF of nearby galaxy cluster is far from universal.

We present the results of a new study of dust attenuation at redshifts $3 < z < 4$ based on a sample of $236$ star-forming galaxies from the VANDELS spectroscopic survey. Motivated by results from the First Billion Years (FiBY) simulation project, we argue that the intrinsic spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of star-forming galaxies at these redshifts have a self-similar shape across the mass range $8.2 \leq$ log$(M_{\star}/M_{\odot}) \leq 10.6$ probed by our sample. Using FiBY data, we construct a set of intrinsic SED templates which incorporate both detailed star formation and chemical abundance histories, and a variety of stellar population synthesis (SPS) model assumptions. With this set of intrinsic SEDs, we present a novel approach for directly recovering the shape and normalization of the dust attenuation curve. We find, across all of the intrinsic templates considered, that the average attenuation curve for star-forming galaxies at $z\simeq3.5$ is similar in shape to the commonly-adopted Calzetti starburst law, with an average total-to-selective attenuation ratio of $R_{V}=4.18\pm0.29$. We show that the optical attenuation ($A_V$) versus stellar mass ($M_{\star}$) relation predicted using our method is consistent with recent ALMA observations of galaxies at $2, Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS