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This study evaluates the relationship between both commercial and scientific spatial fisheries data and a new satellite-based estimate of potential fish production (Ocean Productivity available to Fish, OPFish) in the European Seas. To construct OPFish, we used productivity frontal features derived from chlorophyll-a horizontal gradients, which characterize 10%–20% of the global phytoplankton production that effectively fuels higher trophic levels. OPFish is relatively consistent with the spatial distribution of both pelagic and demersal fish landings and catches per unit of effort (LPUEs and CPUEs, respectively). An index of harvest relative to ocean productivity (HP index) is calculated by dividing these LPUEs or CPUEs with OPFish. The HP index reflects the intensity of fishing by gear type with regard to local fish production. Low HP levels indicate lower LPUEs or CPUEs than expected from oceanic production, suggesting over-exploitation, while high HP levels imply more sustainable fishing. HP allows comparing the production-dependent suitability of local fishing intensities. Our results from bottom trawl data highlight that over-exploitation of demersal species from the shelves is twice as high in the Mediterranean Sea than in the North-East Atlantic. The estimate of HP index by dominant pelagic and demersal gears suggests that midwater and bottom otter trawls are associated with the lowest and highest overfishing, respectively. The contrasts of fishing intensity at local scales captured by the HP index suggest that accounting for the local potential fish production can promote fisheries sustainability in the context of ecosystem-based fisheries management as required by international marine policies., With the institutional support of the ‘Severo OchoaCentre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S).

Understanding population connectivity within a species as well as potential interactions with its close relatives is crucial to define management units and to derive efficient management actions. However, although genetics can reveal mismatches between biological and management units and other relevant but hidden information such as species misidentification or hybridization, the uptake of genetic methods by the fisheries management process is far from having been consolidated. Here, we have assessed the power of genetics to better understand the population connectivity of white (Lophius piscatorius) and its interaction with its sister species, the black anglerfish (Lophius budegassa). Our analyses, based on thousands of genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms, show three findings that are crucial for white anglerfish management. We found (i) that white anglerfish is likely composed of a single panmictic population throughout the Northeast Atlantic, challenging the three-stock based management, (ii) that a fraction of specimens classified as white anglerfish using morphological characteristics are genetically identified as black anglerfish (L. budegassa), and iii) that the two Lophius species naturally hybridize leading to a population of hybrids of up to 20% in certain areas. Our results set the basics for a genetics-informed white anglerfish assessment framework that accounts for stock connectivity, revises and establishes new diagnostic characters for Lophius species identification, and evaluates the effect of hybrids in the current and future assessments of the white anglerfish. Furthermore, our study contributes to provide additional evidence of the potentially negative consequences of ignoring genetic data for assessing fisheries resources., SI

To ensure food security and nutritional quality for a growing world population in the face of climate change, stagnant capture fisheries production, increasing aquaculture production and competition for natural resources, countries must be accountable for what they consume rather than what they produce. To investigate the sustainability of seafood consumption, we propose a methodology to examine the impact of seafood supply chains across national boundaries: the seafood consumption footprint. The seafood consumption footprint is expressed as the biomass of domestic and imported seafood production required to satisfy national seafood consumption, and is estimated using a multi-regional input output model. Thus, we reconstruct for the first time the global fish biomass flows in national supply chains to estimate consumption footprints at the global, country and sector levels (capture fisheries, aquaculture, distribution and processing, and reduction into fishmeal and fish oil) taking into account the biomass supply from beyond national borders. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-018-1060-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Discarding is a common practice in fisheries. Total discards are estimated to be about 30 million tons, representing around 23% of worldwide catches. Discarding is an undesirable practice, not only because of the waste of resources, but also because of its contribution to the overexploitation of fish stocks. Several countries have already established discard bans, to different extents (e.g., Norway, Iceland, Chile, New Zealand). The EU’s landing obligation (discard ban) is a major measure of the latest reform of the Common Fisheries Policy for EU fisheries. It aims to reduce unwanted catches in EU fisheries, by incentivizing improved selectivity and restoring fish stocks to levels that can sustain the maximum production over time without harming the biodiversity and the capacity of future generations to obtain fish. However, banning discards will inevitably induce diverse short- and long-term ecological, economic, and social impacts, which may determine whether the landing obligation’s objectives will be achieved.

ChemAgora, a web application designed and developed in the context of the “Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety Assessment” (diXa) project, provides search capabilities to chemical data from resources available online, enabling users to cross-reference their search results with both regulatory chemical information and public chemical databases. ChemAgora, through an on-the-fly search, informs whether a chemical is known or not in each of the external data sources and provides clikable links leading to the third-party web site pages containing the information. The original purpose of the ChemAgora application was to correlate studies stored in the diXa data warehouse with available chemical data. Since the end of the diXa project, ChemAgora has evolved into an independent portal, currently accessible directly through the ChemAgora home page, with improved search capabilities of online data sources.

FishTrace is a genetic catalogue for species identification associated to reference collections of taxonomically identified vouchers from more than 200 commercial marine fish species. The main purpose of the genetic catalogue is to enable reliable species identification for research purposes as well as in support of traceability schemes under the remit of food and feed laws. A major asset of FishTrace is that all genetic data are linked to biological collections of vouchers, that is the fish specimen that have been identified genetically have, at the same time, been identified by taxonomists and are stored and curated by natural history museums. This opens the potential for future applications related to fish species authenticity tests, also in a legal context, and associated biological research. The genetic catalogue, which contains molecular data together with detailed information on sampling and geographical origin, is publically accessible on the web site of the project. Database URL https://fishtrace.jrc.ec.europa.eu

Information and Communication Technologies have great potential, in the context of natural resources utilization, to improve efficiency by making homes, offices, industries and transportation systems more ‘intelligent’: more information use can be traded off with less energy use. The paper presents a system to monitor and interactively control water and gas utilization, allowing consumers to be better informed about their consumption behaviour and challenging them to improve efficiency in utilization along with saving costs. In the system, smart meters are used in order to collect data on gas and water consumption; the data collected through this kind of meters are made available, almost in real time, in a graphical representation both to the customer and the supplier. The availability of a higher quantity of information about consumption can be used by consumers to improve utilization efficiency; moreover, it can also be seen as a challenge to modify personal consumption behaviours. As a consequence, in ...

The present study applies classic spectral analysis techniques to investigate cyclic patterns in four tree-ring chronologies of Pinus montana Miller from the Central Italian Alps (Valle del Gallo). Three of the chronologies were derived from mountain pine populations located in relatively undisturbed areas of the valley bottom and valley slopes, and one from a population located in an area of the valley bottom occasionally affected by sheetfloods. Each chronology consists of raw, standard, and residual data. We estimated power spectra by applying the Blackman–Tukey Method, the Maximum Entropy Method, the Multitaper Method, and the Lomb–Scargle Fourier transform, and tested the results against appropriate red noise models. The power spectra of the standard chronologies from undisturbed areas yielded statistically significant and reproducible interdecadal-scale cyclicities with main peaks closely spaced around a mean value of ∼0.05 cycle/year, in association with statistically non-significant albeit reproducible peaks at higher frequencies. The chronology of trees affected by sheetfloods yielded no statistically significant cyclicities, probably because sheetfloods altered tree growth. Raw chronologies, instead, yielded power spectra dominated by the growth trend, while residual chronologies yielded flat power spectra. Our analysis suggests that tree growth, if not disturbed by external geomorphological factors, was controlled by environmental and/or climatic conditions that oscillated in the last ∼150 years on interdecadal (∼20 years) to decadal scales.

Corrigendum: Gene-associated markers provide tools for tackling illegal fishing and false eco-certification

IN THIS PAPER, a unified framework for combining browsing and searching capabilities in a hypertext system is presented. The retrieval process in the model introduced is regarded as a process of inference that can be carried out either by the user, exploring the hypertext network—browsing, or by the system, exploiting the hypertext network as a knowledge base—searching. The architecture of a prototype system based on the model is described. Design and implementation issues are emphasized and an evaluation of the system’s capacity for information retrieval is given.

In the first generation of hypermedia systems the main focus was on the flexibility of information organisation and on the ease of navigational access. In particular, this way of interaction was emphasised in contrast with traditional information retrieval systems based on formal query languages. Unfortunately, the limitations of the browsing paradigm were soon realised when approaching real and large hypermedia applications and thus the well-known problems of disorientation and cognitive overhead have been frequently reported and discussed in the literature [18]. In order to alleviate such problems, search capabilities for hypertexts have been added in a more or less integrated way. The effect of this is that content-based requests can be submitted and directly evaluated yielding an immediate answer to a query, whereas a browsing session can take a long time before converging to the goal or it may not converge at all. The problem still remains that such queries do not take into account the structure of information and do not retrieve linked collections of information based on the specification of their structure as well as of their content.

Motivation: The field of toxicogenomics (the application of ‘-omics’ technologies to risk assessment of compound toxicities) has expanded in the last decade, partly driven by new legislation, aimed at reducing animal testing in chemical risk assessment but mainly as a result of a paradigm change in toxicology towards the use and integration of genome wide data. Many research groups worldwide have generated large amounts of such toxicogenomics data. However, there is no centralized repository for archiving and making these data and associated tools for their analysis easily available. Results: The Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety Assessment (diXa) is a robust and sustainable infrastructure storing toxicogenomics data. A central data warehouse is connected to a portal with links to chemical information and molecular and phenotype data. diXa is publicly available through a user-friendly web interface. New data can be readily deposited into diXa using guidelines and templates available online. Analysis descriptions and tools for interrogating the data are available via the diXa portal. Availability and implementation: http://www.dixa-fp7.eu Contact: d.hendrickx@maastrichtuniversity.nl; info@dixa-fp7.eu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

We present a graph-based object model that may be used as a uniform framework for direct manipulation of multimedia information. After an introduction motivating the need for abstraction and structuring mechanisms in hypermedia systems, we introduce the data model and the notion of perspective, a form of data abstraction that acts as a user interface to the system, providing control over the visibility of the objects and their properties. A perspective is defined to include an intension and an extension. The intension is defined in terms of a pattern, a subgraph of the schema graph, and the extension is the set of pattern-matching instances. Perspectives, as well as database schema and instances, are graph structures that can be manipulated in various ways. The resulting uniform approach is well suited to a visual interface. A visual interface for complex information systems provides high semantic power, thus exploiting the semantic expressibility of the underlying data model, while maintaining ease of interaction with the system. In this way, we reach the goal of decreasing cognitive load on the user, with the additional advantage of always maintaining the same interaction style. We present a visual retrieval environment that effectively combines filtering, browsing, and navigation to provide an integrated view of the retrieval problem. Design and implementation issues are outlined for MORE (Multimedia Object Retrieval Environment), a prototype system relying on the proposed model. The focus is on the main user interface functionalities, and actual interaction sessions are presented including schema creation, information loading, and information retrieval.

In the simulation field the demand for distributed architectures is increasing for several reasons, mainly to reuse existing simulators and to model complex systems that could be difficult to realize with a single application. In this paper the ASIA platform that aims at supporting the simulation design and simulators integration is presented. The paper focuses mainly on the comparison of the ASIA platform and the High Level Architecture standard. An example in the manufacturing field is presented as a basis for the comparison of the two approaches. Finally, some considerations are outlined in the perspective of the integration of the two environments.