Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives.

Discute a interdisciplinaridade como um movimento contemporâneo presente nas dimensões da epistemologia e da pedagogia, que vem marcando o rompimento com uma visão cartesiana e mecanicista de mundo e de educação e, ao mesmo tempo, assumindo uma concepção mais integradora, dialética e totalizadora na construção do conhecimento e da prática pedagógica. Inicialmente, faz-se uma breve apresentação da origem histórica desse movimento, discutem-se aspectos de sua conceituação e suas implicações no campo das diferentes ciências contemporâneas para então apresentar a interdisciplinaridade como um importante fenômeno de articulação do processo de ensino e aprendizagem. A argumentação apresentada no texto busca destacar que o movimento da interdisciplinaridade pode transformar profundamente a qualidade da educação escolar por intermédio de seus processos de ensino.

MOTIVATION: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. MAIN TYPES OF VARIABLES INCLUDED: The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record. SPATIAL LOCATION AND GRAIN: ). TIME PERIOD AND GRAIN: BioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year. MAJOR TAXA AND LEVEL OF MEASUREMENT: BioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates. SOFTWARE FORMAT: .csv and .SQL.

OBJECTIVE: To translate the Perceived Stress Scale into Brazilian Portuguese, and to assess its validity for measuring perceived stress of Brazilian elderly. METHODS: The scale was translated and tested in its full version including 14 questions and in a shortened version including ten questions. The whole translation process consisted of translation, back-translation and committee review. The translated version was applied, by means of interview, to 76 elders aged on average 70.04 years (SD=6.34; range: 60-84). The internal consistency was verified by means of the Cronbach's alpha coefficient and the construct validity was analyzed by means of factorial exploratory analysis with varimax rotation. Full and shortened score means were analyzed comparing the perceived stress in terms of self-assessment of health, perceived socioeconomic condition, marital status, and living conditions, among others. RESULTS: As for reliability, the full version has showed similar internal consistency (r=0.82) compared to the shortened one (r=0.83). The factorial analysis found two factors for the full and one factor for the shortened scale. Question 12 showed the lowest factorial loads. When analyzing PSS likelihood of differentiating the perceived stress in terms of the study variables, it was found the full scale had greater differences in perceived stress than the shortened scale. CONCLUSIONS: The Perceived Stress Scale proved to be a clear and reliable tool to measure the perceived stress of Brazilian elderly, showing suitable psychometric performance.

Probiotics, live cells with different beneficiary characteristics, have been extensivelly studied and explored commercially in many different products in the world. Their benefits to human and animal health have been proven in hundreds of scientific research. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium are the main probiotic groups; however, there are reports on the probiotic potential of Pediococcus, Lactococcus, Bacillus and yeasts. Some of the identified probiotic strains exhibit powerful anti-inflammatory, antiallergic and other important properties. Apart from that, the consumption of dairy and non-dairy products stimulates the immunity in different ways. Various food matrices have been used with probiotics, which are briefly documented. In this review, the history of probiotics, their application in the health and food areas and new trends in probiotic products and processes are presented.

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Gamification is increasingly becoming a pertinent aspect of any UI and UX design. However, a canonical dearth in research and application of gamification has been related to the role of individual differences in susceptibility to gamification and its varied designs. To address this gap, this study reviews the extant corpus of research on tailored gamification (42 studies). The findings of the review indicate that most studies on the field are mostly focused on user modeling for a future personalization, adaptation, or recommendation of game elements. This user model usually contains the users’ preferences of play (i.e., player types), and is mostly applied in educational settings. The main contributions of this paper are a standardized terminology of the game elements used in tailored gamification, the discussion on the most suitable game elements for each users’ characteristic, and a research agenda including dynamic modeling, exploring multiple characteristics simultaneously, and understanding the effects of other aspects of the interaction on user experience.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, the World Health Organization and the majority of governments have recommended that the entire human population should 'stay-at-home'. A significant proportion of the population live alone or are vulnerable to mental health problems yet, in the vast majority of cases, individuals in social isolation have no access to mental healthcare. The only resource is people themselves using self-help, self-medication and self-care. During prolonged COVID-19 isolation, an in-built system of homeostasis can help rebalance activity, thought and feeling. Increased physical activity enables a reset of physical and mental well-being. During periods of lockdown, it is recommended that exercise should be as vigorously promoted as social distancing itself.

Maize is the agronomic grass species that is most sensitive to variations in plant density. For each production system, there is a population that maximizes grain yield. This article presents an overview of the factors that affect optimum plant population, emphasizingthe effects of dense stands on ear development and discussing important changes in plant traits that have contributed to increase the tolerance of modern hybrids to high plant densities. Population for maize maximum economic grain yield varies from 30,000 to over 90,000pl.ha-1, depending on water availability, soil fertility, maturity rating, planting date and row spacing. When the number of individuals per area is increased beyond the optimum plant density, there is a series of consequences that are detrimental to ear ontogeny and result in barrenness. First, ear differentiation is delayed in relation to tassel differentiation. Later-initiated earshoots have a reduced growth rate, resulting in fewer spikelet primordia transformed into functional florets by the time of flowering. Functional florets extrude silks slowly, decreasing the number of fertilized spikelets due to the lack of synchrony between anthesis and silking. Limitations in carbon and nitrogen supply to the ear stimulate young kernel abortion immediately after fertilization. Availability of earlier hybrids, with shorter plant height, lower leaf number, upright leaves, smaller tassels and better synchrony between male and female flowering time has enhanced the ability of maize to face high plant populations without showing excessive barrenness. Improved endurance in high stands has allowed maize to intercept and use solar radiation more efficiently, contributing to the remarkable increase in grain yield potential experienced by this crop.

In the future, new aspects from decentralized generation using different dc voltage levels are expected to influence the general concept of power exchange. Converter are needed to adapt the voltage between low voltage (LV), medium voltage (MV), and high voltage (HV). In this paper, a galvanic isolated bidirectional dc/dc converter based on the modular multilevel converter is studied, with a large potential for secure and flexible dc power flow control. The use of medium frequency transformation allows savings in copper and iron. A fundamental frequency modulation method is introduced for the presented converter, that enables variable stepup or step-down between primary and secondary dc voltage in discrete steps. The balancing mechanism of the internal power storage components is explained and verified by simulation and experiment.

Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land-climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variation at the organ and plant level and (2) leaf economics balancing leaf persistence against plant growth potential. The orthogonality of these two axes suggests they are differently influenced by environmental drivers. We find that these axes persist in a global dataset of 17 traits across more than 20,000 species. We find a dominant joint effect of climate and soil on trait variation. Additional independent climate effects are also observed across most traits, whereas independent soil effects are almost exclusively observed for economics traits. Variation in size traits correlates well with a latitudinal gradient related to water or energy limitation. In contrast, variation in economics traits is better explained by interactions of climate with soil fertility. These findings have the potential to improve our understanding of biodiversity patterns and our predictions of climate change impacts on biogeochemical cycles.

Brazil's large land base is important for global food security but its high dependency on inorganic phosphorus (P) fertilizer for crop production (2.2 Tg rising up to 4.6 Tg in 2050) is not a sustainable use of a critical and price-volatile resource. A new strategic analysis of current and future P demand/supply concluded that the nation's secondary P resources which are produced annually (e.g. livestock manures, sugarcane processing residues) could potentially provide up to 20% of crop P demand by 2050 with further investment in P recovery technologies. However, the much larger legacy stores of secondary P in the soil (30 Tg in 2016 worth over $40 billion and rising to 105 Tg by 2050) could provide a more important buffer against future P scarcity or sudden P price fluctuations, and enable a transition to more sustainable P input strategies that could reduce current annual P surpluses by 65%. In the longer-term, farming systems in Brazil should be redesigned to operate profitably but more sustainably under lower soil P fertility thresholds.

This paper presents a model for use in the problem of multistage planning of energy distribution systems including distributed generation. The expansion model allows alternatives to be considered for increasing the capacity of existing substations, for installing new ones, for using distributed generation, and for the possible change to feeders in terms of addition and removing feeders sections; combining, subdividing, and load transfer between feeders; and replacement of conductors. The objective function to be minimized is the present value of total installation costs (feeders and substations), of operating and maintaining the network, and of distributed generation. The model takes operational constraints on equipment capacities and voltage limits together into account with logical constraints, aimed at reducing the search space. This paper presents: (1) an extension to the linear disjunctive formulation to represent the inclusion, exclusion, and replacement of branches and (2) a generalization of constraints related to the creation of new paths which can be applied in more complex topologies. The resulting mixed integer linear model allows the optimal solution to be found using mathematical programming methods, such as the branch-and-bound algorithm. The validity and efficiency of the model are demonstrated in Part II of this paper.

Abstract Aims Vegetation‐plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co‐occurring in the same community. Vegetation‐plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level. Results sPlot version 2.1 contains records from 1,121,244 vegetation plots, which comprise 23,586,216 records of plant species and their relative cover or abundance in plots collected worldwide between 1885 and 2015. We complemented the information for each plot by retrieving climate and soil conditions and the biogeographic context (e.g., biomes) from external sources, and by calculating community‐weighted means and variances of traits using gap‐filled data from the global plant trait database TRY. Moreover, we created a phylogenetic tree for 50,167 out of the 54,519 species identified in the plots. We present the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community‐weighted means of key traits. Conclusions The availability of vegetation plot data in sPlot offers new avenues for vegetation analysis at the global scale.

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising generation of digital technologies. Recent applications and research suggest that AI can not only influence but also accelerate innovation in organizations. However, as the field is rapidly growing, a common understanding of the underlying theoretical capabilities has become increasingly vague and fraught with ambiguity. In view of the centrality of innovation capabilities in making innovation happen, we bring together these scattered perspectives in a systematic and multidisciplinary literature review. The aim of this literature review is to summarize the role of AI in influencing innovation capabilities and provide a taxonomy of AI applications based on empirical studies. Drawing on the technological–organizational–environmental (TOE) framework, our review condenses the research findings of 62 studies. The results of our study are twofold. First, we identify a dichotomous view of innovation capabilities triggered by AI adoption: enabling and enhancing . The enabling capabilities are those that research identifies as enablers of AI adoption, underscoring the competencies and routines needed to implement AI. The enhancing capabilities denote the role that AI adoption has in transforming or creating innovation capabilities in organizations. Second, we propose a taxonomy of AI applications that reflects the practical adoption of AI in relation to three underlying reasons: replace , reinforce , and reveal . Our study makes three main contributions. First, we identify the innovation capabilities that are either required for or generated by AI adoption. Second, we propose a taxonomy of AI applications. Third, we use the TOE framework to track trends in the theoretical contributions of recent articles and propose a research agenda.

RESUMO - Os efeitos de diferentes níveis de concentrado sobre o comportamento ingestivo foram estudados com cinco bezerros holandeses, inteiros, com idade e peso corporal médios iniciais de 10,8±0,8 meses e 233,4±26,1 kg PV. Os animais foram alojados em baias individuais e alimentados à vontade com dietas contendo 30, 45, 60, 75 e 90% de concentrado, com base na MS. As rações contendo, aproximadamente, 16% PB foram formuladas para taxa de ganho de peso de 1,0 kg/dia e compostas por farelo de soja, fubá de milho e feno de capim coast-cross. O delineamento experimental em blocos casualizados com cinco tratamentos, com duração de 20 dias, 12 dias de adaptação e quatro períodos de dois dias, relativos à coleta de dados foi usado. O tempo despendido em alimentação e ruminação diminuiu, e o tempo de ócio aumentou linearmente, em função do aumento dos níveis de concentrado. A eficiência de alimentação em g MS/h registrou comportamento quadrático, estimando-se o valor máximo em 826,81 g FDN/h, para o nível de 60,77% de concentrado. A elevação no nível de concentrado nas dietas aumentou linearmente a eficiência de ruminação em g MS/h, mas em g FDN/h decresceu linearmente. O número de bolos ruminais e de mastigações merícicas por dia decresceu linearmente. O número e o tempo de mastigação merícica por bolo registraram comportamento quadrático, estimando-se valores máximos de 73,79 mastigações e 66,61 segundos, por bolo ruminal, para os níveis de 48,51 e 54,44% de concentrado, respectivamente.

Abstract The continuous development of world aquaculture demands new strategies and alternatives aimed to achieve sustainability. The use or microorganisms in aquaculture has greatly evolved during the last two decades. From being considered as a potential threat, during the last years, they have been used as probiotics and inclusively as food source for fish and crustacean. The microbial‐based systems represent one of the most viable strategies to achieve a sustainable aquaculture. In short, these systems are based on the promotion of microbial proliferation, either autotrophic or heterotrophic microorganisms; these microbes are expected to use, recycle and transform the excess of nutrients from faeces, dead organisms, unconsumed food and diverse metabolites into biomass, which would be further consumed by the cultured organisms. Successful results on using microbial‐based systems have been documented around the world; however, there are key aspects to consider and yet to experiment before a system could be implemented. Some of those aspects are analysed in this manuscript, while new advances in the use of microbial‐based systems and recommendations are also presented.

Plant roots in the soil are under attack from many soil organisms. Although many ecologists are aware of the presence and importance of natural enemies in the soil that protect the plants from herbivores, the existence and nature of tritrophic interactions are poorly understood. So far, attention has focused on how plants protect their above‐ground parts against herbivorous arthropods, either directly or indirectly (i.e. by getting help from the herbivore’s enemies). This article is the first in showing that indirect plant defences also operate underground. We show that the roots of a coniferous plant ( Thuja occidentalis ) release chemicals upon attack by weevil larvae ( Otiorhynchus sulcatus ) and that these chemicals thereby attract parasitic nematodes ( Heterorhabditis megidis ).

Abstract Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments through a previously proposed and evaluated taxonomy while detailing and expanding this taxonomy. In the current paper, we describe our taxonomy in-depth as well as expand it. Our new structured results demonstrate an extension of the proposed taxonomy which results from this process, is divided into five dimensions, related to the learner and the learning environment. Our main contribution is the detailed taxonomy that can be used to design and evaluate gamification design in learning environments.

Grazing management has been the focus of the research with forage plants in Brazil for many years. Only in the last two decades, however, significant changes and advances have occurred regarding the understanding of the key factors and processes that determine adequate use of tropical forage plants in pastures. The objective of this review is to provide an historical overview of the research with forage plants and grasslands in Brazil, highlighting advances, trends, and results, as well as to describe the current state of the art and identify future perspectives and challenges. The information is presented in a systematic manner, favoring an integrated view of the different trends and research philosophies. A critical appraisal is given of the need for revision and change of paradigms as a means of improving and consolidating the knowledge on animal production from pastures. Such analysis idealizes efficient, sound and sustainable grazing management practices necessary to realize the existing potential for animal production in the tropics.