Publications by authors named "Luisa Conti"
In a rapidly evolving global landscape, education stands as a linchpin for navigating complex challenges and fostering sustainable development. This article delves into the transformative potential of education, with a particular focus on insights gleaned from the KIDS4ALLL project. Rooted in contrasting perspectives of education, the study emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift toward fostering critical thinking, creativity, and inclusivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetation records (greater than 7000 plots from 78 datasets) from a large range of habitats which we combined with existing trait databases.
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- Understanding how biodiversity helps maintain ecosystem stability over time is crucial in the context of global change.
- Ecologists believe that different functional traits among organisms play a key role in how local biodiversity influences the stability of ecosystem properties.
- The study reviews various mechanisms related to organism traits that affect stability, highlighting their importance for future research in both experimental and modeling approaches.
The study of insular systems has a long history in ecology and biogeography. Island plants often differ remarkably from their noninsular counterparts, constituting excellent models for exploring eco-evolutionary processes. Trait-based approaches can help to answer important questions in island biogeography, yet plant trait patterns on islands remain understudied.
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- Plant traits, which include various characteristics like morphology and physiology, play a crucial role in how plants interact with their environment and impact ecosystems, making them essential for research in areas like ecology, biodiversity, and environmental management.
- The TRY database, established in 2007, has become a vital resource for global plant trait data, promoting open access and enabling researchers to identify and fill data gaps for better ecological modeling.
- Although the TRY database provides extensive data, there are significant areas lacking consistent measurements, particularly for continuous traits that vary among individuals in their environments, presenting a major challenge that requires collaboration and coordinated efforts to address.
Across the globe, invasive alien species cause severe environmental changes, altering species composition and ecosystem functions. So far, mountain areas have mostly been spared from large-scale invasions. However, climate change, land-use abandonment, the development of tourism and the increasing ornamental trade will weaken the barriers to invasions in these systems.
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