Publications

This Open Access book is about the development of a common understanding of environmental citizenship. It conceptualizes and frames environmental citizenship taking an educational perspective. Organized in four complementary parts, the book first explains the political, economic and societal dimensions of the concept. Next, it examines environmental citizenship as a psychological concept with a specific focus on knowledge, values, beliefs and attitudes. It then explores environmental citizenship within the context of environmental education and education for sustainability. It elaborates responsible environmental behaviour, youth activism and education for sustainability through the lens of environmental citizenship. Finally, it discusses the concept within the context of different educational levels, such as primary and secondary education in formal and non-formal settings.

Environmental citizenship is a key factor in sustainability, green and cycle economy, and low-carbon society, and an important aspect in addressing global environmental problems. It has been an influential concept in many different arenas such as economy, policy, philosophy, and organizational marketing. In the field of education, the concept could be better exploited and established, however. Education and, especially, environmental discourses in science education have a great deal to contribute to the adoption and promotion of environmental citizenship.

Toxigenic cyanobacteria are one of the main health risks associated with water resources. Consequently, the analysis, control, and removal of cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins from water supplies is a high priority research area. This book presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research on water treatment methods for the removal of cyanobacteria, taste and odor compounds, and cyanotoxins.

Starting with an introduction to the subject, Water Treatment for Purification from Cyanobacteria and Cyanotoxins offers chapters on cyanotoxins and human health, conventional physical-chemical treatment for the removal of cyanobacteria/cyanotoxins, removal of cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins by membrane processes, biological treatment for the destruction of cyanotoxins, and conventional disinfection and/or oxidation processes. Other chapters look at advanced oxidation processes, removal/destruction of taste and odour compounds, transformation products of cyanobacterial metabolites during treatment and integrated drinking water processes.

• Provides a comprehensive overview of key methods for treating water tainted by cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins
• Bridges the gap between basic knowledge of cyanobacteria/cyanotoxins and practical management guidelines
• Includes integrated processes case studies and real-life examples
• Developed within the frame of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)–funded CYANOCOST

A must-have resource for every water treatment plant, Water Treatment for Purification from Cyanobacteria and Cyanotoxins is a valuable resource for all researchers in water chemistry and engineering, environmental chemistry as well as water companies and authorities, water resource engineers and managers, environmental and public health protection organizations.

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This open access volume provides for the first time a comprehensive description and scientific evaluation of underwater archaeological finds referring to human occupation of the continental shelf around the coastlines of Europe and the Mediterranean when sea levels were lower than present. These are the largest body of underwater finds worldwide, amounting to over 2500 find spots, ranging from individual stone tools to underwater villages with unique conditions of preservation. The material reviewed here ranges in date from the Lower Palaeolithic period to the Bronze Age and covers 20 countries bordering all the major marine basins from the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Norway to the Black Sea, and from the western Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean. The finds from each country are presented in their archaeological context, with information on the history of discovery, conditions of preservation and visibility, their relationship to regional changes in sea-level and coastal geomorphology, and the institutional arrangements for their investigation and protection. Editorial introductions summarise the findings from each of the major marine basins. There is also a final section with extensive discussion of the historical background and the legal and regulatory frameworks that inform the management of the underwater cultural heritage and collaboration between offshore industries, archaeologists and government agencies.

The volume is based on the work of COST Action TD0902 SPLASHCOS, a multi-disciplinary and multi-national research network supported by the EU-funded COST organisation (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The primary readership is research and professional archaeologists, marine and Quaternary scientists, cultural-heritage managers, commercial and governmental organisations, policy makers, and all those with an interest in the sea floor of the continental shelf and the human impact of changes in climate, sea-level and coastal geomorphology.

In this journal released by Springer, the main findings of the COST Positive Network are explored in 5 articles centered around ‘Interindividual Variation in Response to Consumption of Plant Food Bioactives and Determinants Involved’.

This Open Access textbook provides students and researchers in the life sciences with essential practical information on how to quantitatively analyze data images. It refrains from focusing on theory, and instead uses practical examples and step-by step protocols to familiarize readers with the most commonly used image processing and analysis platforms such as ImageJ, MatLab and Python. Besides gaining knowhow on algorithm usage, readers will learn how to create an analysis pipeline by scripting language; these skills are important in order to document reproducible image analysis workflows.

The textbook is chiefly intended for advanced undergraduates in the life sciences and biomedicine without a theoretical background in data analysis, as well as for postdocs, staff scientists and faculty members who need to perform regular quantitative analyses of microscopy images.

This open access book addresses the various disciplinary aspects of nature-based solutions in flood risk management on private land. In recent decades, water management has been moving towards nature-based solutions. These are assumed to be much more multi-purpose than traditional “grey infrastructures” and seem to be regarded as a panacea for many environmental issues. At the same time, such measures require more – and mostly privately owned – land and more diverse stakeholder involvement than traditional (grey) engineering approaches. They also present challenges related to different disciplines. Nature-based solutions for flood risk management not only require technical expertise, but also call for interdisciplinary insights from land-use planning, economics, property rights, sociology, landscape planning, ecology, hydrology, agriculture and other disciplines to address the challenges of implementing them. Ultimately, nature-based flood risk management is a multi-disciplinary endeavor. Featuring numerous case studies of nature-based flood risk management accompanied by commentaries, this book presents brief academic reflections from two different disciplinary perspectives that critically highlight which specific aspects are of significance, and as such, underscore the multi-disciplinary nature of the challenges faced.

This document reports the State of the Art of science and practice on three topics
related to smart and healthy ageing at home: furniture and habitats, Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), and healthcare. The reports were prepared by
the working groups of COST Action CA16226, Sheld-on. Sheld-on is a network of
researchers, user representatives, industry members, and other stakeholders. The three
domains covered in this report were the areas of interest for three working groups from
the COST Action. The aim of each working group was to assess the State of the Art for
disciplinary understanding, identification of advances in smart furniture and habitat,
products, industries and success stories. The findings on these topics of all working
groups are compiled here. Due to the different backgrounds of the members of each
of the working groups, the document is divided in three separate parts that can be
considered as separate State of the Art reports. The goal of this document is to be used
as input in the fourth working group of Sheld-on COST Action: Solutions for Ageing
Well at Home, in the Community, and at Work, where experts from the three different
domains converge to a single working group in order to achieve the action objectives.

At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore’s law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics.

Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.