Trends of soil organic carbon (SOC) are significant indicators for land and soil degradation. Decrease in SOC compromises the efforts to achieve by 2030, a land degradation neutral world, as required by Target 15.3 of the Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by United Nations in September 2015.

We consider a core-radius approach to nonlocal perimeters governed by isotropic kernels having critical and supercritical exponents, extending the nowadays classical notion of s-fractional perimeter, defined for 0<s<1, to the case s>=1. We show that, as the core-radius vanishes, such core-radius regularized s-fractional perimeters, suitably scaled, ?-converge to the standard Euclidean perimeter.

This paper introduces a dominance test that allows to determine whether or not a financial institution can be classified as being more systemically important than another in a multivariate framework. The dominance test relies on a new risk measure, the NetCoVaR that is specifically tailored to capture the joint extreme co-movements between institutions belonging to a network. The asymptotic theory for the statistical test is provided under mild regularity conditions concerning the joint distribution of asset returns which is assumed to be elliptically contoured.

A prodromal phase of Parkinson's disease (PD) may precede motor manifestations by decades. PD patients' siblings are at higher risk for PD, but the prevalence and distribution of prodromal symptoms are unknown. The study objectives were (1) to assess motor and non-motor features estimating prodromal PD probability in PD siblings recruited within the European PROPAG-AGEING project; (2) to compare motor and non-motor symptoms to the well-established DeNoPa cohort.

We designed a ground-based radar system with a C-band 2-D cross multiple input multiple output (MIMO) array for 3-D imaging and displacement estimation purposes. For this system, we developed a far-field pseudo-polar image format algorithm using pseudo-polar spherical coordinate. The use of a tensor compressive sensing technique allows to focus under-sampled raw data and to optimize the data acquisition time and memory usage.

We consider low-energy configurations for the Heitmann-Radin sticky discs functional, in the limit of diverging number of discs. More precisely, we renormalize the Heitmann-Radin potential by subtracting the minimal energy per particle, i.e. the so-called kissing number.

We present a modified version of an existing lake ecosystem model, describing a trophic chain generated by nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton (NPZ model). The NPZ model takes into account the vertical dynamics of the biomasses of the main species. We tailor the model to specific ecosystems by including seasonality in the dynamics of the various compartments. Moreover, different species exhibit a different behaviour with respect to diffusion and to the rate of vertical movement.

We consider a simple discrete model for screw dislocations in crystals. Using a variational discrete scheme we study the motion of a configuration of dislocations toward low energy configurations. We deduce an effective fully overdamped dynamics that follows the maximal dissipation criterion introduced in Cermelli and Gurtin (1999) and predicts motion along the glide directions of the crystal. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We propose a numerical method for approximating integro-differential equations arising in age-of-infection epidemic models. The method is based on a non-standard finite differences approximation of the integral term appearing in the equation. The study of convergence properties and the analysis of the qualitative behavior of the numerical solution show that it preserves all the basic properties of the continuous model with no restrictive conditions on the step-length h of integration and that it recovers the continuous dynamic as h tends to zero.