The educational innovation project carried out in a Spanish public educational center located on the island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, seeks to awaken in students the capacity for analysis and recognition of the elements that make up the landscape to strengthen geographical knowledge. It tries to recognize the Spanish natural landscape characteristics of its extensive coast. It analyzes natural landscapes and their human transformation, focusing on the Canary Islands and their relationship with the Macaronesian islands. The purpose of this study is to develop the contents of the Geography subjects in the Secondary and Baccalaureate stages, which allow interpretation of the insular and coastal territory and analysis of their natural landscapes. It is related to the current pedagogical approach of designing and applying Learning Situations. This was done by applying learning situations, starting from a previous context or landscape, to develop a theoretical approach from geographical analysis. This will allow us to elaborate on a description of the landscape and make a detailed comparison with nearby landscapes. The work on these geographical contents in the classroom consists of teaching the landscape elements: orography, climate, biogeography, etc. With this knowledge, we can recognize these ingredients in different images of natural islands and coastal landscapes. The results of this intervention show that after working on the content and carrying out a guided practice with the teacher, the students can face new landscapes, look for them, and learn how to analyze them and recognize their natural elements and human modifications. The results show that to understand geography, students not only need to develop theoretical content, such as an encyclopedia. Students need to understand and recognize the elements present in each landscape or image of the territory. Learning this way helps students look at and analyze them correctly and have a holistic sense of the territory. Such educational innovations applied to teaching geography allow for the knowledge and interpretation of the territory and its landscapes practically and give it meaning.
Volcanic eruptions inject particles (tephra) and gases into the atmosphere, impacting air quality. To provide new insights into this process, we focus on the 3-month-long 2021 Tajogaite eruption, on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain. This eruption emplaced lava flows and produced tephra and gases in multiple sustained plumes. We examined the relationship between air quality, tephra dispersion and deposition, and eruption dynamics. We reconstructed the spatiotemporal variations in tephra deposition using a collection network deployed around the island and maintained throughout the eruption, while plume dispersion was tracked using satellite observations. These datasets were compared to the air quality monitoring data from the local regulatory network using time-series analyses. Our findings reveal distinct peaks in tephra deposition rates (a few g/m2/h 20 km away from the vent, up to more than 2000 g/m2/h at locations less than 3 km from the vent), related to both increased explosive activity at the volcanic vents and specific atmospheric conditions. We show that the fluctuations of tephra emission were the main driver of the particulate matter (PM) concentration variations, outweighing contributions from secondary aerosol formation through volcanic SO2 conversion. We evidence spatial disparity in the impact on air quality, with the western half of La Palma island experiencing higher amplitude and more frequent pollution peaks than the eastern half. We demonstrate that even low-explosivity basaltic eruptions can significantly affect air quality by generating and dispersing fine PM and gases over wide areas. Moreover, elevated PM concentrations persist beyond the duration of intense tephra deposition episodes, thereby extending the period of population exposure. These results have important implications for understanding and mitigating human exposure to volcanic pollutants.
Island coastal aquifers, though spatially limited, sustain key ecosystem functions linked to locally critical provisioning, maintenance and cultural ecosystem services. These functions are largely dependent on the presence of highly adapted biological communities, whose microbial components remain poorly understood. Here, we describe bacterial communities across groundwater-dependent ecosystems on Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain), spanning habitats with contrasting environmental conditions and degrees of human influence, using 16 S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. We then infer the processes shaping community variation by integrating diversity partitioning, indicator species analysis, and machine-learning classification. Bacterial taxonomic diversity varied significantly among habitats, with community composition primarily structured by turnover, consistent with environmental filtering. In contrast, predicted human-associated and potentially pathogenic taxa showed patterns dominated by nestedness, indicating localized enrichment linked to anthropogenic inputs. Caves, enclosed marine bays, and hypersaline systems hosted the most compositionally distinct microbial communities, whereas wells and anchialine pools showed greater overlap in community composition. Together, our results suggest that groundwater microbial communities are influenced by the interplay between environmental filtering and anthropogenic inputs, and that coastal aquifers can act simultaneously as reservoirs of natural biodiversity and sinks of human-associated bacteria. These findings highlight the need for integrative monitoring and conservation strategies that incorporate both hydrological and biological components to safeguard groundwater-dependent ecosystems on oceanic islands.
Background: Childhood cancer survivors have a higher risk of developing malignancies later in life compared with individuals of similar age in the general population. In Spain, population-based evidence on second malignant neoplasms (SMNs) is limited. This study aimed to estimate survival following childhood cancer diagnosis and to assess the risk of SMNs in Spain. Methods: This population-based registry study used data from 12 cancer registries within the Spanish Network of Cancer Registries (REDECAN). All malignancies of sites and non-malignant central nervous system (CNS) tumors diagnosed before age 15 were included. Age-standardized incidence rates (ASIRw) for 2015-2019 were calculated. Five- and 10-year age-adjusted observed survival rates for 1990-1999 and 2000-2009 were estimated. SMN risk was assessed using standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) and excess absolute risks (EARs). Results: The ASIRw for 2015-2019 was 181.3 per million child-years. Ten-year survival increased from 71.3% in 1990-1999 to 75.5% in 2000-2009. The overall risk of developing an SMN was significantly elevated (SIR = 5.67) at 20 years. Conclusions: Although survival for childhood cancer in Spain was around 75% in 2000-2009, childhood cancer survivors remain at substantially increased risk of SMNs for at least two decades. Efforts to reduce treatment-related toxicity while maintaining survival gains are essential.
Subordinate clauses to emotive predicates are usually regarded as one of the most challenging contexts in the study of mood. Recently, within the framework of cognitive linguistics, it has been shown that the use of the subjunctive in the complements of volitive, causative, and wish predicates results from adopting the antagonist’s viewpoint within a force dynamics pattern. This paper demonstrates the suitability of this same model to account for (1) subjunctive use in subordinate clauses to emotive predicates, as constructions also associated with force dynamics patterns, and (2) the systematicity of certain phenomena of double choice and polysemy exhibited by some related predicates. Additionally, this paper suggests the model’s capacity to incorporate sociolinguistic and stylistic mood variation.
