The Strait of Messina separates it from the region of Calabria in Southern Italy. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions and is officially referred to as Regione Siciliana. The region has 5 million inhabitants. Its capital city is Palermo.Sicily is in the central Mediterranean Sea, south of the Italian Peninsula in continental Europe, from which it is separated by the narrow Strait of Messina. Its most prominent landmark is Mount Etna, one of the tallest active volcanoes in Europe, and one of the most active in the world, currently 3,357 m (11,014 ft) high. The island has a typical Mediterranean climate.The earliest archaeological evidence of human activity on the island dates from as early as 12,000 BC. By around 750 BC, Sicily had three Phoenician and a dozen Greek colonies and it was later the site of the Sicilian Wars and the Punic Wars. After the end of the Roman province of Sicilia with the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Sicily was ruled during the Early Middle Ages by the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantine Empire, and the Emirate of Sicily. The Norman conquest of southern Italy led to the creation of the County of Sicily in 1071, that was succeeded by Kingdom of Sicily, a state that existed from 1130 until 1816. Later, it was unified under the House of Bourbon with the Kingdom of Naples as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The island became part of Italy in 1860 following the Expedition of the Thousand, a revolt led by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the Italian unification, and a plebiscite. Sicily was given special status as an autonomous region on 15 May 1946, 18 days before the Italian institutional referendum of 1946.Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature, cuisine, and architecture.
The African sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus), a non-native bird species in Europe, has rapidly expanded its range in Italy, prompting the adoption of national control measures due to ecological and epidemiological concerns. As part of this management plan, 20 ibises were culled in February 2025 in Tuscany (Central Italy), and tested for pathogens relevant to wildlife and public health. RT-PCR and molecular analyses on tracheal and cloacal swabs, revealed the presence of low pathogenic avian influenza virus (LPAIV) subtype H5N2 in 1 out of 20 specimens. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the virus was closely related to recent European LPAIV strains, with the PA gene segment clustered with Asian and Russian isolates from 2021-2022. Two mammalian adaptation markers (S155N and T156A) were identified in the HA protein. Although the detected strain poses minimal zoonotic risk, its presence in a highly adaptable invasive species, raises concerns about the potential role of T. aethiopicus as a bridge host in avian influenza transmission cycles. Given the increasing overlap between this species and poultry farming areas, and its scavenging behavior, continued surveillance is essential to assess its epidemiological role. Targeted control actions may be crucial in preventing the establishment of novel wildlife reservoirs and limiting viral evolution towards highly pathogenic forms. Surveillance of alien invasive species should be integrated into broader avian influenza monitoring strategies to protect public health and agricultural biosecurity.
Conservation translocations are becoming common conservation practice, so there is an increasing need to understand the drivers of plant translocation performance through reviews of cases at global and regional levels. The establishment of the Italian Database of Plant Translocation (IDPlanT) provides the opportunity to review the techniques used in 186 plant translocation cases performed in the last 50 years in the heart of the Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot. We described techniques and information available in IDPlanT and used these data to identify drivers of translocation outcomes. We tested the effect of 15 variables on survival of translocated propagules as of the last monitoring date with binomial logistic mixed-effect models. Eleven variables significantly affected survival of transplants: life form, site protection, material source, number of source populations, propagation methods, propagule life stage, planting methods, habitat suitability assessment, site preparation, aftercare, and costs. The integration of vegetation studies in the selection of suitable planting sites significantly increased the success of translocation efforts. Although posttranslocation watering had a generally positive effect on translocation outcome, other aftercare techniques did not always increase transplant survival. Finally, we found that how funds were spent appeared to be more important than the actual amount spent. Plant translocations in Italy and in the Mediterranean area should account for the complexity of speciation, gene flow, and plant migrations that has led to local adaptations and has important implications for the choice and constitution of source material.
Process Industry (PI e.g. Steel, Metals, Chemicals, Cement, Asphalt, Ceramics) is one of the leading sectors of the world economy, characterized however by intense environmental impact, and very high energy consumption. In spite of a traditional low innovation pace in PI, in the recent years a strong push at worldwide level towards the dual objective of improving the efficiency of plants and the quality of products, significantly reducing the consumption of electricity and CO2 emissions has taken momentum. Digital Technologies (namely Smart Embedded Systems, IoT, Data, AI and Edge-to-Cloud Technologies) are enabling drivers for a Twin Digital-Green Transition, as well as foundations for human centric, safe, comfortable and inclusive work places. Currently, digital sensors in plants produce a large amount of data which in most cases constitutes just a potential and not a real value for Process Industry, often locked-in in close proprietary systems and seldomly exploited. Digital technologies, with process modelling-simulation via digital twins, can build a bridge between the physical and the virtual worlds, bringing innovation with great efficiency and drastic reduction of waste. In accordance with the guidelines of Industrie 4.0, the H2020 funded CAPRI project aims to innovate the process industry, with a modular and scalable Reference Architecture, based on open source software, which can be implemented both in brownfield and greenfield scenarios. The ability to distribute processing between the edge, where the data is created, and the cloud, where the greatest computational resources are available, facilitates the development of integrated digital solutions with cognitive capabilities. The reference architecture is being validated in the asphalt, steel & pharma pilot plants, allowing the development of integrated planning solutions, with scheduling and control of the plants.
