Phytoplankton plays a vital role in marine ecosystems, serving as a primary food source for a diverse array of organisms, including commercially important bivalves, crustaceans, and fish. However, in some situations, the proliferation of algae can cause serious economic losses for aquaculture, fishing, and tourism and have major environmental and human health impacts. Increases in the occurrence of toxic phytop...
Ovine footrot caused by Dichelobacter nodosus (D. nodosus) is a contagious disease with serious economic and welfare impacts in sheep production systems worldwide. A better understanding of the host genetic architecture regarding footrot resistance/susceptibility is crucial to develop disease control strategies that efficiently reduce infection and its severity. A genome-wide association study was performed usi...
In the Portuguese Alentejo region, Merino sheep breed is the most common breed, reared for the production of meat, dairy, and wool. Footrot is responsible for lameness, decreased animal welfare, and higher production losses, generating a negative economic impact. The disease is caused by Dichelobacter nodosus that interacts with the sheep foot microbiome, to date largely uncharacterized. In fact, Dichelobacter ...
The Mediterranean climate region of Alentejo in the Southern of Portugal is an important sheep production centre but little is known about the presence and characteristics of Dichelobacter nodosus in association with Fusobacterium necrophorum in the different footrot lesion scores. DNA from 261 interdigital biopsy samples, taken from 14 footrot affected flocks and from three non-affected flocks, were analysed f...
Falls are a public health problem that cause serious damage to people’s health and health systems. This study aims to estimate the validity and reliability of the Memorial Emergency Department Fall Risk Assessment Tool for the European Portuguese population. The sample included 186 adults from an emergency department of a District Hospital in Portugal. Reliability and precision (inter-rater reliability) are ass...
To improve vehicles environmental performance, different strategies have been explored namely to reduce the use stage energy. In order to avoid problem shifting, a life cycle perspective should be used to compare alternative solutions. This paper aims to compare existing studies focused on life cycle energy (LCE) of vehicles to analyze the impacts and benefits regarding two trending improvement strategies: ligh...
The construction industry is responsible for a substantial fraction of materials and energy consumption, waste generation, CO2 and other pollutant emissions. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to study and compare the environmental impacts of buildings under different scenarios. This study comparatively assesses the impact of several design options, envelope solutions and operational conditions on the ener...
As Instituições de Ensino Superior para além de agentes de transmissão de conhecimento científico, também devem contribuir para o desenvolvimento de qualidades humanas e de competências sociais dos seus estudantes, de modo a se tornarem cidadãos mais ativos e conscientes. No contexto do Ensino Superior, a prática de voluntariado tem sido estudada, e tem sido demonstrado que os seus estudantes saem beneficiados ...
Low indoor air quality is an increasingly important problem due to the spread of urbanization. Because people spend most of their time inside, poor indoor air quality causes serious human health issues, resulting in significant economic losses. In this work, the current state of affairs is presented and analyzed, focusing on the current problems and the available solutions to improve the quality of indoor air, ...
A peeira influencia negativamente diversos aspetos da ovinicultura e tem grande impacto económico e social em diversos países produtores de ovinos de ambos os hemisférios, particularmente na indústria da lã fina, amplamente dominada pelas raças Merinas. Com este trabalho pretendeu-se estimar componentes de variância associados à peeira em ovinos das raças Merina Branca (MB) e Merina Preta (MP), tendo sido reali...