Integrating environmental DNA, niche modeling and trait-based ecology to explore the plant-soil-microbial continuum under climate and land-use change

This thesis investigates how the integration of trait-based ecology, environmental DNA metabarcoding, and species distribution modelling can improve ecological inference in plant-soil systems across spatial and organizational scales, and how plant distributions, functional strategies, and plant-associated microbial communities respond to climate and land-use change. The central premise is that ecological responses – particularly under rapidly changing and unstable global-change scenarios – ca...

TheWeak Orthogonal Field regime in Nitrogen-Vacancy color centers in diamond for Quantum Sensing

In the area of Quantum Technologies, the use of a quantum system to detect a physical quantity led to the development of Quantum Sensing and Metrology, a field that focuses on the investigation of how couplings between a quantum system and its environment can be employed to measure a specific physical observable. Among the numerous amount of Quantum Sensors that have been studied, the Nitrogen-Vacancy center in diamond emerged as one of the most promising candidates due to the great number of...

SUSTAINABILITY CERTIFICATIONS AND MARKET DYNAMICS: PRODUCER DIFFERENTIATION AND CONSUMER DECISION PROCESSES

Integrating Socio-Demographic Attributes into Network Models of Infectious Disease Spread and Voluntary Vaccination

Infectious disease transmission is primarily driven by close-range proximity interactions. These interactions are shaped by complex human behaviour and diverse social structures. Households are known as important settings for disease propagation due to frequent and prolonged contact among household members. However, there is a notable lack of detailed, contextspecific empirical data on contact patterns within diverse household structures, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with the hi...

“Is Lomé Policy Political?” Human “Is Lomé Policy Political?” Human Rights and Development Cooperation in the Lomé Convention (1975-1995)

This dissertation offers a new analysis of the human rights debate between the European Community and the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) through the evolution of the Lomé Convention, a development cooperation agreement between the EC and the ACP, from its signature in 1975 (Lomé I) to Lomé IV’s mid-term review in 1995. Lomé I was characterized by the assumption of equality among the partners and political neutrality, which implied the absence of any form of conditiona...

From the Aesthetic Attitude to the Aesthetic Valve: an Electrophysiological Investigation of the Cognitive and Affective Dimensions of Aesthetic Appreciation Across the Lifespan

Capitalizing on the hypothesis that aesthetic experience may play an evolutionary role in signalling what is relevant in the environment, my PhD thesis explored the connection between aesthetic appreciation and learning processes, focusing on three main dimensions: (a) the developmental trajectory, (b) the bottom-up and top-down processes, and (c) the affective modulation, underlying the experience of beauty. Drawing on learning theories of Aesthetics (Schoeller and Perlovsky, 2016), we recen...

Evaluating the effectiveness of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool for measuring environmental sustainability performances in complex systems

This doctoral research investigates the capacity of Life Cycle Assessment to serve as a scientifically robust, empirically grounded methodology for quantitatively evaluating environmental sustainability in complex systems. Despite its ISO 14040/14044 standardization and comprehensive cradle‑to‑grave perspective, LCA faces persistent challenges, particularly concerning data quality, methodological variability, and uncertainty management. These issues intensify within increasingly complex susta...

From description to narrative: evaluating AIdriven RAG architectures for the mediation and enhancement of personal collections in academic libraries

Animal-based indicators for the welfare assessment of dairy goats under extensive farming systems

The present thesis focused on the readaptation in pasture conditions of the original AWIN protocol, developed for goats raised in intensive and semi-intensive systems. The feasibility and reliability of both the individual and of the group-level animal-based welfare indicators were evaluated when the readapted protocol was applied by three raters. Specifically, some of the group-level indicators assessed during the readaptation of the protocol were specifically rearranged to properly assess t...