Livestock production is the main economic engine of Azores. Given role nutrition plays in animal performance and context limited Averages sharing same letter are noagricultural area archipelago, optimising quality availability fodder used feeds takes on an important increasing competitiveness viability industry. This work evaluated potential NIR spectroscopy to quantify several chemical biologi...

Management of natural resources is a complex issue. Human history shows the need for sustainable management of natural resources and one of the premises for this is knowledge integration. Nevertheless the need to integrate different types of knowledge poses a challenge. This paper proposes Conceptual Modeling as a tool to improve deliberation processes and research. Praia da Vitoria Bay in Terc...

(1) Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, UPR 1934, France. 8 (2) LIENSs (Littoral Environnement et Sociétés), UMR 7266 CNRS/Université de La Rochelle, 9 France. 10 (3) GECC (Groupe d’Etude des Cétacés du Cotentin), Cherbourg-Octeville, France. 11 (4) Observatoire PELAGIS, UMS 3462 CNRS/Université La Rochelle, France. 12 (5) Océanopolis, Brest, France. 13 (6) BioGeMME, UFR Sciences et Technique...

Knowledge of demographic parameters of most cetacean populations is scarce because of problems associated with sampling open populations of wide-ranging animals. In recent years, capture–recapture models have been developed to address these problems. We used a photo-identification dataset collected from a population of bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus between 1999 and 2004 around 2 island...

Geological hazards in the Azores archipelago include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, degassing phenomena and landslides, being the cause of thousands of deaths and severe damage and loss. To reduce the impact of future events it is necessary to improve the emergency response and reinforce land-use planning, and this has given rise to the development of AZORIS, a GIS database for risk analysis ...

Small-scale artisanal fisheries can have a significant negative impact in cetacean populations. Cetacean bycatch has been documented in the pole-and-line tuna fishery in the Azores with common dolphins being the species more frequently taken. Based on data collected by observers on ∼50% of vessels operating from 1998 to 2012, we investigate the influence of various environmental and fisheries-r...

Biological samples of free-ranging dolphins are increasingly used to gain information on population structure and ecology. In small cetaceans, the gender of individuals usually cannot be determined at sea, and population sex ratio has to be inferred indirectly. We used molecular sexing to determine the gender of 340 biopsy samples of bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, spotted dolphins, St...

The Azorean representatives of the Leptaxini (Pulmonata) are single island endemics, where a high-spired shell distinguishes the monotypic genus Helixena from two slightly different low-spired forms within Leptaxis (azorica and caldeirarum type). We studied the evolutionary history of putative taxa and the three shell-types using 12 allozyme loci and sequences of nuclear (ITS-1 and ITS-2) and m...