The XXI century home should be a digital habitat, a connected residence, but at the same time it should be involved in sustainability and the environment. The location of new technologies at home, and its acceptance by the user, requires, among other actions, a significant diffusion and activity to be undertaken. This work proposes the development of a Smart House network designed for its integ...

The geographic range of the Neotropical harvestman Discocyrtus testudineus (Holmberg, 1876) (Gonyleptidae) is addressed by determining the species' bioclimatic profile and modeling its potential distribution. Analysis was performed on a record set of 71 localities, including literature records and 34 new localities reported here. The bioclimatic profile was characterized through extreme, median...

The study of the evolution of abiotic niches can be informative regarding the speciation drivers in a given group. Yet, two factors that could potentially affect niche evolution have seldom been addressed concomitantly, which are biotic interactions and geographical isolation. In this study, we used as a model group the Antillean plant genera Gesneria and Rhytidophyllum (Gesneriaceae) to evalua...

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) combine information on the geographic occurrence of species with environmental layers to estimate distributional ranges and have been extensively implemented to answer a wide array of applied ecological questions. Unfortunately, most global datasets available to parameterize SDMs consist of spatially interpolated climate surfaces obtained from ground weather s...

A lot of field investigations for damage to buildings are carried out after large earthquakes. In concordance with the variety of investigations, the building damage descriptions are really incoherent because a well-coordinated damage scale has not been prepared yet. This paper proposed a new chart for describing the building damage patterns by seismic vulnerability so as to help investigators ...

Energy consumption has been increasing steadily due to globalization and industrialization. Studies have shown that buildings are responsible for the biggest proportion of energy consumption; for example in European Union countries, energy consumption in buildings represents around 40% of the total energy consumption. In order to control energy consumption in buildings, different policies have ...

We are living through serious problems of environmental pollution, which causes great risks to the well-being population. These presented by bad planning urban growth, and many times in very quality. Industrialization grows cities without having an order appropriate avoid damage our environment. The construction sector is largely responsible for this global pollution that experienced today. As ...