The Eastern Mediterranean Transient (EMT) occurred in the Aegean Sea from 1988 to 1995 and is the most significant intermediate-to-deep Mediterranean overturning perturbation reported by instrumental records. The EMT was likely caused by accumulation of high salinity waters in the Levantine and enhanced heat loss in the Aegean Sea, coupled with surface water freshening in the Sicily Channel. It...

Genetic diversity of durum wheat landraces is a powerful tool for the introgression of new alleles of commercial interest in breeding programs. In a previous study, our team structured a collection of 172 durum wheat landraces from 21 Mediterranean countries in four genetic populations related to their geographical origin: east Mediterranean (17), east Balkan and Turkey (23), west Balkan and Eg...

The Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery, one of the most prized and lucrative, is increasingly threatened with collapse, according to scientists, after the regulatory body established to maintain the fishery has again recommended a quota for the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean population at a level that many scientists and conservationists believe is unsustainable. The International Commission for...

The Etruscan culture developed in Central Italy (Etruria) in the first millennium BC and for centuries dominated part of the Italian Peninsula, including Rome. The history of the Etruscans is at the roots of Mediterranean culture and civilization, but their origin is still debated: local or Eastern provenance? To shed light on this mystery, bovine and human mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) have been...

Based on an extensive sampling regime from both nesting populations and bycatch, frequency analyses of mitochondrial (mt) DNA control region haplotypes in the Mediterranean were used to assess the genetic structure and stock composition of the loggerhead sea turtle, Caretta caretta, in different marine fisheries. The analyses show the following. (i) In drifting longline fisheries working in Med...

BACKGROUND Systematic reviews can offer policymakers and stakeholders concise, transparent, and relevant evidence pertaining to pressing policy priorities to help inform the decision-making process. The production and the use of systematic reviews are specifically limited in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The extent to which published systematic reviews address policy priorities in the regio...

Help is needed to close the gaps in knowledge dissemination and access One of the current barriers to international knowledge-sharing is the assortment of obstacles to publication that non-native users of English from resource-limited settings must overcome. 1 In some countries, efforts to build research capacity are hampered by limited access to English-language resources for the professional ...

Documented sightings of harbour porpoises in the Mediterranean are rare, although the species is common in the neighbouring North Atlantic and Black Sea. However, in the past 2 decades, 4 harbour porpoises Phocoena phocoena have been recorded in the northern Aegean Sea in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. Samples were taken from 2 of these. Both have a genetic signature indicative of the Black S...

S U M M A R Y In this study we investigate the dynamics of the region that includes Greece, the Aegean Sea and Asia Minor. In a least-squares inversion we solve for a continuous strain rate field, and corresponding velocity field, that satisfies 872 GPS data. The estimate of the geodetic strain rate field provides constraints for our dynamic analysis. Next, we separately solve the depth integra...

This study investigates the variations of surface Moho inverted from Bouguer gravity data beneath northwestern Arabian plate. The results were obtained by applying 3DINVER program developed in a MATLAB environment using Parker–Oldenburg method. calculation show that maximum depth observed western shield approaches more than 40 km, while minimum values 16–20 km are mainly concentrated Mediterran...