BACKGROUND Due to its complex, dynamic and well-known paleogeography, the Mediterranean region provides an ideal framework to study the colonization history of plant lineages. The genus Linaria has its diversity centre in the Mediterranean region, both in Europe and Africa. The last land connection between both continental plates occurred during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, in the late Miocen...

Tree species with wide distributions often exhibit different levels of genetic structuring correlated to their environment. However, understanding how environmental heterogeneity influences genetic variation is difficult because the effects of gene flow, drift and selection are confounded. We investigated the genetic variation and its ecological correlates in a wind-pollinated Mediterranean tre...

The Most Expected Rainfall Regime – MERR in a certain region is composed of various parameters regarding the annual rainfall regime in that region. The present study examines several parameters of the MERR, such as: the rainfall TOTAL, the Date of Accumulated Percentage-DAP, the Rainy Season Length-RSL, the Number of Rain-Spells-NRS, the Rain-Spell Yield-RSY, the ratio between Average and Media...

The ‘‘Arab spring’’ aftermath calls for a closer look at the developments in the south Mediterranean countries. This paper develops and assesses alternative scenarios for the region up to the year 2030 with the employment of GEM-E3, a computable general equilibrium model. The scenarios quantify three alternative visions of the regional future which assume: (i) south Mediterranean-EU cooperation...

We describe the first steps towards developing a methodology for building a trilingual thesaurus that is dedicated to biodiversity in the Mediterranean region. A key property of our synthetic approach is to discover expert domain knowledge by means of literature-based information extraction techniques. Thus, a highly relevant set of terms, which provides the foundation for a better understandin...

The MINOS (Mediterranean INtensive Oxidant Study) campaign was an international, multi-platform field campaign to measure long-range transport of air-pollution and aerosols from South East Asia and Europe towards the Mediterranean basin during August 2001. High pollution events were observed during this campaign. For the Mediterranean region enhanced tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and form...