The management of Mediterranean mountains need to know whether or not the flora is adapted to respond to fire and, if so, through what mechanisms. Serpentine outcrops constitute particular ecosystems in the Mediterranean Basin, and plants need to make an additional adaptive effort. The objective of this study is to know the response to fire of the main members of the group of serpentine plants, which habit the Spanish Mediterranean ultramafic mountain, to help in their management. For this purpose, monitoring plots were established on a burned ultramafic outcrop, which was affected by fire in August 2012.They were located in the Mediterranean south of the Iberian Peninsula, Andalusia region. The dominant vegetation of this serpentine ecosystem had been studied previously to fire; it was a shrubland composed of endemic serpentinophytes (small shrubs and perennial herbs) included in Digitali laciniatae-Halimietum atriplicifolii plant association (Cisto-Lavanduletea class) in an opened pine forest. The post-fire response of the plants was studied in the stablished burned plots by field works through permanent 200 x 10 m transect methods, consisting on checking whether they were resprouters, seeders, both of them or if they showed no survival response. Additional information about fire related functional traits is provided for the studied taxa from other studies. Of the total of plants studied (23 taxa), 74% acted as resprouters, 30% as seeders, some of which also had the capacity to resprout (13%), and only 9% of the plants did not show any survival strategy. The presence of a resprouting burl was not high (17%), although serpentine small shrubs such as Bupleurum acutifolium and the generalist Teucrium haenseleri had this kind of organ. The herbaceous taxa Sanguisorba verrucosa, Galium boissieranum and Linum carratracense were seen to be resprouters and seeders. The serpentine obligated Ni-accumulator, Alyssum serpyllifolium subsp. malacitanum, did not show any survival strategy in the face of fire and therefore their populations need monitoring after fires. In the studied ecosystems no species had traits that would protect the aerial part of the plant against fire, although most of the species are capable of post-fire generation by below ground buds. Our results show that the ecosystem studied, composed of taxa with a high degree of endemism and some of them threatened, is predominantly adapted to survival after a fire, although their response capacity may be decreased by environmental factors.

A theoretical investigation of the effect of an inverse parabolic potential on third harmonic generation in cylindrical quantum wires is presented. The wave functions are obtained as solutions to Schrödinger equation solved within the effective mass approximation. It turns out that peaks of the third harmonic generation susceptibility (THGS) associated with nanowires of small radii occur at larger photon energies as compared to those associated with quantum wires of larger radii. The inverse parabolic potential red-shifts peaks of the THGS, and suppresses the amplitude of the THGS. THGS associated with higher radial quantum numbers is diminished in magnitude and blue-shifted, as a function of the photon energy. As a function of the inverse parabolic potential, the THGS still characterized by peaks, and the peaks shift to lower values of the potential as the photon energy increases.

Two kinds of solar thermal power generation systems (trough and tower) are selected as the research objects. The life cycle assessment (LCA) method is used to make a systematic and comprehensive environmental impact assessment on the trough and tower solar thermal power generation. This paper mainly analyzes the three stages of materials, production and transportation of two kinds of solar thermal power generation, calculates the unit energy consumption and environmental impact of the three stages respectively, and compares the analysis results of the two systems. At the same time, Rankine cycle is used to compare the thermal efficiency of the two systems.

Cucumis sativus is an important vegetable crop in the world. Agrobacterium mediated transgenic technology is an important means to study plant gene function and variety improvement. In order to further accelerate the transgenic research and breeding process of cucumber, aiming at the Agrobacterium mediated genetic transformation method of cucumber, this paper expounds the research progress and existing problems of Agrobacterium mediated transgenic cucumber from the aspects of influencing factors of cucumber regeneration ability, genetic transformation conditions and various added substances in the process, and prospects the future of improving the efficiency of cucumber genetic transformation and the application of safety screening markers, in order to provide reference for cucumber stress resistance breeding and fruit quality improvement.