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Recent forest expansion in Euro‐Mediterranean countries predominantly results from secondary succession in abandoned farmland, rather than from artificial afforestation. This major forest transition involves the delivery of both ecosystem services and disservices, which must be balanced through new land‐use planning and policy approaches. Ecosystem services arising from this expansion of forests include increased carbon sequestration, water infiltration, provision of forest products, soil retention, and forest coalescence. Nevertheless, ecosystem disservices such as reductions in water yield, landscape homogenisation, increased wildfire risk, and/or the loss of high nature value managed habitats caution against generalisation of the benefits of such expansion. Most EU funds related to forests are being allocated to conservation, restoration, or fire prevention and extinction efforts, whereas sustainable forest management and the maintenance of multifunctional agro‐silvo‐pastoral mosaics are hampered by the lack of financial incentives and by environmental regulations. Policy implications. We advocate for more‐targeted policies based on landscape planning that favours multifunctionality while reducing environmental and economic uncertainties and maximizing the ecosystem service/disservice ratio. The following recommendations follow from this approach: (1) a climate‐smart policy favouring fire‐resistant landscapes and enhancing value chains that stimulate active forest management; (2) the adoption of a territorial perspective, beyond forest and farm‐based measures and payments, that relies on management actions and minimizes socio‐ecological tensions; (3) re‐focusing CAP Pillar II grants from afforestation and forest protection measures to sustainable forest management; (4) transforming the CAP direct payments to support multifunctional farming systems (e.g. agroforestry); (5) a more balanced inclusion of different land uses in the Natura 2000 network and intensification of the support for High Nature Value ...

We derive a master equation for the reduced density matrix of a uniformly accelerating quantum detector in arbitrary dimensions, generically coupled to a field initially in its vacuum state, and analyze its late time regime. We find that such density matrix asymptotically reaches a Gibbs state. The particularities of its evolution towards this state are encoded in the response function, which depends on the dimension, the properties of the fields, and the specific coupling to them. We also compare this situation with the thermalization of a static detector immersed in a thermal field state, pinpointing the differences between both scenarios. In particular, we analyze the role of the response function and its effect on the evolution of the detector towards equilibrium. Furthermore, we explore the consequences of the well-known statistics inversion of the response function of an Unruh-DeWitt detector linearly coupled to a free scalar field in odd spacetime dimensions. This allows us to specify in which sense accelerated detectors in Minkowski vacuum behave as static detectors in a thermal bath and in which sense they do not. © 2021 American Physical Society. ; Financial support was provided by the Spanish Government through the projects FIS2017-86497-C2-1-P, FIS2017-86497-C2-2-P (with FEDER contribution), FIS2016-78859-P (AEI/FEDER, UE), and by the Junta de Andalucia through the project FQM219. Authors J. A., C. B. and G. G. M. acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (SEV-2017-0709). G. G. M. acknowledges financial support from Instituto de Fisica de Particulas y del Cosmos through "Ayudas para cursar estudios de Doctorado del Instituto de Fisica de Particulas y del Cosmos." ; Peer reviewed

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; Gauge symmetries remove unphysical states and guarantee that field theories are free from the pathologies associated with these states. In this work we find a set of general conditions that guarantee the removal of unphysical states in field theories describing interacting vector fields. These conditions are obtained through the extension of a mechanism for the emergence of gauge symmetries proposed in a previous article [C. Barceló J. High Energy Phys. 10 (2016) 084JHEPFG1029-847910.1007/JHEP10(2016)084] in order to account for non-Abelian gauge symmetries, and are the following: low-energy Lorentz invariance, emergence of massless vector fields describable by an action quadratic in those fields and their derivatives, and self-coupling to a conserved current associated with specific rigid symmetries. Using a bootstrapping procedure, we prove that these conditions are equivalent to the emergence of gauge symmetries and, therefore, guarantee that any theory satisfying them must be equivalent to a Yang-Mills theory at low energies. © 2021 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. ; Financial support was provided by the Spanish Government through the projects No. FIS2017-86497C2-1-P, No. FIS2017-86497-C2-2-P (with FEDER contribution), No. FIS2016-78859-P (AEI/FEDER,UE), and by the Junta de Andalucia through the Project No. FQM219. C. B. and G. G. M. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (No. SEV-20170709). G. G. M. acknowledges financial support from IPARCOS (Instituto de Fisica de Particulas y el Cosmos) through "Ayudas para cursar estudios de Doctorado del Instituto de Fisica de Particulas y del Cosmos". ; Peer reviewed

7 pags., 2 figs. ; Quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories, aiming at tackling nonperturbative particle and condensed matter physics, has recently received a lot of interest and attention, resulting in many theoretical proposals as well as several experimental implementations. One of the current challenges is to go beyond 1+1 dimensions, where four-body (plaquette) interactions, not contained naturally in quantum simulating devices, appear. In this Letter, we propose a method to obtain them based on a combination of stroboscopic optical atomic control and the nonlocal photon-mediated interactions appearing in nanophotonic or cavity QED setups. We illustrate the method for a Z2 lattice gauge theory. We also show how to prepare the ground state and measure Wilson loops using state-of-the-art techniques in atomic physics. ; E. Z. acknowledges support by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 523/20). A. G.-T. acknowledges financial support from the Proyecto Sinergico CAM 2020 Y2020/TCS-6545 (NanoQuCo-CM), the CSIC Research Platform on Quantum Technologies PTI-001, and from Spanish project PGC2018-094792-B-100 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU). G. G. M. acknowledges financial support from the Gropo Especializado de Fisica de Estado Solido prize, State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709), from IPARCOS (Instituto de Física de Partículas y el Cosmos), and from the Spanish government through project PID2019-107847RB-C44.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ; One of the main problems that emergent-gravity approaches face is explaining how a system that does not contain gauge symmetries ab initio might develop them effectively in some regime. We review a mechanism introduced by some of the authors for the emergence of gauge symmetries in [JHEP 10 (2016) 084] and discuss how it works for interacting Lorentz-invariant vector field theories as a warm-up exercise for the more convoluted problem of gravity. Then, we apply this mechanism to the emergence of linear diffeomorphisms for the most general Lorentz-invariant linear theory of a two-index symmetric tensor field, which constitutes a generalization of the Fierz–Pauli theory describing linearized gravity. Finally we discuss two results, the well-known Weinberg–Witten theorem and a more recent theorem by Marolf, that are often invoked as no-go theorems for emergent gravity. Our analysis illustrates that, although these results pinpoint some of the particularities of gravity with respect to other gauge theories, they do not constitute an impediment for the emergent gravity program if gauge symmetries (diffeomorphisms) are emergent in the sense discussed in this paper. © 2021 by the authors. ; Financial support was provided by the Spanish Government through the projects FIS2017-86497-C2-1-P, FIS2017-86497-C2-2-P, PID2019-107847RB-C44, PID2020-118159GB-C43, PID2020-118159GB-C44, and by the Junta de Andalucia through the project FQM219. C.B. and G.G.M. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (SEV-2017-0709). GGM acknowledges financial support from IPARCOS. ; Peer reviewed

Despite their ecological, economic and social importance, grasslands in areas with Mediterranean climates continue to receive limited scientific, political and media attention. The main objectives of this review are to compare and contrast dryland grasslands in the 'Old World' regions of the Mediterranean basin (southern Europe, western Asia and North Africa) with those of 'New World' regions with Mediterranean climates (Australia and Chile) and to identify common research priorities. The common characteristics and differences in climate, soils, native vegetation, importance of the livestock sector and the socio-economic background for the different Mediterranean environments are examined. Past trends and the current status of temporary and permanent Mediterranean grasslands are also described. Some common issues between these regions are as follows: (i) adaptation to climate change; (ii) increasing persistence and drought survival of both annual and perennial species; (iii) the important role of forage legumes; (iv) maintaining grassland plant diversity; and (v) improved ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, control of soil erosion and wildfires, and preservation of both wild and domestic biodiversity. The favourable climate in these regions, which allows year-round grazing and the growth of legumes, should be exploited to improve the sustainability of grassland-based, extensive farming systems and the quality of their animal products, while at the same time improving ecosystem services. The decreasing support for grassland research and development programmes requires increased international scientific and technical cooperation among the few institutions operating in the different Mediterranean-climate areas of the World to provide innovative and sustainable solutions to farmers.

Background: Electronic health (eHealth) literacy may affect telehealth uptake, yet few studies have evaluated eHealth literacy in underserved populations.Objective: The objective of this study was to describe technology access and use patterns as well as eHealth literacy levels among English-speaking and LEP patients in a Los Angeles safety net health system.Methods: Patients, aged ≥18 years with a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus and/or hyper­tension, and their caregivers were recruited from three primary care safety-net clinics in Los Angeles County (California) between June – July 2017. Participants' electronic health literacy was assessed by the eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS); participants were also asked about technology access and use. We examined these measures in English-speaking and limited English proficient (LEP) Spanish-speaking patients.Results: A total of 71 participants (62 pa­tients and 9 caregivers) completed the ques­tionnaire. The mean age of the respondents was 56 years old. More than half of partici­pants used a phone that could connect to the Internet (67%). The mean score for 10 eHEALS items was in the moderate range (26/50 points). There was no difference in mean eHEALS between language groups. However, 47% of Spanish-speaking partici­pants "agreed/strongly agreed" that they knew how to use the Internet to answer their health questions, compared to 68% of English-speaking participants (P<.05).Conclusions: In this sample of patients from a diverse safety net population, perceived skills and confidence in engaging with electronic health systems were low, particularly among LEP Spanish-speakers, despite moderate levels of electronic health literacy. More studies are needed among diverse patient populations to better assess eHealth literacy and patients' digital readi­ness, and to examine how these patient metrics directly impact telehealth utilization.Ethn Dis. 2022;32(1):21-30; doi:10.18865/ed.32.1.21

This paper reports the results of a study conducted in Italy, within the AGFORWARD (2014–2017) project, aimed at promoting innovative agroforestry practices in Europe. Agroforestry offers a means for maintaining food production whilst addressing some of the negative environmental effects of intensive agriculture. This study aims to elicit the positive and negative points of view and perceptions of local stakeholders in Italy in relation to three types of agroforestry systems. The Participatory Research and Network Development was implemented in three workshops conducted in Sardinia, Umbria, and Veneto regions, and applied adopting a common methodological protocol. Qualitative data were obtained using open discussions with stakeholders on key issues, challenges and innovations. Quantitative data were obtained from stakeholders completing questionnaires during the workshops. A statistical analysis was applied to elicit the differences in stakeholders' positive and negative perceptions in relation to production, management, environment and socio-economy aspects. Although the participants in the study came from different geographical and socioeconomic contexts with varied educational and cultural backgrounds, the different professional groups (farmers, policy-makers and researchers) and the three workshops generally shared similar perceptions of the benefits and constraints. The effects of agroforestry on production and the environment were generally perceived as positive, whilst those related to management were generally negative. The process of bringing the groups together seemed to be an effective means for identifying the key research gaps that need to be addressed in order to promote the uptake and maintenance of agroforestry.