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Copyright of International Journal of Medicine & Science of Physical Activity & Sport / Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte is the property of Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Fisica y del Deporte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Journal of Medicine & Science of Physical Activity & Sport / Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte is the property of Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Fisica y del Deporte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The main purpose of this study was to evaluate running kinematic characteristics and foot strike patterns (FSP) during early and late stages of actual and common high-intensity intermittent training (HIIT): 5 × 2000 m with 120-s recovery between runs. Thirteen healthy, elite, highly trained male endurance runners participated in this study. They each had a personal record in the half-marathon of 70 ± 2.24 min, and each had a minimum experience of 4 years of training and competition. Heart rate (HR) and rate of perceived exertion (RPE) were monitored during HIIT. High levels of exhaustion were reached by the athletes during HIIT (HRpeak: 174.30 bpm; RPE: 17.23). There was a significant increase of HRpeak and RPE during HIIT; nevertheless, time for each run remained unchanged. A within-protocol pairedt-test (first vs. last run) revealed no significant changes (P ≥ 0.05) in kinematics variables and FSP variables during HIIT. There were no substantial changes on kinematics and FSP characteristics in endurance runners after fatigue induced by a HIIT. Only the minimum ankle alignment showed a significant change. The author suggests that these results might be due to both the high athletic level of participants and their experience in HIIT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary 1. Freshwater conservation has received less attention than its terrestrial or marine counterparts. Given the accelerated rate of change and intensive human use that freshwater ecosystems are submitted to, it is urgent to focus more attention on fresh waters. Existing conservation planning tools - such as Marxan - need to be modified to account for the special nature of these systems. Connectivity plays a key role in freshwater ecosystems. Threats are mediated along river corridors, and the condition of the entire catchment influences river biodiversity downstream. This needs to be considered in conservation planning. 2. The probabilities of occurrence of nine native freshwater fish species in a Mediterranean river basin, obtained from Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines- Generalized Linear Model (MARS-GLM) models, were used as features to develop spatial conservation priorities. The priorities accounted for complementarity and spatial design issues. 3. To deal with the connected nature of rivers, we modified Marxan's boundary length penalty, avoiding the selection of isolated planning units and forcing the inclusion of closer upstream areas. We introduced 'virtual boundaries' between non-headwater stream segments and added distance-weighted penalties to the overall connectivity cost (CP) when stream segments upstream of the selected planning units are not selected. 4. This approach to prioritising connectivity is concordant with ecological theory, as it considers the natural and roughly exponential decay of upstream influences with distance. It accounts for the natural capacity of rivers to mitigate impacts when designing reserves. When connectivity was not emphasised, Marxan prioritised natural corridors for longitudinal movements. In contrast, whole sub-basins were prioritised when connectivity was emphasised. Changing the relative emphasis on connectivity substantially changed the spatial prioritisation; our conservation investment could move from one basin to another. 5. Our novel approach to dealing with directional connectivity enables managers of freshwater systems to set ecologically meaningful spatial conservation priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracy of bioassessment programmes is highly limited by the precision of the systems used to derive sensitivity–tolerance values for the organisms used as indicators. We provide quantitative support to the objective evaluation of freshwater fish species sensitivity to different sources of disturbance, accounting for co-variation issues not only between perturbations and natural gradients (especially river size), but also between different perturbations. With this aim, we performed two different principal component analyses: (i) on a general environmental matrix to obtain a perturbation gradient independent of river size effects and (ii) on human impairment-related variables to extract independent synthetic perturbation gradients. Then, we checked each species responses to those gradients to assess their sensitivity–tolerance through an available-used chi-squared analysis in the first approach and through a t-test/ancova analysis in the second one. In this way, we obtained sensitivity–tolerance which could be included in future bioassessment tools, enabling effective evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guadiana River basin’s freshwater fish species richness, endemicity and threatened status (92% of native species are threatened) highlight the need for a large-scale study to identify priority areas for their conservation. One of the most common problems in conservation planning is the assessment of a site’s relative value for the conservation of regional biodiversity. Here we used a two-tiered approach, which integrates an assessment of biodiversity loss and the evaluation of conservation value through site-specific measures. These measures based on the reference condition approach introduce the ability to make objective comparisons throughout the Guadiana River basin, thus avoiding a priori target areas. We identified a set of biodiversity priority areas of special conservation significance—which contain rare taxa as well as intact fish communities—because of their outstanding contribution to the basin’s biodiversity. The inclusion of complete sub-basins in these priority areas might guarantee an optimal solution in terms of spatial aggregation and connectivity. However, the high spatial fragmentation to which the Guadiana River basin is submitted due to river regulation highlights the necessity of a systematic approach to evaluate the capability of the identified priority areas to maintain the Guadiana’s freshwater fish biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]