Abstract
Aim of study: The study aims to evaluate the maximum potential stocking level in cork oak (Quercus suber L.) woodlands, using the ecologically-based size-density relationship of the self-thinning law. Area of study: The study area refers to cork oak forests in mainland Portugal, distributed along its 18 districts from north to south. Material and Methods: A dataset with a total of 2181 observations regarding pure cork oak stands was collected from the Portuguese Forest Inventory (NFI) databases and from research plots. The dataset was subjected to two filtering procedures, one more restrictive than the other, to select the stands presenting the higher stocking values. The two resulting subsets, with 116 and 36 observations, from 16 and 10 districts of mainland Portugal, respectively, were then used to assess and describe the allometric relationship between tree number and their mean diameter. Main results: The allometric relationship was analysed and modelled using the log transformed variables. A slightly curvilinear trend was identified. Thus, a straight line and a curve were both fitted for comparison purposes. Goodness-of-fit statistics point out for a good performance when the data is set to the uppermost observed stocking values. A self-thinning line for cork oak was projected from the estimated relationship. Research highlights: The self-thinning model can be used as an ecological approach to develop density guidelines for oak woodlands in a scenario of increasing cork demands. The results indicate that the recommendations being applied in Portugal are far below the maximal potential stocking values for the species. It is therefore of the utmost importance to review the traditional silvicultural guidelines and endorse new ones.

Abstract
Conflict-free Data Types (CRDTs) were designed to automatically resolve conflicts in eventually consistent systems. Different CRDTs were designed in both operation-based and state-based flavors such as Counters, Sets, Registers, Maps, etc. In a previous paper [2], Baquero et al. presented the problem with embedded CRDT counters and a solution, covering state-based counters that can be embedded in maps, but needing an ad-hoc extension to the standard counter API. Here, we present a resettable operation-based counter design, with the standard simple API and small state, through a causal-stability-based state compaction.

Abstract
The huge amount of genomic and transcriptomic data obtained to characterize human diversity can also be exploited to indirectly gather information on the human microbiome. Here we present the pipeline QmihR designed to identify and quantify the abundance of known microbiome communities and to search for new/rare pathogenic species in RNA-seq datasets. We applied QmihR to 36 RNA-seq tumor tissue samples from Ukrainian gastric carcinoma patients available in TCGA, in order to characterize their microbiome and check for efficiency of the pipeline. The microbes present in the samples were in accordance to published data in other European datasets, and the independent BLAST evaluation of microbiome-aligned reads confirmed that the assigned species presented the highest BLAST match-hits. QmihR is available at GitHub (https://github.com/ Pereira-lab/QmihR). © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract
Motivation: The exponential growth of publicly available RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) data poses an increasing challenge to researchers wishing to discover, analyse and store such data, particularly those based in institutions with limited computational resources. EMBL-EBI is in an ideal position to address these challenges and to allow the scientific community easy access to not just raw, but also processed RNA-Seq data. We present a Web service to access the results of a systematically and continually updated standardized alignment as well as gene and exon expression quantification of all public bulk (and in the near future also single-cell) RNA-Seq runs in 264 species in European Nucleotide Archive, using Representational State Transfer. Results: The RNASeq-er API (Application Programming Interface) enables ontology-powered search for and retrieval of CRAM, bigwig and bedGraph files, gene and exon expression quantification matrices (Fragments Per Kilobase Of Exon Per Million Fragments Mapped, Transcripts Per Million, raw counts) as well as sample attributes annotated with ontology terms. To date over 270 00 RNA-Seq runs in nearly 10 000 studies (1PB of raw FASTQ data) in 264 species in ENA have been processed and made available via the API.

Abstract
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an important research area. It originated in sociology but has spread to other areas of research, including anthropology, biology, information science, organizational studies, political science, and computer science. This has stimulated research on how to support SNA with the development of new algorithms. One of the critical areas involves calculation of different centrality measures. The challenge is how to do this fast, as many increasingly larger datasets are available. Our contribution is an incremental version of the Laplacian Centrality measure that can be applied not only to large graphs but also to dynamically changing networks. We have conducted several tests with different types of evolving networks. We show that our incremental version can process a given large network, faster than the corresponding batch version in both incremental and full dynamic network setups. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.

Abstract
The sharp decrease of the remnant ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties of Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O-3-PbTiO3 (PMNT) thin films close to the Morphotropic Phase Boundary (MPB) respect to their corresponding bulk ceramics is a major drawback for their integration in microdevices. In order to take full advantage of the excellent piezoelectric properties of polycrystalline PMNT in thin film form, a multilayer configuration with PbTiO3 (PT) layers is proposed. The PT layers generate an internal electric bias within the PMNT layer, which anchor an induced polarization in it. This results in a significant improvement of the piezoelectric behavior, obtaining remnant piezoelectric coefficients, d(33) (r), as high as 67 pm V-1. The role of the thickness of the PT layers used is discussed, in order to find the optimum configuration for these multilayers.