""Understanding the role of the developmental pathways in shaping phenotypic diversity allows appreciating in full the processes influencing and constraining morphological change. Podarcis lizards demonstrate extraordinary morphological variability that likely originated in short evolutionary time. Using geometric morphometrics and a broad suite of statistical tests, we explored the role of developmental mechanisms such as growth rate change, ontogenetic divergence ⁄ convergence ⁄ parallelism as well as morphological expression of heterochronic processes in mediating the formation of their phenotypic diversity during the post-natal ontogeny. We identified hypermorphosis – the prolongation of growth along the same trajectory – as the process responsible for both intersexual and interspecific morphological differentiation. Albeit the common allometric pattern observed in both sexes of any species constrains and canalizes their cephalic scales variation in a fixed portion of the phenotypic space, the extended growth experienced by males and some species allows them to achieve peramorphic morphologies. Conversely, the intrasexual phenotypic diversity is accounted for by nonallometric processes that drive the extensive morphological dispersion throughout their ontogenetic trajectories. This study suggests a model of how simple heterochronic perturbations can produce phenotypic variation, and thus potential for further evolutionary change, even within a strictly constrained developmental pathway."
In this paper, we carried out an empirical productive analysis on agricultural Italian farms. In this research area, we propose a new approach of stochastic frontier analysis adopting a generalized additive model framework also compared with Stochastic semi-Nonparametric Envelopment of Z variables Data. By using the Italian National Institute of Agricultural Economics micro-data, we were able to map out the overall level of efficiency thereby focusing also on the evaluation of the differences observed due to presence of contextual variables. We obtained overall measures for the citrus sector that suggests an evaluation framework that can uphold policies to encourage and support farms.
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