Forest fire risk has increased globally during the previous decades. The Mediterranean region is traditionally the most at risk in Europe, but continental countries like Serbia have experienced significant economic and ecological losses due to forest fires. To prevent damage to forests and infrastructure, alongside other societal losses, it is necessary to create an effective protection system against fire, which minimizes the harmful effects. Forest fire probability mapping, as one of the basic tools in risk management, allows the allocation of resources for fire suppression, within a fire season, from zones with a lower risk to those under higher threat. Logistic regression (LR) has been used as a standard procedure in forest fire probability mapping, but in the last decade, machine learning methods such as fandom forest (RF) have become more frequent. The main goals in this study were to (i) determine the main explanatory variables for forest fire occurrence for both models, LR and RF, and (ii) map the probability of forest fire occurrence in Eastern Serbia based on LR and RF. The most important variable was drought code, followed by different anthropogenic features depending on the type of the model. The RF models demonstrated better overall predictive ability than LR models. The map produced may increase firefighting efficiency due to the early detection of forest fire and enable resources to be allocated in the eastern part of Serbia, which covers more than one-third of the country’s area.

Hypertension is one of the most prevalent and powerful contributors of cardiovascular diseases. Malignant hypertension is a relatively rare but extremely severe form of hypertension accompanied with heart, brain, and renal impairment. Resveratrol, a recently described grape-derived, polyphenolic antioxidant molecule, has been proposed as an effective agent in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. This study was designed to examine chronic resveratrol administration on blood pressure, oxidative stress, and inflammation, with special emphasis on cardiac structure and function in two models of experimental hypertension. The experiments were performed in spontaneously (SHRs) and malignantly hypertensive rats (MHRs). The chronic administration of resveratrol significantly decreased blood pressure in both spontaneously and malignant hypertensive animals. The resveratrol treatment ameliorated morphological changes in the heart tissue. The immunohistochemistry of the heart tissue after resveratrol treatment showed that both TGF-β and Bax were not present in the myocytes of SHRs and were present mainly in the myocytes of MHRs. Resveratrol suppressed lipid peroxidation and significantly improved oxidative status and release of NO. These results suggest that resveratrol prevents hypertrophic and apoptotic consequences induced by high blood pressure with more pronounced effects in malignant hypertension.

The main cause of death among patients with malignant hypertension is a kidney failure. The promising field in essential and malignant hypertension therapy could be centered on the amelioration of oxidative stress using antioxidant molecules like resveratrol. Resveratrol is a potent antioxidative agent naturally occurred in many plants that possess health-promoting properties. In the present study, we investigated the therapeutic potential of resveratrol, a polyphenol with anti-oxidative activity, in N^G-L-Arginine Methyl Ester (L-NAME) treated spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) - malignantly hypertensive rats (MHR). Resveratrol significantly improves oxidative damages by modulation of antioxidant enzymes and suppression of prooxidant factors in the kidney tissue of MHR. Enhanced antioxidant defense in the kidney improves renal function and ameliorates the morphological changes in this target organ. Besides, protective properties of resveratrol are followed by the restoration of the nitrogen oxide (NO) pathway. 4) Conclusion: Antioxidant therapy with resveratrol could represent promising therapeutical approach in hypertension, especially malignant, against kidney damage.

In recent years, forest fires have become an important issue in Central Europe. To model the probability of the occurrence of forest fires in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship of Poland, historical fire data and several types of predictors were collected or generated, including topographic, vegetation, climatic, and anthropogenic features. The main objectives of this study were to determine the importance of the predictors of forest fire occurrence and to map the probability of forest fire occurrence. The H2O driverless artificial intelligence (DAI) cloud platform was used to model forest fire probability. The gradient boosted machine (GBM) and random forest (RF) methods were applied to assess the probability of forest fire occurrence. Evaluation the importance of the variables was performed using the H2O platform permutation method. The most important variables were the presence of coniferous forest and the distance to agricultural land according to the GBM and RF methods, respectively. Model validation was conducted using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The areas under the curve (AUCs) of the ROC plots from the GBM and RF models were 83.3% and 81.3%, respectively. Based on the results obtained, the GBM model can be recommended for the mapping of forest fire occurrence in the study area.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a group of diseases with a very high rate of morbidity and mortality. The clinical presentation of CVDs can vary from asymptomatic to classic symptoms such as chest pain in patients with myocardial infarction. Current therapeutics for CVDs mainly target disease symptoms. The most common CVDs are coronary artery disease, acute myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation, chronic heart failure, arterial hypertension, and valvular heart disease. In their treatment, conventional therapies and pharmacological therapies are used. However, the use of herbal medicines in the therapy of these diseases has also been reported in the literature, resulting in a need for critical evaluation of advances related to their use. Therefore, we carried out a narrative review of pharmacological and herbal therapeutic effects reported for these diseases. Data for this comprehensive review were obtained from electronic databases such as MedLine, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Conventional therapy requires an individual approach to the patients, as when patients do not respond well, this often causes allergic effects or various other unwanted effects. Nowadays, medicinal plants as therapeutics are frequently used in different parts of the world. Preclinical/clinical pharmacology studies have confirmed that some bioactive compounds may have beneficial therapeutic effects in some common CVDs. The natural products analyzed in this review are promising phytochemicals for adjuvant and complementary drug candidates in CVDs pharmacotherapy, and some of them have already been approved by the FDA. There are insufficient clinical studies to compare the effectiveness of natural products compared to approved therapeutics for the treatment of CVDs. Further long-term studies are needed to accelerate the potential of using natural products for these diseases. Despite this undoubted beneficence on CVDs, there are no strong breakthroughs supporting the implementation of natural products in clinical practice. Nevertheless, they are promising agents in the supplementation and co-therapy of CVDs.