Search results for " Design"
showing 10 items of 5050 documents
Improving scientific rigour in conservation evaluations and a plea deal for transparency on potential biases
2020
Abstract The delivery of rigorous and unbiased evidence on the effects of interventions lay at the heart of the scientific method. Here we examine scientific papers evaluating agri‐environment schemes, the principal instrument to mitigate farmland biodiversity declines worldwide. Despite previous warnings about rudimentary study designs in this field, we found that the majority of studies published between 2008 and 2017 still lack robust study designs to strictly evaluate intervention effects. Potential sources of bias that arise from the correlative nature are rarely mentioned, and results are still promoted by using a causal language. This lack of robust study designs likely results from …
Fruit body based inventories in wood-inhabiting fungi: Should we replicate in space or time?
2016
We assessed the effect of survey design on the results when conducting fruit body surveys of wood-inhabiting fungi. Our results demonstrate that the optimal design depends on the ecological question to be addressed, as well as the group of fungal species under research. If the aim is to record the total species richness in a dead wood unit or to estimate the population size of a species, repeating the survey over time is generally necessary. However, if the aim is to estimate the total species richness in the forest or to assess how environmental covariates influence species richness or community composition, it is generally more efficient to increase the number of dead wood units than to r…
Demographic responses to protection from harvesting in a long-lived marine species
2021
Abstract Marine protected areas (MPAs) are usually considered to have positive effects on the recovery of over-exploited populations. However, resolving the extent to which MPAs function according to their conservation goals requires that essential demographic information such as individual survival and population size are quantified. To this end, we analyzed a 16-year replicated mark-recapture study on European lobster (Homarus gammarus, n = 8793) conducted at several protected and unprotected sites in southern Norway, quantifying the impact of MPAs on local population dynamics by means of a “before-after control-impact” study approach (BACI). Lobster survival and abundance were estimated …
Fishery-dependent and -independent data lead to consistent estimations of essential habitats
2016
AbstractSpecies mapping is an essential tool for conservation programmes as it provides clear pictures of the distribution of marine resources. However, in fishery ecology, the amount of objective scientific information is limited and data may not always be directly comparable. Information about the distribution of marine species can be derived from two main sources: fishery-independent data (scientific surveys at sea) and fishery-dependent data (collection and sampling by observers in commercial vessels). The aim of this paper is to compare whether these two different sources produce similar, complementary, or different results. We compare them in the specific context of identifying the Es…
The flex end-to-end simulator: From concept phase (A/B1) to ground segment and operations (C/D)
2018
ESA's FLEX/Sentinel-3 tandem mission aims at mapping Sun-induced fluorescence (SIF) as a proxy to quantify photosynthetic activity of terrestrial vegetation. Due to the complexity of the mission concept and stringent requirements for the data processing algorithms, ESA developed a Phase A/B1 End-to-End Mission Performance Simulator (E2ES) tool to reproduce the expected mission performance and check the mission and instrument concepts. In the current Phase C/D, the E2ES concept must evolve to consolidate the whole data processing chain, providing an accurate figures of the whole mission error budget and serving as a roadmap for the future development of FLEX Ground Segment. This paper gives …
Large differences in catch per unit of effort between two minnow trap models
2013
Background: Little is known about variation in catch per unit of effort (CPUE) in stickleback fisheries, or the factors explaining this variation. We investigated how nine-spined stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) CPUE was influenced by trap model by comparing the CPUEs of two very similar minnow trap models fished side-by-side in a paired experimental design. Results: The galvanized trap type (mean CPUE = 1.31 fish h–1) out-fished the black trap type (mean CPUE = 0.20 fish h–1) consistently, and yielded on average 81% more fish. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that small differences in trap appearance can have large impacts on CPUE. This has implications for studies designed to investi…
Artificial Biosystems by Printing Biology
2020
The continuous progress of printing technologies over the past 20 years has fueled the development of a plethora of applications in materials sciences, flexible electronics, and biotechnologies. More recently, printing methodologies have started up to explore the world of Artificial Biology, offering new paradigms in the direct assembly of Artificial Biosystems (small condensates, compartments, networks, tissues, and organs) by mimicking the result of the evolution of living systems and also by redesigning natural biological systems, taking inspiration from them. This recent progress is reported in terms of a new field here defined as Printing Biology, resulting from the intersection betwee…
Low-Power, Subthreshold Reference Circuits for the Space Environment : Evaluated with -rays, X-rays, Protons and Heavy Ions
2019
The radiation tolerance of subthreshold reference circuits for space microelectronics is presented. The assessment is supported by measured results of total ionization dose and single event transient radiation-induced effects under &gamma
In vitro comparison of primary stability of two implant designs in D3 bone
2016
Background Primary stability (PS) is a key factor for implant survival rate and depends on implant design or bone quality. The aim of this study was to compare different thread designs implants, evaluating PS with periotest values (PV) and implant stability quotient (ISQ) values through resonance frequency analysis (RFA). Material and Methods A total of 60 implants (Radhex®, Inmet-Garnick S.A., Guadalajara, Spain) were placed in freshly bovine ribs in vitro. Two designs were used: 30 tapered body with single thread design (PHI) and 30 tapered body with double thread design implants (PHIA). Both designs were 4mm wide and 12mm long. Implants were placed according to manufacturer’s guidelines.…
Bit-parallel approximate pattern matching: Kepler GPU versus Xeon Phi
2016
Advanced SIMD features on GPUs and Xeon Phis promote efficient long pattern search.A tiled approach to accelerating the Wu-Manber algorithm on GPUs has been proposed.Both the GPU and Xeon Phi yield two orders-of-magnitude speedup over one CPU core.The GPU-based version with tiling runs up to 2.9 × faster than the Xeon Phi version. Approximate pattern matching (APM) targets to find the occurrences of a pattern inside a subject text allowing a limited number of errors. It has been widely used in many application areas such as bioinformatics and information retrieval. Bit-parallel APM takes advantage of the intrinsic parallelism of bitwise operations inside a machine word. This approach typica…