Search results for "Landscape"
showing 10 items of 1561 documents
Of Oaks, Erratic Boulders, and Milkmaids
2004
In the study and care for rural landscapes and their inhabitants a perpetual dilemma is knowing the different discourses those landscapes embody for a culture group, or “discourse community,” as Siri Aasbo (1999: 148) calls it (after Eco 1977). It is a well-known truism that a gap exists in the understanding and evaluation of landscapes between insiders and outsiders, natives and visitors, actors and observers, inhabitants and experts. Since this is known territory, I shall not revisit it, except to restate the obvious — expert opinion, even when well-intended, rarely agrees with the local inhabitants in what is good for them. As Sverker Sorlin expresses it, landscape is a “contested terrai…
LaDy: Software for assessing local landscape diversity profiles of raster land cover maps using geographic windows
2003
Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics have ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and their ecological functions. These assumptions imply effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. In this paper, a software, LaDy (Landscape Diversity Software), for computing Re´nyi’s local landscape diversity profile on raster land cover maps is presented. LaDy is based on the use of Merchant’s adaptive geographic window, which is designed to operate on a neig…
Maternal effects in vulnerability to eye-parasites and correlations between behavior and parasitism in juvenile Arctic charr
2017
Hatchery-reared fish show high mortalities after release to the wild environment. Explanations for this include potentially predetermined genetics, behavioral, and physiological acclimation to fish farm environments, and increased vulnerability to predation and parasitism in the wild. We studied vulnerability to Diplostomum spp. parasites (load of eye flukes in the lenses), immune defense (relative spleen size) and antipredator behaviors (approaches toward predator odor, freezing, and swimming activity) in hatchery-reared juvenile Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) using a nested mating design. Fish were exposed to eye-fluke larvae via the incoming water at the hatchery. Fish size was positi…
Rapid evolutionary adaptation to elevated salt concentrations in pathogenic freshwater bacteria Serratia marcescens.
2014
Rapid evolutionary adaptions to new and previously detrimental environmental conditions can increase the risk of invasion by novel pathogens. We tested this hypothesis with a 133-day-long evolutionary experiment studying the evolution of the pathogenic Serratia marcescens bacterium at salinity niche boundary and in fluctuating conditions. We found that S. marcescens evolved at harsh (80 g/L) and extreme (100 g/L) salt conditions had clearly improved salt tolerance than those evolved in the other three treatments (ancestral conditions, nonsaline conditions, and fluctuating salt conditions). Evolutionary theories suggest that fastest evolutionary changes could be observed in intermediate sele…
Quel prix les habitants d'une région périurbaine payent-ils pour voir des paysages "verts" depuis chez eux ?
2009
National audience; L'objectif de cet article est d'estimer le prix d'attributs paysagers dans la région de Dijon. À partir d'images satellites et d'un modèle numérique de terrain, une méthode de géographie quantitative développée à partir de systèmes d'information géographique (SIG) permet de " mesurer " les paysages vus depuis le sol à travers une batterie d'indices. Sur la base de 2 667 transactions immobilières, un modèle économétrique utilisant la méthode des prix hédonistes permet d'estimer les prix des attributs paysagers ainsi quantifiés. Les résultats montrent, tout d'abord, que dans cette région les ménages sont " myopes ": le prix de paysages vus au-delà d'une ou deux centaines de…
Modelling sediment delivery using connectivity components at the experimental SPA2 basin, Sicily (Italy)
2018
Sediment delivery ratio can be used as a measure of sediment connectivity and it can be linked to the structural connectivity (morphological unit, slope length, slope steepness, travel time) of a basin and to the functional connectivity (rainfall-runoff processes at morphological unit scale). In this paper the sediment connectivity approach was applied at basin scale both using Sediment Delivery Distributed (SEDD) model, which takes into account the hillslope sediment transport, and sediment yield measurements carried out at SPA2 experimental basin (Sicily, Italy). The expression of the sediment delivery ratio SDRi of a morphological unit was modified for highlighting two components corresp…
Differential Evolution with Fitness Diversity Self-adaptation
2009
This chapter proposes the integration of fitness diversity adaptation techniques within the parameter setting of Differential Evolution (DE). The scale factor and crossover rate are encoded within each genotype and self-adaptively updated during the evolution by means of a probabilistic criterion which takes into account the diversity properties of the entire population. The population size is also adaptively controlled by means of a novel technique based on a measurement of the fitness diversity. An extensive experimental setup has been implemented by including multivariate problems and hard to solve fitness landscapes. A comparison of the performance has been conducted by considering both…
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the RNA-RNA interaction underlying a genetic transposition program
2021
Thermodynamic descriptions are powerful tools to formally study complex gene expression programs evolved in living cells on the basis of macromolecular interactions. While transcriptional regulations are often modeled in the equilibrium, other interactions that occur in the cell follow a more complex pattern. Here, we adopt a nonequilibrium thermodynamic scheme to explain the RNA-RNA interaction underlying IS10 transposition. We determine the energy landscape associated with such an interaction at the base-pair resolution, and we present an original scaling law for expression prediction that depends on different free energies characterizing that landscape. Then, we show that massive experim…
Aging in a free-energy landscape model for glassy relaxation
2005
The aging properties of a simple free-energy landscape model for the primary relaxation in supercooled liquids are investigated. The intermediate scattering function and the rotational correlation functions are calculated for the generic situation of a quench from a high temperature to below the glass transition temperature. It is found that the re-equilibration of molecular orientations takes longer than for translational degrees of freedom. The time scale for re-equilibration is determined by that of the primary relaxation as an intrinsic property of the model.
From the Beehives: Identification and Comparison of Physicochemical Properties of Algerian Honey
2021
In this study, the authors aimed at characterizing 11 Algerian kinds of honey taken from various geographical locations (beehives located at Djelfa (Medjbara and Dzaira), Laghouat, Aflou, Medea, Tiaret, Sidi bel-Abbes, Tiaret, Ain-Safra, Mostaganem, El Bayadh, and Ghardïa). The authors investigated the physicochemical parameters of these honey samples, including density, water content, electrical conductivity, ash content, pH, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) content, free acidity, and color. The physicochemical parameters obtained were found to be within acceptable ranges according to the international standards (Codex Alimentarius) for 9 out of 11 analyzed samples: density 1.38–1.50 g/cm3 (the…