Search results for "Processes"
showing 10 items of 3831 documents
Short-term changes in soil Munsell colour value, organic matter content and soil water repellency after a spring grassland fire in Lithuania
2014
Abstract. Fire is a natural phenomenon with important implications on soil properties. The degree of this impact depends upon fire severity, the ecosystem affected, topography of the burned area and post-fire meteorological conditions. The study of fire effects on soil properties is fundamental to understand the impacts of this disturbance on ecosystems. The aim of this work was to study the short-term effects immediately after the fire (IAF), 2, 5, 7 and 9 months after a low-severity spring boreal grassland fire on soil colour value (assessed with the Munsell colour chart), soil organic matter content (SOM) and soil water repellency (SWR) in Lithuania. Four days after the fire a 400 m2 plo…
Synthesis and optical characterization of Er-doped bismuth titanate nanoparticles grown by sol-gel hydrothermal method
2017
Abstract The Er 3+ -doped bismuth titanate (Bi 4 Ti 3 O 12 , BIT) nanoparticles were synthesized by a combined sol–gel and hydrothermal method under a partial oxygen pressure of 30 bar. The composition and morphology were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman scattering. They showed pure and homogeneous spherical BIT nanoparticles with a size below the 30 nm. The incorporation of Er ions showed a strong decrease in the lattice parameters, as well as averaged particle size. The photoluminescence up-conversion (excitation wavelength =1480 nm) showed an enhancement of the infrared emission (980 nm) as Er concentration increased, achieving a maxi…
Expression of functional α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor during mammalian muscle development and denervation
1999
We have studied, on the transcriptional, protein and functional level, the expression of alpha7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR) in the course of rat muscle development, denervation and renervation. At foetal day 13, alpha7 nAChR expression was observed in somites and developing muscles of the back, but not yet in migrating myoblasts. Two days later, concomitant with myoblast aggregation, the alpha7 isoform began to be expressed in isolated myoblasts, with the highest level of expression in the frontal zone of the migrating wave. On foetal day 18, a time when the myoblasts in the upper hindleg have fused, alpha7 nAChR expression was most prominent in the outer layer of muscle tissu…
Immobilised Humic Substances as Low-Cost Sorbents for Emerging Contaminants
2021
Environmental pollution with contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) is a worldwide problem that is receiving increasing attention. Although these substances have been released in the aquatic environment for a long time, wastewater treatment plants are still incapable of removing emerging contaminants completely. Consequently, trace metals, metalloids and pharmaceuticals, as well as surfactant leftovers, are often found in environmental samples. Environmentally friendly and cost-effective sorbents such as humic substances can be used for purification if their sorption properties are increased by immobilization. To our knowledge, immobilized humic substances have not been widely studied as s…
Testing an adapted beerkan infiltration run for a hydrologically relevant soil hydraulic characterization
2020
Abstract Literature raises doubts about the usability of infiltrometer methods to characterize soils in a hydrological perspective since these methods often yield excessively high infiltration rates or saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, Ks, values. For a loam (AR) and a silty-clay (RO) soil, beerkan infiltration runs were adapted in the perspective to obtain usable soil data to predict rainfall partition into infiltration and rainfall excess. In particular, the initially nearly dry soil was sampled with different water volumes (15 or 30) and heights of water application (low, L, 0.03 m, and high, H, 1.5 m), and the BEST-steady algorithm was applied to determine sorptivity, S, and Ks. Th…
Heat-transfer performance comparison between overlapped and woven spacers for membrane distillation
2016
Sustainable production of fresh water from seawater desalination is a problem of crucial importance nowadays. Recently, some desalination technologies are taking advantage from the coupling with renewable resources. Among emerging technologies, Membrane Distillation (MD) is considered as one of the most promising as it can be easily powered by solar thermal energy or waste-heat. As an emerging technology, efforts are required to optimize MD unit geometry and operating conditions in order to reduce fresh water production specific cost. Temperature polarization phenomenon is a well-known detrimental effect for the MD process. Spacers are traditionally used to enhance mixing and shrink tempera…
Biodiversity dynamics and their driving factors during the Cretaceous diversification of Spatangoida (Echinoidea, Echinodermata)
2004
Abstract Variations in recorded diversity over time present a scrambled signal that is modulated by a large number of variables: the potential of particular life forms to generate evolutionary innovations, external constraints induced by the environment in its broad sense, the heterogeneity of the fossil record and the analytical artefacts due to sampling bias. A key question is how to characterise and quantify the separate input of any given factor in the overall diversity signal. This paper explores the structure of diversity data for spatangoid heart urchins and the sensitivity of recorded diversity to different factors of analytical bias (length of geological periods, proportion of pala…
Hawkes processes on networks for crime data
2022
Motivated by the analysis of crime data in Bucaramanga (Colombia), we propose a spatio-temporal Hawkes point process model adapted to events living on linear networks. We first consider a non-parametric modelling strategy, for both the background and the triggering components, and then we include a parametric estimation of the background based on covariates, and a non-parametric one of the triggering effects. Our network model outperforms a planar version, improving the fitting of the self-exciting point process model.
Dimensionality reduction for large spatio-temporal datasets based on SVD
2009
Many models for spatio-temporal measurements Z(s; t) can be written as a sum of a systematic component and a residual component: Z = M + E. The approach presented here incorporates two Singular Value Decompositions (SVD). The first SVD is applied to the space-time data matrix Z with cross-validation to choose the number of smoothed singular vectors to use as temporal basis functions for modelling spatially varying temporal trend in the matrix M. The second SVD is applied to the spatio-temporal matrix E of residuals from the trend models fitted at each site; it represents spatially correlated short time scale temporal processes. The remaining stochastic structure is explained by simple autor…
A spatio-temporal model based on the SVD to analyze large spatio-temporal datasets
2009
A common problem in the analysis of space-time data is to compress a large dataset in order to extract the underlying trends. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is a useful tool for examining both the temporal and the spatial variation in atmospherical and physical process and a convenient method of performing this is the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Many spatio-temporal models for measurements Z(s; t) at location s at time t, can be written as a sum of a systematic component and a residual component: Z = M+E, where Z, M and E are all T x N matrices. Our approach permits modeling of incomplete data matrices using an "EM-like" iterative algorithm for the SVD. We model the tr…