Search results for "computer"
showing 10 items of 30657 documents
Fifteen operationally important decisions in the planning of biodiversity offsets
2018
Many development projects, whether they are about construction of factories, mines, roads, railways, new suburbs, shopping malls, or even individual houses, have negative environmental consequences. Biodiversity offsetting is about compensating that damage, typically via habitat restoration, land management, or by establishment of new protected areas. Offsets are the fourth step of the so-called mitigation hierarchy, in which ecological damage is first avoided, minimized second, and third restored locally. Whatever residual damage remains is then offset. Offsetting has been increasingly adopted all around the world, but simultaneously serious concerns are expressed about the validity of the…
GrassPlot – a database of multi-scale plant diversity in Palaearctic grasslands
2018
GrassPlot is a collaborative vegetation-plot database organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and listed in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD ID EU-00-003). GrassPlot collects plot records (relevés) from grasslands and other open habitats of the Palaearctic biogeographic realm. It focuses on precisely delimited plots of eight standard grain sizes (0.0001; 0.001; ... 1,000 m²) and on nested-plot series with at least four different grain sizes. The usage of GrassPlot is regulated through Bylaws that intend to balance the interests of data contributors and data users. The current version (v. 1.00) contains data for approximately 170,000 plots of different sizes a…
Evolution of sexually dimorphic pheromone profiles coincides with increased number of male‐specific chemosensory organs in Drosophila prolongata
2019
Abstract Binary communication systems that involve sex‐specific signaling and sex‐specific signal perception play a key role in sexual selection and in the evolution of sexually dimorphic traits. The driving forces and genetic changes underlying such traits can be investigated in systems where sex‐specific signaling and perception have emerged recently and show evidence of potential coevolution. A promising model is found in Drosophila prolongata, which exhibits a species‐specific increase in the number of male chemosensory bristles. We show that this transition coincides with recent evolutionary changes in cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profiles. Long‐chain CHCs that are sexually monomorphic …
Plankton Tracker: A novel integrated system to investigate the dynamic sinking behavior in phytoplankton
2020
Abstract Phytoplankton sinking is an important property that can determine community composition, affecting nutrient and light absorption in the photic zone, and influencing biogeochemical cycling via material loss to the deep ocean. To date, the difficulty in exploring the sinking processes is partly due to methodological limitations in measuring phytoplankton sinking rate. However, in the last decade, works have illustrated various methods based on some non-invasive and low perturbing approaches (laser scanner, video-microscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy). In this study, we review the methods for sinking rate estimation and describe the Plankton Tracker, a novel integrated system to inves…
Database of diazotrophs in global ocean: abundance, biomass and nitrogen fixation rates
2012
Marine N<sub>2</sub> fixing microorganisms, termed diazotrophs, are a key functional group in marine pelagic ecosystems. The biological fixation of dinitrogen (N<sub>2</sub>) to bioavailable nitrogen provides an important new source of nitrogen for pelagic marine ecosystems and influences primary productivity and organic matter export to the deep ocean. As one of a series of efforts to collect biomass and rates specific to different phytoplankton functional groups, we have constructed a database on diazotrophic organisms in the global pelagic upper ocean by compiling about 12 000 direct field measurements of cyanobacterial diazotroph abundances (based on microscopic …
Biometric Fish Classification of Temperate Species Using Convolutional Neural Network with Squeeze-and-Excitation
2019
Our understanding and ability to effectively monitor and manage coastal ecosystems are severely limited by observation methods. Automatic recognition of species in natural environment is a promising tool which would revolutionize video and image analysis for a wide range of applications in marine ecology. However, classifying fish from images captured by underwater cameras is in general very challenging due to noise and illumination variations in water. Previous classification methods in the literature relies on filtering the images to separate the fish from the background or sharpening the images by removing background noise. This pre-filtering process may negatively impact the classificat…
EUNIS Habitat Classification: Expert system, characteristic species combinations and distribution maps of European habitats
2020
Aim The EUNIS Habitat Classification is a widely used reference framework for European habitat types (habitats), but it lacks formal definitions of individual habitats that would enable their unequivocal identification. Our goal was to develop a tool for assigning vegetation-plot records to the habitats of the EUNIS system, use it to classify a European vegetation-plot database, and compile statistically-derived characteristic species combinations and distribution maps for these habitats. Location Europe. Methods We developed the classification expert system EUNIS-ESy, which contains definitions of individual EUNIS habitats based on their species composition and geographic location. Each ha…
A unified vegetation index for quantifying the terrestrial biosphere
2021
[EN] Empirical vegetation indices derived from spectral reflectance data are widely used in remote sensing of the biosphere, as they represent robust proxies for canopy structure, leaf pigment content, and, subsequently, plant photosynthetic potential. Here, we generalize the broad family of commonly used vegetation indices by exploiting all higher-order relations between the spectral channels involved. This results in a higher sensitivity to vegetation biophysical and physiological parameters. The presented nonlinear generalization of the celebrated normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) consistently improves accuracy in monitoring key parameters, such as leaf area index, gross prim…
Data synergy between leaf area index and clumping index Earth Observation products using photon recollision probability theory
2018
International audience; Clumping index (CI) is a measure of foliage aggregation relative to a random distribution of leaves in space. The CI can help with estimating fractions of sunlit and shaded leaves for a given leaf area index (LAI) value. Both the CI and LAI can be obtained from global Earth Observation data from sensors such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS). Here, the synergy between a MODIS-based CI and a MODIS LAI product is examined using the theory of spectral invariants, also referred to as photon recollision probability ('p-theory'), along with raw LAI-2000/2200 Plant Canopy Analyzer data from 75 sites distributed across a range of plant functional types.…
Chlorophyll fluorescence as a tool for management of plant resources
1994
Abstract Light-induced chlorophyll fluorescence has become a tool which has ever-increasing potential application to experimental plant physiology. The effects of frost, heat, and drought have been analyzed using the kinetics of individual leaves of two representative types of life form: an evergreen tree (holm oak) dominant in the Mediterranean Basin and an annual cultivated legume (soybean). Various indices were used to quantify their response to environmental stress. Canopy fluorescence for the two types of plants was simulated. For two levels of measurement, leaf or canopy, light-induced fluorescence appears to be helpful for forest or crop management in the Mediterranean area.