Search results for "forest"

Trend of inter-arrival times of rainfall events for Italian Sub-Alpine and Mediterranean areas

2011

Spatial variability of dry spells duration statistical distributions

2014

Dry spells duration and its extent in space, is a key factor in water resources problems. In order to modelling the empirical distribution of dry spells (DS) frequencies observed in Sicily (i.e. in a typical Mediterranean climate), Agnese et al. (2014) successfully applied the two-parameter polylogarithm-series distribution. Because of the strong seasonality characterising Sicily’s rainfall regime, statistical analysis was separately applied to two data sets, referred to as “dry” and “wet” seasons, respectively. In this work, a similar analysis was carried out for a set of 26 DS time-series recorded in a large area (about 30000 km2), including Piedmont and the Aosta Valley. Area altitude ra…

Intermediate-duration-rainfall intensity equations. Discussion by Vito Ferro

1997

Rainfall depth-duration relationships are presented.

Global Estimation of Biophysical Variables from Google Earth Engine Platform

2018

This paper proposes a processing chain for the derivation of global Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR), Fraction Vegetation Cover (FVC), and Canopy water content (CWC) maps from 15-years of MODIS data exploiting the capabilities of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform. The retrieval chain is based on a hybrid method inverting the PROSAIL radiative transfer model (RTM) with Random forests (RF) regression. A major feature of this work is the implementation of a retrieval chain exploiting the GEE capabilities using global and climate data records (CDR) of both MODIS surface reflectance and LAI/FAPAR datasets allowing the global estim…

Performance Dissimilarities in European Union Manufacturing: The Effect of Ownership and Technological Intensity

2021

Our paper addresses the relevance of a set of continuous and categorical variables that describe industry characteristics to differences in performance between foreign versus locally owned companies in industries with dissimilar levels of technological intensity. Including data on manufacturing sector performance from 20 European Union member countries and covering the 2009–2016 period, we used the random forests methodology to identify the best predictors of EU manufacturing industries’ a priori classification based on two main attributes: ownership (foreign versus local) and technological intensity. We found that EU foreign-owned businesses dominate locally owned ones in terms of size, wh…

Application of selected methods of black box for modelling the settleability process in wastewater treatment plant

2017

The paper described how the results of measurement s of inflow wastewater temperature in the chamber, a degree of external and internal recirculation in the biological-mechanical wastewater treatment plan t (WWTP) in Cedzyna near Kielce, Poland, were used to make predictions of settleability of activated sludge. Three methods,namely: multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), random forests (RF) and modified random forests (RF+ SOM) were employed to compute activated sludge settleability. The results of analysis indicate that modified random forests demonstrate the best predictive abilities.

Application of selected supervised classification methods to bank marketing campaign

2016

Supervised classification covers a number of data mining methods based on training data. These methods have been successfully applied to solve multi-criteria complex classification problems in many domains, including economical issues. In this paper we discuss features of some supervised classification methods based on decision trees and apply them to the direct marketing campaigns data of a Portuguese banking institution. We discuss and compare the following classification methods: decision trees, bagging, boosting, and random forests. A classification problem in our approach is defined in a scenario where a bank’s clients make decisions about the activation of their deposits. The obtained…

Current Social and Rangeland Access Trends among Pastoralists in the Western Algerian Steppe

2021

International audience; In the western Algerian steppe, the public authorities have carried out actions aimed at rural development (agricultural development programs) and combating desertification (grazing reserves) to counter the significant and rapid loss of vegetation cover of pastures by overgrazing, and the consequent impacts on local livelihoods. In the Rogassa area, these actions have impacted land tenure and the ancestral and collective way of land use and access. These changes have caused transformations in lifestyle and pasture management. This research aims to characterize how such changes are affecting local pastoralists and what their perceptions are about them. A selective sam…

ENSEMBLE METHODS FOR RANKING DATA

2017

The last years have seen a remarkable flowering of works about the use of decision trees for ranking data. As a matter of fact, decision trees are useful and intuitive, but they are very unstable: small perturbations bring big changes. This is the reason why it could be necessary to use more stable procedures, as ensemble methods, in order to find which predictors are able to explain the preference structure. In this work ensemble methods as BAGGING and Random Forest are proposed, from both a theoretical and computational point of view, for deriving classification trees when ranking data are observed. The advantages of these procedures are shown through an example on the SUSHI data set.

Questing abundance of adult taiga ticks Ixodes persulcatus and their Borrelia prevalence at the north-western part of their distribution

2020

Background Because ixodid ticks are vectors of zoonotic pathogens, including Borrelia, information of their abundance, seasonal variation in questing behaviour and pathogen prevalence is important for human health. As ticks are invading new areas northwards, information from these new areas are needed. Taiga tick (Ixodes persulcatus) populations have been recently found at Bothnian Bay, Finland. We assessed seasonal variation in questing abundance of ticks and their pathogen prevalence in coastal deciduous forests near the city of Oulu (latitudes 64–65°) in 2019. Methods We sampled ticks from May until September by cloth dragging 100 meters once a month at eight study sites. We calculated a…