Search results for "gradient"
showing 10 items of 725 documents
Soil fungal community composition does not alter along a latitudinal gradient through the maritime and sub-Antarctic
2012
We investigated the relationships between fungal community composition, latitude and a range of physicochemical parameters in 58 soils sampled from a 2370 km latitudinal gradient between South Georgia (54 S, 38 W) in the sub-Antarctic and Mars Oasis (72 S, 68 W) on Alexander Island in the southern maritime Antarctic. Our study, which is based on approximately ten times the number of samples used in previous similar studies, indicates that latitude and its associated environmental parameters are not related to fungal community composition. Significant changes in the composition of soil fungal communities were observed in relation to gradients of the ratio of total organic carbon to nitrogen,…
Impact of woody encroachment on soil organic carbon and nitrogen in abandoned agricultural lands along a rainfall gradient in Italy
2011
Land use changes represent one of the most important components of global environmental change andhave a strong influence on carbon cycling. As a consequence of changes in economy during the last century, areas of marginal agriculture have been abandoned leading to secondary successions. The encroachment of woody plants into grasslands, pastures and croplands is generally thought to increase the carbon stored in these ecosystems even though there are evidences for a decrease in soil carbon stocks after land use change. In this paper, we investigate the effects of woody plant invasion on soil carbon and nitrogen stocks along a precipitation gradient (200–2,500 mm) using original data from pa…
Multilayer neural networks: an experimental evaluation of on-line training methods
2004
Artificial neural networks (ANN) are inspired by the structure of biological neural networks and their ability to integrate knowledge and learning. In ANN training, the objective is to minimize the error over the training set. The most popular method for training these networks is back propagation, a gradient descent technique. Other non-linear optimization methods such as conjugate directions set or conjugate gradient have also been used for this purpose. Recently, metaheuristics such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms or tabu search have been also adapted to this context.There are situations in which the necessary training data are being generated in real time and, an extensive tr…
Increase in rear-end collision risk by acute stress-induced fatigue in on-road truck driving.
2021
Increasing road crashes related to occupational drivers’ deteriorating health has become a social problem. To prevent road crashes, warnings and predictions of increased crash risk based on drivers’ conditions are important. However, in on-road driving, the relationship between drivers’ physiological condition and crash risk remains unclear due to difficulties in the simultaneous measurement of both. This study aimed to elucidate the relationship between drivers’ physiological condition assessed by autonomic nerve function (ANF) and an indicator of rear-end collision risk in on-road driving. Data from 20 male truck drivers (mean ± SD, 49.0±8.2 years; range, 35–63 years) were analyzed. Over …
Regional variations in the chemical and helium–carbon isotope composition of geothermal fluids across Tunisia
2011
Abstract Tunisia has numerous thermo-mineral springs. Previous studies have shown that their chemical composition and occurrence are strongly influenced by the regional geology. However little work has been done so far to study the isotopic composition of volatiles associated with these geothermal manifestations. Here, we report on the results of an extensive survey of both natural hot springs and production wells across Tunisia, aimed at investigating the spatial distribution of thermal fluids' geochemical characteristics and He–C isotopic composition. The chemistry of the analyzed samples highlights the heterogeneity of the water mineralization processes in Tunisia, as a consequence of th…
Strain gradient plasticity, strengthening effects and plastic limit analysis
2010
Abstract Within the framework of isotropic strain gradient plasticity, a rate-independent constitutive model exhibiting size dependent hardening is formulated and discussed with particular concern to its strengthening behavior. The latter is modelled as a (fictitious) isotropic hardening featured by a potential which is a positively degree-one homogeneous function of the effective plastic strain and its gradient. This potential leads to a strengthening law in which the strengthening stress, i.e. the increase of the plastically undeformed material initial yield stress, is related to the effective plastic strain through a second order PDE and related higher order boundary conditions. The plas…
Stability of Flow with Viscous Dissipation in a Horizontal Porous Layer with an Open Boundary Having a Prescribed Temperature Gradient
2010
Published version of an article in the journal: Transport in Porous Media. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11242-010-9588-6 A buoyancy-induced stationary flow with viscous dissipation in a horizontal porous layer is investigated. The lower boundary surface is impermeable and subject to a uniform heat flux. The upper open boundary has a prescribed, linearly varying, temperature distribution. The buoyancy-induced basic velocity profile is parallel and non-uniform. The linear stability of this basic solution is analysed numerically by solving the disturbance equations for oblique rolls arbitrarily oriented with respect to the basic velo…
Ellenberg-type indicator values for European vascular plant species
2022
This is a dataset of Ellenberg-type indicator values for European vascular plant species described in this article: Tichý L., Axmanová I., Dengler J., Guarino R., Jansen F., Midolo G., Nobis M.P., Van Meerbeek K., Aćić S., Attorre F., Bergmeier E., Biurrun I., Bonari G., Bruelheide H., Campos J.A., Čarni A., Chiarucci A., Ćuk M., Ćušterevska M., Didukh Y., Dítě D., Dítě Z., Dziuba T., Fanelli G., Fernández-Pascual E., Garbolino E., Gavilán R.G., Gégout J.-C., Graf U., Güler B., Hájek M., Hennekens S.M., Jandt U., Jašková A., Jiménez-Alfaro B., Julve P., Kambach S., Karger D.N., Karrer G., Kavgacı A., Knollová I., Kuzemko A., Küzmič F., Landucci F., Lengyel A., Lenoir J., Marcenò C., Moeslun…
A Novel Artificial Mosaic Generation Technique Driven by Local Gradient Analysis
2008
Art often provides valuable hints for technological innovations especially in the field of Image Processing and Computer Graphics. In this paper we present a novel method to generate an artificial mosaic starting from a raster input image. This approach, based on Gradient Vector Flow computation and some smart heuristics, permit us to follow the most important edges maintaining at the same time high frequency details. Several examples and comparisons with other recent mosaic generation approaches show the effectiveness of our technique.
A second strain gradient elasticity theory with second velocity gradient inertia – Part I: Constitutive equations and quasi-static behavior
2013
Abstract A multi-cell homogenization procedure with four geometrically different groups of cell elements (respectively for the bulk, the boundary surface, the edge lines and the corner points of a body) is envisioned, which is able not only to extract the effective constitutive properties of a material, but also to assess the “surface effects” produced by the boundary surface on the near bulk material. Applied to an unbounded material in combination with the thermodynamics energy balance principles, this procedure leads to an equivalent continuum constitutively characterized by (ordinary, double and triple) generalized stresses and momenta. Also, applying this procedure to a (finite) body s…