Search results for "growing"

On thermoeconomics of energy systems at variable load conditions: integrated optimization of plant design and operation

2007

Abstract Thermoeconomics has been assuming a growing role among the disciplines oriented to the analysis of energy systems, its different methodologies allowing solution of problems in the fields of cost accounting, plant design optimisation and diagnostic of malfunctions. However, the thermoeconomic methodologies as such are particularly appropriate to analyse large industrial systems at steady or quasi-steady operation, but they can be hardly applied to small to medium scale units operating in unsteady conditions to cover a variable energy demand. In this paper, the fundamentals of thermoeconomics for systems operated at variable load are discussed, examining the cost formation process an…

Novel leaf-level measurements of chlorophyll fluorescence for photosynthetic efficiency

2015

Solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) from vegetation can now be obtained from satellites as well as ground-based field studies, at select wavelengths associated with atmospheric features. At the leaf level, full spectrum (650–800 nm) chlorophyll emissions (ChlF) can be measured using specialized instrumentation to support interpretation of these SIF observations. We found that ChlF spectra differ for leaf bottoms versus upper leaf surfaces, potentially affecting within-canopy radiative scattering. Our ChlF measurements for leaves of eight tree species (n≥125) obtained during fall 2013 senescence at the Duke Forest in North Carolina, USA and the 2014 growing season (n=72) at the USDA…

Interannual to decadal variability of summer sea surface temperature in the Sea of Okhotsk recorded in the shell growth history of Stimpson's hard cl…

2017

Abstract Sclerochronological and shell stable oxygen isotopic analyses were conducted on live-caught specimens of Stimpson's hard clams, Mercenaria stimpsoni , from the southern Sea of Okhotsk, off northern Hokkaido, Japan. In this region, the main growing season of this species during early ontogeny (below the age of 12 years) lasts from mid-spring to mid-fall at sea surface temperatures (SST) between approximately 10 and 22 °C. Growth cessation begins between late fall and early spring at SST, below approximately 6 °C; however, shell growth was largely limited to the summer season later in life. Counting of annual increments indicated that this species had a relatively long life span of u…

Growing stock volume from multi-temporal landsat imagery through google earth engine

2019

Growing stock volume (GSV) is one of the most important variables for.forest management and is traditionally- estimated from ground measurements. These measurements are expensive and therefore sparse and hard to maintain in time on a regular basis. Remote sensing data combined with national forest inventories constitute a helpful tool to estimate and map forest attributes. However, most studies on GSV estimation from remote sensing data focus on small forest areas with a single or only a few species. The current study aims to map GSV in peninsular Spain, a rather large and very heterogeneous area. Around 50 000 wooded land plots from the Third Spanish National Forest Inventory (NFI3) were u…

European phenological response to climate change matches the warming pattern

2006

Global climate change impacts can already be tracked in many physical and biological systems; in particular, terrestrial ecosystems provide a consistent picture of observed changes. One of the preferred indicators is phenology, the science of natural recurring events, as their recorded dates provide a high-temporal resolution of ongoing changes. Thus, numerous analyses have demonstrated an earlier onset of spring events for mid and higher latitudes and a lengthening of the growing season. However, published single-site or single-species studies are particularly open to suspicion of being biased towards predominantly reporting climate change-induced impacts. No comprehensive study or meta-an…

The ARYA crop yield forecasting algorithm: Application to the main wheat exporting countries

2021

Abstract Wheat is the most important commodity traded in the international food market. Thus, accurate and timely information on wheat production can help mitigate food price fluctuations. Within the existing operational regional and global scale agricultural monitoring systems that provide information on global crop yield and area forecasts, there are still fundamental gaps: #1. Lack of quantitative Earth Observation (EO) derived crop information, #2. Lack of global but detailed (national or subnational level) and timely crop production forecasts and #3. Lack of information on forecast uncertainties. In this study we present the Agriculture Remotely-sensed Yield Algorithm (ARYA) an EO-base…

Evaluating the Environmental Performance of Green Roofs by a Life Cycle Approach: an Application of the LCA Method on a Case Study in Italy

2011

Automatic Seed Placement for Breast Lesion Segmentation on US Images

2012

Breast lesion boundaries have been mostly extracted by using conventional approaches as a previous step in the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems. Among these, region growing is a frequently used segmentation method. To make the segmentation completely automatic, most of the region growing methods incorporate automatic selection of the seed points. This paper proposes a new automatic seed placement algorithm for breast lesion segmentation on ultrasound images by means of assigning the probability of belonging to a lesion for every pixel depending on intensity, texture and geometrical constraints. The proposal has been evaluated using a set of sonographic breast images with acco…

The effect of environmental uncertainty and diapause investment on the occurrence of specialist and generalist species

2014

The evolution of specialist and generalist strategies is a central topic in ecology with strong implications for the biodiversity and structure of communities. Environmental unpredictability has been suggested as a key factor affecting the relative advantages of generalist species. However, life cycle features, like diapause, can also play a major role in the competitive dynamics between generalists and specialists. Zooplanktonic communities of continental waters are suitable models to study this; they inhabit water bodies that vary temporally with different degrees of uncertainty and rely on the production of diapause stages to survive across the year. We developed a simple theoretical mod…

Evaluation of Green Roof Ageing Effects on Substrate Hydraulic Characteristics

2020

The vegetated substrate of green roofs may undergo various chemical and physical changes with time. Minidisk infiltrometer (MDI) tests were conducted to assess the short-term variations of the near-saturated hydraulic conductivity, K0, in the extensive green roof test plot established at the University of Palermo. Sampling was repeated four times: before planting (Age 0) and then after four months (Age 1), seven months (Age 2) and ten months (Age 3). A total of 144 infiltration tests were conducted at two pressure heads, h0 = −3 cm and h0 = −0.5 cm and infiltration data analysed by the Zhang (Soil Science Society of America Journal 61(4):1024–1030, 1997) model. Both K-3 and K-0.5 underwent …