Search results for "rules"

The effects of drainage and restoration of pine mires on habitat structure, vegetation and ants

2016

Habitat loss and degradation are the main threats to biodiversity worldwide. For example, nearly 80% of peatlands in southern Finland have been drained. There is thus a need to safeguard the remaining pristine mires and to restore degraded ones. Ants play a pivotal role in many ecosystems and like many keystone plant species, shape ecosystem conditions for other biota. The effects of mire restoration and subsequent vegetation succession on ants, however, are poorly understood. We inventoried tree stands, vegetation, water-table level, and ants (with pitfall traps) in nine mires in southern Finland to explore differences in habitats, vegetation and ant assemblages among pristine, drained (30…

2016

Ecological communities are structured by competitive, predatory, mutualistic and parasitic interactions combined with chance events. Separating deterministic from stochastic processes is possible, but finding statistical evidence for specific biological interactions is challenging. We attempt to solve this problem for ant communities nesting in epiphytic bird’s nest ferns (Asplenium nidus) in Borneo’s lowland rainforest. By recording the frequencies with which each and every single ant species occurred together, we were able to test statistically for patterns associated with interspecific competition. We found evidence for competition, but the resulting co-occurrence pattern was the opposit…

Fuzzy quantification of common and rare species in ecological communities (FuzzyQ)

2021

International audience; Most species in ecological communities are rare, whereas only a few are common. This distributional paradox has intrigued ecologists for decades but the interpretation of species abundance distributions remains elusive.We present Fuzzy Quantification of Common and Rare Species in Ecological Communities (FuzzyQ) as an R package. FuzzyQ shifts the focus from the prevailing species-categorization approach to develop a quantitative framework that seeks to place each species along a rarity-commonness gradient. Given a community surveyed over a number of sites, quadrats, or any other convenient sampling unit, FuzzyQ uses a fuzzy clustering algorithm that estimates a probab…

Simple learning rules to cope with changing environments

2008

10 pages; International audience; We consider an agent that must choose repeatedly among several actions. Each action has a certain probability of giving the agent an energy reward, and costs may be associated with switching between actions. The agent does not know which action has the highest reward probability, and the probabilities change randomly over time. We study two learning rules that have been widely used to model decision-making processes in animals-one deterministic and the other stochastic. In particular, we examine the influence of the rules' 'learning rate' on the agent's energy gain. We compare the performance of each rule with the best performance attainable when the agent …

Plant functional and taxonomic diversity in European grasslands along climatic gradients

2021

Aim European grassland communities are highly diverse, but patterns and drivers of their continental-scale diversity remain elusive. This study analyses taxonomic and functional richness in European grasslands along continental-scale temperature and precipitation gradients. Location Europe. Methods We quantified functional and taxonomic richness of 55,748 vegetation plots. Six plant traits, related to resource acquisition and conservation, were analysed to describe plant community functional composition. Using a null-model approach we derived functional richness effect sizes that indicate higher or lower diversity than expected given the taxonomic richness. We assessed the variation in abso…

Assembly rules of helminth parasite communities in grey mullets: combining components of diversity.

2020

Abstract Organisms aggregate in ecological communities. It has been widely debated whether these associations are explained by deterministic or, in contrast, random processes. The answer may vary, depending on the level of an organisational scale (α, β and γ) and the facet of diversity considered: taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic. Diversity at the level of a sampling unit (i.e. host individual) is the α diversity; β diversity represents the extent of dissimilarity in diversity among sampling units (within a level of an organisational scale, β1; between levels of an organisational scale, β2); and the total diversity of a system is γ diversity. Thus, the combination of facets and levels…

On the structural connectivity of large-scale models of brain networks at cellular level

2021

AbstractThe brain’s structural connectivity plays a fundamental role in determining how neuron networks generate, process, and transfer information within and between brain regions. The underlying mechanisms are extremely difficult to study experimentally and, in many cases, large-scale model networks are of great help. However, the implementation of these models relies on experimental findings that are often sparse and limited. Their predicting power ultimately depends on how closely a model’s connectivity represents the real system. Here we argue that the data-driven probabilistic rules, widely used to build neuronal network models, may not be appropriate to represent the dynamics of the …

Defining sensory descriptors: towards writing rules based on terminology

2007

International audience; Descriptive analysis relies upon the use of sensory descriptors. They are words generally associated to a definition aimed at helping their understanding. However, the writing rules for such definitions remain implicit. The present work is a collaborative attempt from sensory analysts and linguists to get further insight into how definitions are elaborated.Definition formulations were analyzed according to linguistic criteria, syntactic (type and number of nouns, verbs and adjectives) as well as semantic ones (relations of synonymy, metaphor or analogy between the descriptors and their definitions). Such a linguistic analysis was performed on one hundred descriptor d…

Field rules and bias in random surveys with quota samples : an assessment of CIS surveys

2018

Surveys applying quota sampling in their final step are widely used in opinion and market research all over the world. This is also the case in Spain, where the surveys carried out by CIS (a public institution for sociological research supported by the government) have become a point of reference. The rules used by CIS to select individuals within quotas, however, could be improved as they lead to biases in age distributions. Analysing more than 545,000 responses collected in the 220 monthly barometers conducted between 1997 and 2016 by CIS, we compare the empirical distributions of the barometers with the expected distributions from the sample design and/or target populations. Among other …

Reflexiones a propósito de la protección de datos en el escenario global digital: El derecho de daños en la litigiosidad internacional

2021

La circulación internacional de datos personales constituye un sector pujante en la esfera socio-económica. En tales condiciones, ante la existencia de un tratamiento ilícito de aquellos, el agraviado está legitimado para exigir una indemnización por los daños y perjuicios que se hubieran podido originar en el marco transfronterizo. Tal situación plantea dos cuestiones fundamentales: por un lado, determinar el órgano jurisdiccional competente para conocer de un eventual litigio, y, por otro, precisar la Ley aplicable para resolver la controversia suscitada. En la presente investigación cabe destacar las significativas novedades que introduce el Reglamento (UE) 2016/679, de 27 de abril de 20…