Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Nitrification on Soil Acidification and Cation Leaching in a Red Alder Ecosystem

ABSTRACT The objectives of this study were to investigate the impacts of in· ternal nitrification on soil and soil solution acidity and on the rate of nutrient export through NO, -mediated leaching. This was achieved by comparing soil chemical properties and soil solution composition within a naturally N·rich red alder (Alnus rubra Bong.) ecosystem to those of an adjacent Douglas·fir IPseudotsuga menziesii (Mirbel) Francol forest where soil N levels were significantly lower and no measurable HNO, production could be observed. In the red alder sys· tern, where> 100 kg ha-' yr-' of N were added through symbiotic N, fixation, the net annual NO, - leaching past the 40·cm soil depth amounted to 3460 mol charges ha-', and NO, -concentrations in the solutions collected below 40 cm periodically exceeded drinking water standards of 10 mg L -'. The H' and NO, - release was most pro· nounced in the forest floor and top 10 em of the soil under alder oc­cupancy and caused significant acidification of percolating solutions. Less than 1010 of the total H' input from internal (nitrification) and external (atmospheric) sources leached below the 40-cm depth, which was indicative for the strong buffering capacity of this particular soil. The cation displacement reactions involved in this pH buffering caused a 15% decline in base saturation and a significant acidification of the upper part of the soil profile. The presence of large amounts of mobile NO, -in solution triggered accelerated cation leaching, causing a selective redistribution of primarily exchangeable Ca" from the A to the B horizon. These field studies lead us to conclude that the rate and the selectivity of NO, -mediated leaching in a red alder system could significantly lower the exchangeable cation pool in the rooting zone or
GROWTH, YIELD AND QUALITY OF SUGARCANE (SACCHARUM SPP. HYBRID COMPLEX) AS INFLUENCED BY INTEGRATED NUTRIENT MANAGEMENT AND GENOTYPES

A field investigation was carried out at Crop Research Centre, Rajendra Agricultural University, Pusa, Bihar during spring season of 2012-13 to evaluate the effect of integrated nutrient management and genotypes on growth, yield and quality of sugarcane. The results indicated that significant improvement of higher growth, yield attributes and yield in terms of tillers (149.53×103/ha), plant height (293.47 cm), millable canes (116.19×103/ ha), cane yield (93.90 t/ha) and sugar yield (10.82 t/ha) were recorded with application of 100% RDN through chemical fertilizer + 25% RDN through pressmud. Among three midlate genotypes, ‘BO 154’ resulted significantly highest tillers (161.43×10 3 /ha), plant height (292.57 cm), millable canes (124.04×10 3 /ha), cane yield
Influence of ambient environmental conditions and orography on the characteristics of deep convective cells as simulated with a sophisticated two-moment (bulk) microphysical scheme

The influence of orography and ambient environmental conditions (aerosol conditions, profiles of temperature, humidity and wind) on the initiation, life cycle and precipitation efficiency of convective cells is a current topic in meteorological research as well as in numerical weather prediction. In order to elaborate parameters crucially affecting the development of convective cells high resolution cloud resolving 3D simulations (∆x≤ 1 km) with a test version of the operational nonhydrostatic Lokalmodell (LM) of the German Weather Service are performed. In contrast to other studies, we use a sophisticated cloud microphysics parameterization, the two-moment bulk microphysical scheme by Seifert and Beheng (2006). In this way, the complex microphysical/(thermo)dynamical feedback processes in clouds are quite accurately described while keeping the numerical costs affordable for full 3D simulations. In detail, idealized high resolution cloud resolving simulations are performed considering simplified orography (e.g., elongated mountain ridge). As influencing parameters, temperatureand humidity profiles, condensationand 0◦C-level and maritime/continental CCN conditions are varied as well as mountain width and height to investigate the combined effects of different (thermo)dynamic conditions and orographic flow modification on single convective systems. The ultimate goal is to find parameters allowing to discriminate different convective regimes, useful for convection parameterizations and for nowcasting purposes. In a first stage, certain processes and sensitivities are identified and investigated in a more or less ”spot check” fashion. This paper presents examples of these investigations. To switch over to a more systematic processand parameter study, the next step will be to identify the most prominent sensitivities and to choose a suitable subset (no more than approx. 3 or 4 parameters) for a detailed sensitivity study to keep the computational effort within manageable limits. In parallel, radar reflectivity measurements of single deep convective systems are compared to accompanying model simulated reflectivities to check the model setup and results in a qualitative way. In Chapter 2 the model setup is briefly described, Chapter 3 shows an example of comparison with radar data, and in Chapters 4 and 5 two examples of interesting sensitivities are presented.
EXPLORING TIMELINESS FOR ACCURATE LOCATION RECOMMENDATION ON LOCATION-BASED SOCIAL NETWORKS

An individual’s location history in the real world implies his or her interests and behaviors. Accordingly, people who share similar location histories are likely to have common interest and behavior. This thesis analyzes and understands the process of Collaborative Filtering (CF) approach, which mines an individual’s preference from his/her geographic location histories and recommends locations based on the similarities between the user and others. We find that a CFbased recommendation process can be summarized as a sequence of multiplications between a transition matrix and visited-location matrix. The transition matrix is usually approximated by the user’s interest matrix that reflect the similarity among users, regarding to their interest in visiting different locations. The visited-location matrix provides the history of visited locations of all users, which is currently available to the recommendation system. We find that recommendation results will converge if and only if the transition matrix remains unchanged; otherwise, the recommendations will be valid for only a certain period of time. Based on our analysis, a novel location-based accurate recommendation (LAR) method is proposed, which considers the semantic meaning and category information of locations, as well as the timeliness of recommending results, to make accurate recommendations. We evaluated the precision and recall rates of LAR, using a large-scale real-world data set collected from Brightkite. Evaluation results confirm that LAR offers more accurate recommendations, comparing to the state-of-art approaches.
RAMAN LIGHT SCATTERING FOR SYSTEMS WITH STRONG SHORT-RANGE INTERACTION

Various type contributions to Raman light scattering are investigated for the Hubbard, t − J and pseudospin-electron models. To construct the polarizability operator the microscopic approach is used, which is based on the operator expansion in the terms of the Hubbard operators using t and J as formal parameters of the expansion. Two different contributions to the dipole momentum are taken into account: one is connected with the nonhomeopolarity of filling of the electron states on a site, another – with the dipole transitions from the ground state to the excited ones (for the case of the Hubbard model) and with the dipole momentum of the pseudospins (for the case of the pseudospinelectron model). The general expressions for the scattering tensor components describing the magnon, electron (intraand interband) and pseudospin scattering are obtained. The resonant and nonresonant contributions are separated; their role at the change of the hole concentration due to doping is studied. The dependence of the Raman scattering tensor on the polarization of the incident and scattered light is investigated.
A verified computational technique to locate chaotic regions of Hénon systems

We present a computer assisted proof for the existence of a horseshoe of the 7-th iterate classical Henon map (H(x,y) = (1 + y i fix 2 ,flx)). An earlier, published theorem gives three geometrical conditions to be fulfilled by all points of the solution region, given by 2 parallelograms. We analyze these conditions separately and in case when all of them hold true, the proof is ready. The method applies interval arithmetic and recursive subdivision. This verified technique proved to be fast on the investigated problem instances.
Instrumental Fado: a generative interactive system

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas Universidade Nova de Lisboa Doctor of Philosophy Instrumental Fado A Generative Interactive System by Tiago Videira Fado was listed as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. This dissertation describes a theoretical model, as well as an automatic system, able to generate instrumental music based on the musics and vocal sounds typically associated with fado’s practice. A description of the phenomenon of fado, its musics and vocal sounds, based on ethnographic, historical sources and empirical data is presented. The data includes the creation of a digital corpus, of musical transcriptions, identified as fado, and statistical analysis via music information retrieval techniques. The second part consists in the formulation of a theory and the coding of a symbolic model, as a proof of concept, for the automatic generation of instrumental music based on the one in the corpus.
Elemental Analysis of Sub-Hourly Ambient Aerosol Collections

Simultaneous multielement graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry was used to determine Al, As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sb, Se, and Zn in ambient air sampled at 170 L·min−1 for 30 min and collected as a slurry after dynamic preconcentration. In PM20 samples collected at College Park, MD, results were > 2σ above system blank in > 95% of samples for Al, Cd, Cu, Cr, Fe, Mn, Pb, and Zn, and > 2σ above system blank in > 80% of samples for As, Ni, and Se. Analyses of slurries of NIST SRM 1648, Urban Particulate Matter, were typically within 10% of expected values for all elements except Al, Cr, and Fe, elements for which deviations were mostly due to difficulties in transferring large particles. This problem will be reduced for urban fine particulate matter samples (PM2.5). Trends in the concentrations of elemental source markers were readily correlated with wind direction and other meteorological factors to identify the influences of local industrial emissions, including motor vehicle traffic, coal- and oil-fired power plants, and municipal incinerators. Factor analysis was applied to the 88-sample data set to extract 7 factors: urban dust, meteorological factors, incinerators, coal-fired power plants, Tour Bus emission, unknown As source, and oil-fired power plants. Factor analysis was also applied to an 18-sample data set representing 2.5 h averages of the 30 min data to simulate the effect of longer sample collection times. Only 6 factors were extracted from this data set, which shows that increased temporal resolution enhances the power of factor analysis to resolve sources. These results indicate that a wealth of detailed information is revealed at this level of temporal resolution.
X-ray absorption spectroscopy study of chromium recovered from Cr(VI)-containing water with rice husk

The characteristics of the richness in silica and the high porosity of rice husk enable its application as a good, yet cheap, heavy metal adsorbent from wastewater. This study used rice husk to sorb Cr(VI) from wastewater that contained 2000 mg Cr(VI) l−1. Results of a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) experiment indicate a considerable morphology alteration of the rice husk after the sorption experiments. 13C-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements show significant decrease in intensity of all the following peaks: carbonylic, carboxylic, aromatic, polysaccharides, carbohydrates and aliphatics. The X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) result indicates that about 70% and 90% of the Cr(VI) sorbed on the rice husk after the 12 and 48 h sorption experiments, respectively, were in Cr(III) forms. In the 12 h sorbed rice husk sample, the chromium species distribution is 41% organic Cr(III) +27%Cr(OH)3+32%CrO3, while in the 48 h sorbed one, it is 57% organic Cr(III) +31%Cr(OH)3+12%CrO3.
Effect of mycotoxin deactivator product supplementation on dairy cows

A total mixed ration (TMR) containing a blend of feedstuffs naturally contaminated with harmful mycotoxins was fed for 84 days to 24 primiparous and multiparous Holstein–Friesian × local dairy cows in a randomised complete block design. The dietary treatments consisted of a contaminated TMR diet plus various levels of the mycotoxin deactivator product (MDP) (0, 15, 30 or 45 g/head.day). Deoxynivalenol (DON), fumonisin B1 (FB1), zearalenone (ZON) and ochratoxin A (OTA) were found in the TMR at levels up to 720, 701, 541 and 501 μg/kg, whereas aflatoxin B1 (AfB1) and T-2 toxin (T-2) were found in the TMR at levels of 38 and 270 μg/kg, respectively. Rumen microbial ecology, ruminal volatile fatty acid (VFA) concentrations, ruminal microorganism populations, feed intake, total tract digestibility, milk yield, milk composition and serum immunoglobulin (Ig) concentrations were measured. The results revealed that the ruminal pH, ruminal ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) concentration, total ruminal VFA concentrations and ruminal bacterial counts were significantly (P < 0.05) higher in supplemented than in non-supplemented cows. Ruminal protozoal counts were significantly (P < 0.05) lower in supplemented than in non-supplemented cows. DM intake, and digestibility of crude protein (CP) and neutral detergent fibre (NDF) were significantly (P < 0.05) higher in supplemented than in non-supplemented cows. Serum IgA concentrations were significantly (P < 0.05) higher in supplemented than in non-supplemented cows. Milk yield and milk protein were significantly (P < 0.05) higher in supplemented than in non-supplemented cows. On the basis of this experiment, it can be concluded that milk production and feed intake can be increased with the addition of MDP to cow diet in the presence of mycotoxins. These increases were accompanied by decreases in the negative effects of mycotoxins on rumen and immune function.
The floristic and faunistic Korean refugium during the last glacial period and its significance in postglacial biota formation

The hypothesis that the Manchurian-Korean refugium of forest flora and fauna played a role in the formation of the European biota in the postglacial period is confirmed by: geographical vicarance in the Palaearctic region, the distribution of fossil species, the similarity of the present-day climate to that in the Tertiary, the disappearance of the sea barrier between Europe and Asia in the Quaternary, ecological corridors serving as migration pathways between Europe and the Far East. The data point to the importance of studies of the biota of Poland and Korea for the explanation of the genesis and evolution of the living world.
Enhancing Bengali character recognition process applying heuristics on Neural Network

Summary Recognition of Bengali characters by neural network has received much attention already. Better preprocessing and feature extraction may fail to give better accuracy if the recognition process (includes training and testing) is incompetent. In this paper, some heuristics are proposed to make the backpropagation training algorithm perform better. Finally, character recognition accuracy results obtained from different algorithms are compared.
Is Pelagic Top-down Control in Lakes Augmented by Benthic Energy Pathways?

Modern food web studies are typically conducted from a trophic dynamic perspective that focuses on com- bined roles of top-down and bottom-up forces in regulating food web structure. Recognition of spatial food web subsi- dies in diverse ecosystems highlights the importance of energy flow as a foundation for understanding trophic dynamics. Here, we consider how different energy flow configurations might affect trophic dynamics in north-temperate lakes. A literature review revealed that littoral piscivores exert top-down control on prey fishes. In contrast, analysis of littoral predator diets indicated extensive omnivory and heavy reliance on zoobenthic prey. We explored this uncoupling between trophic dynamics (piscivores regulate prey fish) and energy flow (zoobenthos in piscivore diets) using a bio- mass dynamic model. This model compared top-down impacts of a piscivore on prey fishes under two scenarios: con- sumption of prey fish only and consumption of prey fish plus zoobenthos. The model predicted that elimination of zoobenthivory leads to a 50% reduction in piscivore standing stock and concomitant 2.5-fold increase in prey fish abundance (i.e., zoobenthivory plays a key role in mediating pelagic top-down control). These results highlight the role of benthic-pelagic linkages in regulating trophic dynamics and underscore the value of whole-ecosystem approaches to the study of food webs.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS AND NUTRITIONAL STATUS FOR A HUNTER-GATHERER SOCIETY WITH SOCIAL TRANSITIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN CAMEROON

Economic development and social transition often influence the health status of local populations. Pygmy hunter-gatherers in central African rainforest had lived in nomadic life, however, their surrounding environment have been changing. This study aimed to assess the transition of nutritional status for local hunter-gatherers societies which faced social transition. Cross-sectional surveys were conducted in 1996 and 2010-2011 for a village of Baka Pygmy in southeastern Cameroon. The census and anthropometric data were collected from all inhabitants. The nutritional statuses were assessed by following ways; (1) BMI classification, (2) Z-score converting for children using CDC/NHANES reference, and (3) Deriving biological parameters for child growth from Preece-Baines model. During 15 years, despite the migrants greatly increased, the number of Baka was decreased and their living areas were become dispersed. However, the mean values of BMI and %fat for adults were proper and unchanged. Children's Z-scores indicated that although their body sizes were smaller than reference population, they had much amount of body weight and muscle for their height. In addition, the onset of growth spurt for children was occurred in moderate ages. These indices indicated that the nutritional status for Baka people was generally good, and that statuses were not changed.
Effects of Calcium-Sensing Protein Dysregulation on Cardiac Function in Drosophila melanogaster

As a ubiquitous intracellular messenger ion, calcium is involved in many critical biochemical processes in the cell. In cardiomyocytes, Ca interacts with a variety of calcium-sensing proteins and regulates cardiac pacemaking, excitability and contractility. This study examined two typical calcium-sensing proteins: calpain and Ca/calmodulindependent protein kinase II (CaMKII). Drosophila melanogaster was used as a model to explore the roles of these proteins in cardiomyocyte and how their dysregulation affects cardiac function. We show here that calpain mutations, calpain knockdowns, and CaMKII knockdown result in increased cardiac frequency and rhythmicity. In contrast, mutation in CaMKII causes a decreased cardiac frequency and rhythmicity. The findings deepened our understanding of the roles of calpain and CaMKII in heart cells and how their dysregulation could affect the heartbeat.
Surveying bats for conservation: the status of cave‐dwelling bats on Curaçao from 1993 to 2003

In view of their ecological importance and the abundance of threats on a developing Caribbean island, we surveyed the bats of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, and examined changes in the populations of seven threatened species over a decade, using previously published data as a baseline for comparison. The most important caves for bats (in terms of species representation and reproduction) were visited yearly, and monthly in 2001. Noctilio leporinus still occurs on the island, but does not appear to be numerous (six observed in 2003). We captured Myotis nesopolus nesopolus, but its roosting sites remain unknown. Leptonycteris curasoae curasoae numbers varied greatly, even within a year, and it may travel to and from other islands and Venezuela. Overall, however, the population of this species on Curaçao seems to be declining (1000 in 1993 and 625 in 2003); the disappearance of this pollinator could have severe consequences for the Curaçao ecosystem. Mormoops megalophylla intermedia is declining as well; in 2003, we counted 403 individuals including 75 pups, from 500 to 600 adults in the 10 previous years, representing a 25–30% decline in 1 year. We estimated the population of Natalus tumidirostris to be 890 in 2003. We also found a group of 60 Pteronotus davyi in Kueba di Ratón in 2003. Glossophaga longirostris elongata (1417 individuals counted) is the only species for which our data indicate relative stability over 10 years; L. curasoae and Mor. megalophylla are declining and other species must be monitored closely. Most caves are disturbed; four major caves require attention for the conservation of the most fragile species. Without immediate attention, Mor. megalophylla, in particular, risks imminent extinction. Despite problems associated with bat counts on Curaçao, it is clear that regular surveys are crucial to understand bat populations and their fluctuations in caves, and to allow management responses to declines, particularly for areas undergoing rapid urbanization.
INFRARED HIGH-RESOLUTION INTEGRATED LIGHT SPECTRAL ANALYSES OF M31 GLOBULAR CLUSTERS FROM APOGEE

Chemical abundances are presented for 25 M31 globular clusters (GCs), based on moderately high resolution (R = 22,500) H-band integrated light (IL) spectra from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). Infrared (IR) spectra offer lines from new elements, lines of different strengths, and lines at higher excitation potentials compared to the optical. Integrated abundances of C, N, and O are derived from CO, CN, and OH molecular features, while Fe, Na, Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, and Ti abundances are derived from atomic features. These abundances are compared to previous results from the optical, demonstrating the validity and value of IR IL analyses. The CNO abundances are consistent with typical tip of the red giant branch stellar abundances but are systematically offset from optical Lick index abundances. With a few exceptions, the other abundances agree between the optical and the IR within the 1σ uncertainties. The first integrated K abundances are also presented and demonstrate that K tracks the α elements. The combination of IR and optical abundances allows better determinations of GC properties and enables probes of the multiple populations in extragalactic GCs. In particular, the integrated effects of the Na/O anticorrelation can be directly examined for the first time.