Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Climate and the seasonal abundance of the tick <i>Dermacentor reticulatus</i>

Dermacentor reticulatus (Ixodida: Ixodidae, Fabricius 1794) is one of the most widely distributed and abundant tick species in central Europe and is a vector for a range of pathogens. Nevertheless, many aspects of its ecology and distribution remain poorly understood. To quantify the seasonal abundance of this species in the U.K. and the environmental factors that determine this, weekly sampling at sites throughout Wales and southern England was undertaken for 12 months. This showed that the activity of adult D. reticulatus peaked February and March and that no individuals were collected between May and mid-October; no questing tick activity was observed when the 5-day average temperature was greater than 15 ∘C. A single nymph was collected by dragging, confirming speculation over the nidicolous status of larval and nymphal stadia. Laboratory analysis found that D. reticulatus were able survive cold shock and the lower lethal temperature was estimated to be between −18 and −20 ∘C. Habitat was significantly associated with tick activity, with higher numbers of ticks collected from low lying vegetation in marsh environments than from exposed grassland or woodland. A strong association was observed between activity and saturation deficit suggesting that the seasonal pattern of activity seen in the field, within the sites where it was abundant, is more strongly determined by temperature than humidity. Range expansion within the U.K. should be expected, bringing with it an elevated disease risk for animal and human hosts.
The measurement properties of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale- Parent version in a large international pooled sample of young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Magiati, Iliana, Lerh, Jian Wei, Hollocks, Matthew J., Uljarevic, Mirko, Rodgers, Jacqui, McConachie, Helen, Ozsivadjian, Ann, South, Mikle, Van Hecke, Amy, Hardan, Antonio, Libove, Robin, Leekam, Susan and Simonoff, Emily 2017. The measurement properties of the spence children's anxiety scale-parent version in a large international pooled sample of young people with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research 10 (10) , pp. 1629-1652. 10.1002/aur.1809 file
Convection Allowing Simulations of Hail in Historical and Future Climate Epochs

CONVECTION ALLOWING SIMULATIONS OF HAIL IN HISTORICAL AND FUTURE CLIMATE EPOCHS Jillian R. Goodin, M.S. Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment Northern Illinois University, 2023 Dr. Vittorio (Victor) A. Gensini, Thesis Director This thesis investigates the potential impact of anthropogenic climate change on hail frequency and intensity, which poses a significant threat to life and property, accounting for annual insured losses of around $30 billion in the U.S. This approach uses convection-allowing dynamically-downscaled regional climate simulations using input data from NCAR's biascorrected Community Earth System Model to simulate historical and projected future climate regimes under two greenhouse gas emission scenarios. A column maximum diameter hail diagnostic is simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasting regional climate model to identify instances of hail days and size to quantify changes in large hail frequency and location. Results reveal that elevated greenhouse gas concentrations cause a significant increase in large hail days in broad areas of the Midwest and Eastern U.S., while maximum hail size distribution profiles in other areas undergo negligible changes. Cumulative hail day counts indicate that the Southern Plains has the potential to experience a robust decrease in large hail days during summer, indicating more complex climate change responses in this region. Overall, almost all other U.S. regions exhibit an increase in cumulative severe and larger hail day counts on a seasonal basis, with the exception of the Southern Plains during boreal fall. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS
Variability of the subtropical highs, African easterly jet and easterly wave intensities over North Africa and Arabian Peninsula in late summer

The North African climate is analysed for August during a 32‐year period using the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) global data set to investigate the intensity variability at 600 mb of the subtropical highs, Africa easterly jet (AEJ) with two embedded local wind maxima, and African easterly waves over North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The variability of these synoptic weather systems is higher in East Africa. The most noticeable variability of intensity occurred with easterly waves. Maintenance of easterly waves from the Arabian Peninsula into East Africa is dependent on strong zonal gradients from the AEJ through shear vorticity. These zonal gradients were induced by the strengthening of the subtropical highs and the presence of a westerly jet in Central Africa and south of the Arabian Peninsula. During positive ENSO periods, these systems are generally weaker while in negative periods are stronger. The focus of this research is to investigate the role of the Arabian High and eastern local wind maximum (LWME) on complementing the Saharan High and western local wind maximum (LWMW). It is found that an intense local wind maximum in East Africa helps maintain the easterly waves and their westward propagation from the Arabian Peninsula.
Certification of Origin as a Non-Tariff Barrier

This paper puts forward the opinion that the certification of origin constitutes another type of non-tariff barrier. Indeed, certification of origin often combines both a quantity restriction and a sort of quality cost subsidy. We consider the canonical model of strategic trade policy, whereby two firms located respectively in the home country and in a foreign country are competing on the domestic market. In this framework, we show how certification can allow the domestic firm to position itself as a high quality producer. If, however, the certified firm offers the low quality good, then consumers' surplus may be improved.
Thin plate smoothing spline interpolation of daily rainfall for New Zealand using a climatological rainfall surface

This study presents a method for estimating daily rainfall on a 0.05° latitude/longitude grid covering all of New Zealand for the period 1960–2004 using a second order derivative trivariate thin plate smoothing spline spatial interpolation model. Use of a hand‐drawn (and subsequently digitised) mean annual rainfall surface as an independent variable in the interpolation is shown to reduce the interpolation error compared with using an elevation surface. This result is confirmed when long‐term average annual rainfall data, derived from the daily interpolations, are validated using long‐term river flow data. Copyright © 2006 Royal Meteorological Society
Delayed benefits for fallow bucks: more fights decrease same day mating success, but may increase matings the next day

Dominance hierarchies help to reduce unnecessary fights and associated costs during the mating season. Fallow deer (Dama dama) typically have high levels of male-male competition and strong reproductive skew. Nevertheless, how male dominance and daily fight rates affect mating success remains unknown. We used a two-year dataset from a large population of tagged fallow deer (620-689 individuals), to calculate male dominance ranks based on their agonistic interactions prior to the mating season (‘prerut’), in order to then examine how rank is related to fight rates and mating success during the mating season (‘rut’). Overall, higher-ranked males fought at least twice a day on a higher proportion of days during the rut and secured more matings. Males engaging in more than 10 fights per day were less likely to secure a mating that same day, and those males exceeding 15 fights per day secured no matings at all. Nevertheless, males with the highest numbers of fights (i.e. 15-21 fights per day) on a given day had higher mating success on subsequent days. Although higher-ranked males secured most matings during the rut, their fight rates decreased towards the end. We propose that engaging in more fights negatively affects daily individual mating success, but may benefit mating success on subsequent days, and potentially increase long-term fitness benefits. Additionally, engaging in more fights as the rut progresses probably allows lower-ranked males to secure some matings before the availability of oestrous females ends for almost a year. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Fighting carries a risk of injury and high energetic costs. Male fallow deer establish dominance hierarchies, that help reduce unnecessary fights among individuals of different competitive abilities. However, whether high-ranked males fight more or less is yet unknown. By calculating social ranks of fallow bucks before the start of their mating period, we show that males of higher social status do fight and mate more during the mating season (rut). Furthermore, by investigating how investment in fights affects individual mating success that same day and the next day, we find that males that fight more cause a decrease in their immediate daily mating success, but can potentially increase their chances of mating in subsequent days. Thus, to fight more may allow males to climb the hierarchical social ladder, hence increasing longer-term fitness benefits associated to higher ranks.
An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-andforward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2–6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1–10s.
Optimizing on-demand resource deployment for peer-assisted content delivery

Increasingly, content delivery solutions leverage client resources in exchange for services in a peerto-peer (P2P) fashion. Such peer-assisted service paradigm promise s significant infrastructure cost reduction, but suffers from the unpredictability associated with client res ources, which is often exhibited as an imbalance between the contribution and consumption of resour c by clients. This imbalance hinders the ability to guarantee a minimum service fidelity of these servic es to lients especially for applications where content has to be fresh and cannot be cached. In this thesis, we propose a novel architectural service model that enables the establis hment of higher fidelity services through (1) coordinatingthe content delivery to efficiently utilize the available resources, and (2) leasing the least additional cloud resources, available through s pecial nodes (angels) that join the service on-demand, and only if needed, to complement the scarce re sourc s available through clients. While the proposed service model can be deployed in many settings, this thesis focuses on peer-assisted content delivery and routing applications, in which the sca rce resource is typically the upstream capacity of clients. We target three applications that require th e d livery of fresh as opposed to stale content. The first application is bulk-synchronous trans fe , in which the goal of the system is to minimize the maximum distribution time – the time it takes to deliver the content to all clients in a group. The second application is live video streaming, in which t e goal of the
Ergodicity and mixing rate of one-dimensional cellular automata

One- and two-dimensional cellular automata which are known to be fault-tolerant are very complex. On the other hand, only very simple cellular automata have actually been proven to lack fault-tolerance, i.e., to be mixing. The latter either have large noise probability $\varepsilon$ or belong to the small family of two-state nearest-neighbor monotonic rules which includes local majority voting. For a certain simple automaton L called the soldiers rule, this problem has intrigued researchers for the last two decades since L is clearly more robust than local voting: in the absence of noise, L eliminates any finite island of perturbation from an initial configuration of all 0's or all 1's. The same holds for a 4-state monotonic variant of L, K, called two-line voting. We will prove that the probabilistic cellular automata $K\sb\varepsilon$ and $L\sb\varepsilon$, asymptotically lose all information about their initial state when subject to small, strongly biased noise. The mixing property trivially implies that the systems are ergodic. The finite-time information-retaining quality of a mixing system can be represented by its relaxation time Relax($\cdot$), which measures the time before the onset of significant information loss. This is known to grow as (1/$\varepsilon)\sp{c}$ for noisy local voting. The impressive error-correction ability of L has prompted some researchers to conjecture that $Relax(L\sb\varepsilon) =2\sp{c/ \varepsilon}$. We prove the tight bound $2\sp{c\sb1{\rm log}\sp21/ \varepsilon} < Relax(L\sb\varepsilon) < 2\sp{c\sb2{\rm log}\sp21/ \varepsilon}$ for a biased error model. The same holds for $K\sb\varepsilon$. Moreover, the lower bound is independent of the bias assumption. The strong bias assumption makes it possible to apply sparsity/renormalization techniques, the main tools of our investigation, used earlier in the opposite context of proving fault-tolerance.
A D-vine copula-based quantile regression towards merging satellite precipitation products over a rugged topography at the upper Tekeze Atbara Basin of the Nile Basin

Precipitation is a vital key element in various studies of hydrology, flood prediction, drought monitoring, and water resources management. The main challenge in conducting studies over remote regions with rugged topography is that weather stations are usually scarce and unevenly distributed. However, open-sourced satellite-based precipitation products 25 (SPPs) with the suitable resolution provide alternative options in these data-scarce regions, typically associated with high uncertainty. To reduce the uncertainty of individual satellite products, we have proposed a D-vine Copula-based Quantile Regression (DVQR) model to merge multiple SPPs with rain gauges (RGs). DVQR model was employed during the 2001-2017 summer monsoon seasons and compared with two other quantile regression methods based on the Multivariate Linear (MLQR) and the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMAQ), respectively, and two traditional merging methods: the simple 30 modeling average (SMA) and the one-outlier-removed average (OORA) using the descriptive and categorical statistics. The rugged topography region of the Upper Tekeze-Atbara Basin in Ethiopia was selected as the study region. The Results indicated that the precipitation data estimates with DVQR, MLQR, and BMAQ models and traditional merging methods outperformed the downscaled SPPs. Monthly evaluations reveal that all products perform better in July and September than in June and August due to precipitation variability. DVQR, MLQR
PREDICTING THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF F. Muell. Flindersia pimenteliana IN INDONESIAN PAPUA AND PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Population of Flindersia pimenteliana (Maple Silkwood) in Indonesian Papua and Papua New Guinea is severely fragmented and experiencing a continuing decline due to habitat destruction and illegal logging. This species is very susceptible to environmental changes and at greater risk of extinction due to its small and fragmented geographic ranges and low abundance. Using maximum entropy (MaxEnt) method, the present study predicted the impact of climate change on the distribution of the species across its native distribution area. Elevation and 19 bioclimatic variables commonly used in species distribution modeling were used as predictors. The prediction model of the 2 current potential distribution identified a total area of 156,214 km in Indonesian Papua and Papua New Guinea (18% of total land area) as suitable habitat for F. pimenteliana. Elevation and precipitation of the wettest, coldest and warmest quarters contributed most to the model. Based on the average of HadGEM2-ES and MIROC-ESM models, potential distribution projections under RCP8.5 scenario suggested a habitat gain of 16% for 2050 and 8% for 2070 in the species distribution. Whereas under RCP4.5, an average habitat gain of 7% was predicted for both 2050 and 2070. The newly suitable habitats were predicted to be found mainly in Southern and Western Highland of Papua New Guinea. Protection of these areas from habitat destruction and land use change is needed to assist F. pimenteliana find the most suitable climate for its survival.
A dual role of dams in fragmentation and support of fish diversity across the Godavari River basin in India

Freshwater systems are among the habitats most sensitive to environmental changes and human interference. The increasing needs in India for supplies of both fresh water and fish as a food source under the pressure of a rapidly growing population mandate identification of ways to conserve natural resources while meeting these human needs. Dams provide a partial solution for both water and food fish supplies, especially in monsoonal areas, although disruption of natural fish habitats may offset these benefits. To examine this phenomenon, the Godavari River basin in India was sampled at 32 sites, and the effects dams might have on fish species assemblages and distribution at these sites were analysed. Although the river basin was rich in species, their representation and distribution was fragmented. The surveyed fish fauna included 114 species that were classified into 12 orders. Cyprinids dominated the fauna. Few introduced and cultured species were widely distributed in the river. Some native species were barely captured, suggesting they might be at risk of loss. The presence of the Godavari dams, as has been the case elsewhere, does appear to have disturbed the species distribution. However, here, the dams also appear to have positive effects. Some dam reservoirs supported the highest levels of species diversity, and as low as five dam sites contained over 95% of all species found. The dam reservoirs may therefore represent preferred sites for conservation, and the proper management of such reservoirs may be critical to balancing human needs with sustainable conservation of fish biodiversity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Strategies for high-precision Global Positioning System orbit determination

High-precision orbit determination of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites is a key requirement for GPS-based precise geodetic measurements and precise low-Earth orbiter tracking. We explore different strategies for orbit determination with data from 1985 GPS field experiments. The most successful strategy uses multiday arcs for orbit determination and incorporates fine tuning of spacecraft solar pressure coefficients and stochastic station zenith tropospheric delays using the GPS data. Average rms orbit repeatabilities for five of the GPS satellites are 1.0, 1.2, and 1.7 m in altitude, cross-track, and downtrack components, when two independent 5-day fits are compared. Orbits predicted up to 24 hours outside a 7-day arc show average rms component differences of 1.5–2.5 m when compared to independent solutions obtained with a separate, nonoverlapping 5-day arc. For a 246-km baseline, with 6-day arc carrier phase solutions for GPS orbits, baseline repeatability is 2 parts in 108 (0.4–0.6 cm) for east, north, and length components and 8 parts in 108 for the vertical component. For a 1314-km baseline with the same orbits, baseline repeatability is about 2 parts in 108 for the north component (2.5 cm) and 4 parts in 108 or better for east, length, and vertical components. When GPS carrier phase is combined with pseudorange, the 1314-km baseline repeatability improves further to 5 parts in 109 for the north (0.6 cm) and 2 parts in 108 for the other components (2–3 cm).
Post‐Glacial immigration of the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) into the Baltic Sea *

At the end of the Pleistocene, environmental conditions in the Baltic Basin were affected by the melting glaciers and the resultant freshwater bodies. In contrast to various seal species, there is no subfossil evidence of the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) from the early Holocene stages of the Baltic Basin. This article is an attempt to clarify the colonization of the harbour porpoise into the Baltic Sea and to reveal the ecological background of this process. All published Holocene subfossil records from the porpoise in the Baltic region were sought and supplemented with those from museums and zoological collections; 148 records document the porpoise's occurrence. The earliest records of the harbour porpoise date from the time between 9600 and 7000 cal. yr BP and originate from the early and middle Mesolithic coastal settlements of the Maglemose and Kongemose culture during the early Littorina stage. Around 7500–5700 cal. yr BP, the porpoise is recorded frequently at many localities from late Mesolithic (Ertebølle culture) and Neolithic in the coastal areas of the western Baltic Sea, as well as for the first time in the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland. Since 4000 cal. yr BP, P. phocoena has only been recorded in the western Baltic. We suggest that immigration and dispersion of P. phocoena into the Baltic Sea was connected with the Littorina transgression beginning around 9000 cal. yr BP. The continuous influx of seawater and the associated ecological changes led to a new, very species‐rich, fish community and adequate living conditions for the harbour porpoise.
Precomputed routing on a Store and Forward satellite system

—Satellite constellations like Orbcomm provide store and forward message communication services. Inter-satellite links (ISL) are not considered in order to keep the system simple and the costs moderate ([1], [2]). Rather, gateways may act as relays between satellites. In this context, routing is important because it helps to control the end-to-end delay and resources utilization (e.g. on-board memory). However, routing must face frequent changes and partitioning of the network because of the satellite motion. Similar routing problems have been studied in the transportation ﬁeld (e.g. subway and railways). In this contribution, the Shortest Path Problem with Time Windows (SPPTW) is applied to satellite constellations and a pre-computed routing algorithm is derived. Simulation results show how this algorithm reduces the end-to-end delay of the routes.