bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Wetland Ecosystem’s Health Using Remote Sensing – Case Study: Burullus Wetland – Ramsar Site
Authors: Hotaiba Amira M. , Salem Boshra B. , Halmy Marwa Waseem A. 
Published: September 2023

AbstractComplex ecosystems as wetlands are very sensitive to changes and disturbances. Human activities causing habitat fragmentation that alter landscapes affect the wetland ecosystems and negatively influence biodiversity. The health of the ecosystem is measured as a homeostasis between the system components and stability or resilience of the system against disturbance; therefore, any anthropogenic disturbances can cause dramatic changes in the balance of wetland ecosystem. Burullus, the second largest of the Egyptian northern coastal wetlands along the Mediterranean coast, has been recognized recently as critically endangered ecosystem according to an assessment using IUCN Red List of ecosystems. The study sought to assess Burullus wetland’s health based on multispectral indicators related to the structure, function, and resilience of the ecosystem. Three indices were calculated to quantify the health of the wetland: the structure index, vigor index, and resilience index. The overall status of the wetland indicates a dynamic state and rapid transformation, which occurred over the study period. The outcomes indicated that Burullus’s health has progressively deteriorated in the recent investigated years of 2016 and 2019 compared to the reference years of 1984 and 1986. The assessed indicators revealed a trend towards more deterioration of its ecological system due to the LULC transformations, anthropogenic interventions, and overexploitation of its natural resources. In addition, the growth in the impervious surfaces by 9% in the recent years due to expansion in urbanization was detected. All of these factors may affect the ecological balance and the health of the wetland to some extent. The fragility of this wetland and the continuous fragmentation of it occurs due to human activities that threaten its important and unique habitats. The integrated framework for the assessment of Burullus wetland’s health based on remotely sensed data and using geospatial techniques can be utilized for the assessment of other similar coastal wetlands at national and regional scales.
Two-sided fault parameter assessment through the utilization of a particle swarm optimizer to different gravity horizontal gradients-orders with application to various cases studies
Authors: Elhussein Mahmoud , Abo-Ezz Eid R. , Gomaa Omar A. , Géraud Yves , Essa Khalid S. 
Published: September 2023

AbstractMetaheuristic methods are increasingly being implemented to source parameter estimation of gravity anomalies. These approaches have become popular in the geophysical community because of their superior advantages. We emphasize the application of the particle swarm optimizer (PSO), which is motivated by the birds’ behaviors, to elucidate gravity anomalies. Besides, using different horizontal derivative orders for the observed data is valuable in reducing the regional field effect. The current inversion algorithm applied to other synthetic models (a two-sided dipping fault with a third-order regional, a two-sided dipping fault model interfered by a spherical structure model with and without 10% noise, and two neighboring two-sided dipping faults models with and without 10% noise) as well as two real-world cases from the United States and Tunisia. The usefulness of applying these techniques together was demonstrated by providing stable results in executing the buried source parameters and eradicating the regional field effect. Therefore, we recommend the application of these techniques in the model parameter estimation studies performed with potential field anomalies due to mineralized zones.
Dolomitisation favoured by Lewis acidic background compounds in saline fluids
Authors: Vandeginste Veerle , Hocknull Elliot , Fazeli Hossein , Ji Yukun 
Published: September 2023

AbstractPredicting the type and rate of reactions between minerals and fluids is of utmost importance in many applications. Due to the presence of background ions, natural environments are often much more complex than laboratory experimental conditions that are used to derive mineral dissolution or precipitation rates. Dolomitisation is one of the most important diagenetic processes affecting carbonate rocks. Still, its underlying mechanisms are not yet completely unraveled. Here, we test the impact of background ions in saline solutions on the dolomitisation rate. Using batch reactor experiments at 200 °C and mineralogical characterisation, we demonstrate that the presence of background ions influences the fluid starting pH and specific ion effect, both impacting the dolomitisation rate. The results indicate that ions with a stronger hydration enthalpy correlate with a shorter dolomitisation induction time, and that Lewis acid AlCl3 is more effective than Brønsted acid HCl. Importantly, dolomitisation occurred at a slightly acidic pH, and carbon speciation modelling showed that carbonate ions did not dominate in any of the experiments. Hence, dolomitisation in our experiments is faster in saline, slightly acidic rather than alkaline solutions and the rate is influenced by the solution composition, with specific ion effects influencing dolomite surface charge, interfacial tension and the structure of water. These new insights have implications for interpretations on natural environments, such as deep reservoirs with saline, slightly acidic formation water, and predictions related to geological carbon dioxide storage.
Assessing the role of community participation in integrated watershed management in Dandi Lake watershed Dandi district, West Showa, Oromia, Ethiopia
Authors: Bekele Yobsan , Kebede Birhanu , Kuma Tolera 
Published: September 2023

AbstractIntegrated watershed management is the method of overseeing human exercises and characteristic assets on a water shed basis, taking into consideration social and financial concerns. It is an ever-evolving hone including the administration of arrive, water, biota, and other assets and it requires involvement of strong institutions at the grass root level. Most watershed projects were not successful due to a lack of effective community participation. The objective of this study was to evaluate the contribution of community participation in integrated watershed management schemes in the Dandi lake watershed (Ethiopia) for long-term water resource conservation initiatives and short-term livelihood activities that enables the communities of the study area to meet their needs. Questionnaires, FGD, key informant interviews, personal observation were used as data collection tools. The collected data were organized and categorized according to the intended objectives and analyzed in qualitative and quantitative methods. The result of the study showed that role of community participation in participatory watershed management was examined by involvement in different management phases, 65.1% were involved only in the implementation stage, only 27.6% of respondents confirmed as they involve in all stages, 5.9 and 1.3% of sampled respondents witnessed as they are only involved in planning and mapping stage of watershed management. This study revealed that community participation in water shade management was hindered due to shortage of resources, interest, and previous experience, as well as peer pressure. In the meantime some successful efforts have been made on different land uses meant to reduce natural resource degradation and food security problems. These efforts include, contribution of delivered extension service, infrastructure provision and maintenance. The study also realized and proved the existence of unused development potential to improve the livelihood situation of the watershed community. This study came up with a good managerial implication, typically, it enhances Community engagement status by increasing its visibility and understanding of issues and empowers communities to have a say in decisions that affect their lives, cities and neighborhoods. The watershed management guidelines have to be clear to the community.
Effectiveness of bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 nanoparticles produced by Streptomyces gancidicus as prospective antifungal agents and therapeutic nutrients to enhance pea plant immunity against damping off-causing Pythium irregulare: in vivo and in vitro investigations
Authors: Elkhodary Basma H. , Attia Mohamed S. , El-Sayyad Gharieb S. , Salem Marwa S. 
Published: September 2023

Abstract

Pythium irregulare (P. irregulare) is one of the soil-borne pathogens that is the primary cause of damage to several plants each year. The novelty and originality of this work were the ability of Streptomyces gancidicus (S. gancidicus OR229936) to synthesize bimetallic zinc oxide-boron oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-B2O3 NPs) for reducing P. irregulare growth and safeguarding pea plant from damping off disease. The produced bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs’ XRD results highlighted the ZnO diffraction peaks at 2Ɵ = 27.50°, 31.15°, 45.15°, 56.89°, 67.98°, and 75.25°, which are complemented by the standard card JCPDS number 361451 and correspond to (002), (101), (102), (110), (103), and (201) Bragg’s reflections. Along with the standard card JCPDS number 300019, they additionally include the B2O3 NP diffraction peaks at 2Ɵ = 15.25°, 28.69°, 31.99°, and 41.28°. Bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs were tested against P. irregular for their antifungal activities. The findings indicated that ZnO-B2O3 NPs exhibited potential anti P. irregulare activity, with an inhibition zone of 33 mm at a concentration of 1000 µg/mL and a promising MIC of 0.01 µg/mL. Bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs (0.01 ppm) application appeared to significantly lessen the severity of the pea post-emergence damaging off disease by 10% and to provide significant protection by 88%. In comparison to fungicide (difenoconazole 25%) treatments, all metabolic resistance indicators significantly enhanced after the usage of bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs, ZnO NPs, and B2O3 NPs with ethyl acetate extract of S. gancidicus. The beneficial impacts of the bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs, ZnO NPs, and B2O3 NPs have been broadened to increase the enzyme activities of peroxidase (POD) and polyphenol oxidase (PPO) in both healthy and infected pea plant in comparison to control. Reduction of Malondialdehyde content (MDA) in response to S. gancidius filtrate, bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs, ZnO NPs, B2O3 NPs, and difenoconazole by 41.68%, 36.51%, 26.15, 26.15, and 15.25%, respectively. Also, contents of H2O2 in infected pea plant were diminished by 50%, 45%, 40%, 37.5%, and 22.5% at bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs, S. gancidicus filtrate, ZnO NPs, difenoconazole, and B2O3 NPs comparing to P. irregular-infected pea plant is strong evidence to induce disease recovery. The application of bimetallic ZnO-B2O3 NPs seems to be a significant approach to relieve the toxic influences of P. irregulare on infected pea plant as green and alternative therapeutic nutrients of chemical fungicides.
Improving table detection for document images using boundary
Authors: Liu Yingli , Zheng Jianfeng , Zhang Guangtao , Shen Tao 
Published: September 2023

AbstractLocating tables in document images is the first step to extracting table information, and high location precision is required. The dominant approach of table detection is based on an object detection algorithm, and the detector defines the prediction task as a regression problem, which inevitably leads to positioning errors. To address this issue, this paper presents an approach called Border Line Correction (BLC) to refine the rough prediction results of the original detector through the table boundary lines extracted from the document image. Our approach transforms the regression task into a classification problem, thus avoiding the inherent regression error of the object detection algorithm. Traditional annotation methods are inadequate for table detection tasks as they fail to capture the completeness and purity of the detection results. Therefore, this study treats the correct position of a table as a tolerance region. Additionally, to overcome the limitations of existing datasets in the materials domain, we collected 1183 samples from scientific literature in the materials field and created the MatTab dataset, annotating the tables with tolerance regions. This paper use Cascade RCNN with Swin Transformer as baseline models, and BLC is utilized to optimize the detection results. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements with BLC at an IOU of 0.95 on the MatTab, ICDAR2019, and ICDAR2017 datasets. In MatTab, the percentage of correctly detected complete and pure tables increased from 72.3% to 82.1%.
Actor-critic objective penalty function method: an adaptive strategy for trajectory tracking in autonomous driving
Authors: Wang Bo , Bai Fusheng , Zhang Ke 
Published: September 2023

AbstractTrajectory tracking is a key technology for controlling the autonomous vehicles effectively and stably to track the reference trajectory. How to handle the various constraints in trajectory tracking is very challenging. The recently proposed generalized exterior point method (GEP) shows high computational efficiency and closed-loop performance in solving the constrained trajectory tracking problem. However, the neural networks used in the GEP may suffer from the ill-conditioning issue during model training, which result in a slow or even non-converging training convergence process and the control output of the policy network being suboptimal or even severely constraint-violating. To effectively deal with the large-scale nonlinear state-wise constraints and avoid the ill-conditioning issue, we propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) method called the actor-critic objective penalty function method (ACOPFM) for trajectory tracking in autonomous driving. We adopt an integrated decision and control (IDC)-based planning and control scheme to transform the trajectory tracking problem into MPC-based nonlinear programming problems and embed the objective penalty function method into an actor-critic solution framework. The nonlinear programming problem is transformed into an unconstrained optimization problem and employed as a loss function for model updating of the policy network, and the ill-conditioning issue is avoided by alternately performing gradient descent and adaptively adjusting the penalty parameter. The convergence of ACOPFM is proved. The simulation results demonstrate that the ACOPFM converges to the optimal control strategy fast and steadily, and perform well under the multi-lane test scenario.
Sustainable Financial Advice for SMEs
Authors: de Jong Fred , Wagensveld Koos 
Published: September 2023

AbstractThe financial industry can play a significant role in reaching the sustainability goals. But there is a lack of attention to the part financial advisors can or should play. By advising SMEs on sustainability, financial advisors are in the position to make a large impact. To do that, financial advisors must not only advise on creating financial value but also on social and ecological value. By advising on creating multiple value and applying integrated thinking, financial advisors can provide sustainable financial advice to SMEs. And because of the large and diverse number of financial advisors for SMEs, they can make a difference in helping SMEs to become more sustainable. This article focuses on the role financial advisors can play and the impact they can make for SMEs in their challenge to become more sustainable. By combining theory on the value of advice, multiple value creation, and integrated thinking, specifically related to the challenges of SMEs on sustainability, the result is a definition of sustainable financial advice to stimulate the debate on the specific role of financial advisors in reaching the sustainability goals worldwide. Sustainable financial advice is financial advice with integrated thinking about multiple value creation with the aim to reach the sustainability goals.
Retraining investment for Alberta’s oil and gas workers for green jobs in the solar industry
Authors: Meyer Theresa K. , Hunsberger Carol , Pearce Joshua M. 
Published: September 2023

AbstractIf oil sands are to be eliminated from the energy market to protect the global environment, human health and long-term economic welfare, a significant number of workers will be displaced in the transition to renewable energy technologies. This study outlines a cost-effective and convenient path for oil and gas workers in Alberta to be retrained in the burgeoning solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Many oil and gas workers would be able to transfer fields with no additional training required. This study examines retraining options for the remainder of workers using the most closely matching skill equivalent PV job to minimize retraining time. The costs for retraining all oil sands workers are quantified and aggregated. The results show the total costs for retaining all oil sands workers in Alberta for the PV industry ranges between CAD$91.5 m and CAD$276.2 m. Thus, only 2–6% of federal, provincial, and territorial oil and gas subsidies for a single year would need to be reallocated to provide oil and gas workers with a new career of approximately equivalent pay. The results of this study clearly show that a rapid transition to sustainable energy production is feasible as costs of retraining oil and gas workers are far from prohibitive.
A NAC transcription factor, PpNAC1, regulates the expression of PpMYB10.1 to promote anthocyanin biosynthesis in the leaves of peach trees in autumn
Authors: Meng Junren , Sun Shihang , Li Ang , Pan Lei , Duan Wenyi , Cui Guochao , Xu Juan , Niu Liang , Wang Zhiqiang , Zeng Wenfang 
Published: September 2023

AbstractRed leaves in autumn are characteristic of a very early-maturing ripening variety of peach (Prunus persica). Analysis of the genetic factors and molecular mechanisms associated with the red-leaf phenotype can help breed peach very early maturing peach varieties. This study investigated the mechanisms underlying the red- and green-leaf phenotypes in autumn. Red compounds accumulated in the older but not younger leaves in the extremely early-maturing peach variety, ‘99-30-33’, and the leaves of the medium-maturing variety, ‘Zhongtao5 (CP5)’. Metabolic analysis showed that cyanidin-3-O-glucoside was the most abundant anthocyanin in the red leaves. The segregation of the progenies obtained from crossing revealed that the red leaves are a unique hereditary phenomenon not in line with Mendel’s law. BSA-seq and RNA-seq analyses suggest that PpNAC1 was essential for enhancing anthocyanin biosynthesis and was highly upregulated in red than in green leaves. Similar to PpNAC1, the anthocyanin activator, PpMYB10.1, was the only gene highly expressed in red leaves. Moreover, the functional genes involved in anthocyanin biosynthesis, such as Prunus persica Flavonoid 3'-hydroxylase (PpF3'H), Prunus persicaDihydroflavonol reductase (PpDFR), Prunus persica Leucoantho-cyanidin dioxygenase (Pp LDOX), Prunus persica Glutathione S-transferase (PpGST), and Prunus persica UDP-glucose, flavonoid-3-O-glucosyltransferase (PpUFGT), were upregulated in the older red leaves of 99-30-33 but downregulated in the younger 99-30-33 and green CP5 leaves. Yeast one-hybrid and dual-luciferase assays further confirmed that PpNAC1, which refers to 'Prunus persica NAC (NAM、A TAF1/2、CUC1/2)' bound to the promoter of PpMYB10.1, PpMYB10.1 stands for 'Prunus persica MYB (v-myb avian myeloblastosis viral) 10.1' and activated its expression along with those of PpGST and PpUFGT. These results provide insights into the mechanisms responsible for the development of red color in peach leaves in autumn.
Sparse, Empirically Optimized Quadrature for Broadband Spectral Integration
Authors: Czarnecki Paulina , Polvani Lorenzo , Pincus Robert 
Published: September 2023

AbstractBroadband (spectrally‐integrated) radiation calculations are dominated by the expense of spectral integration, and many applications require fast parameterizations for computing radiative flux. Here we describe a novel approach using a linear weighted sum of monochromatic calculations at a small set of optimally‐chosen frequencies. The empirically‐optimized quadrature method is used to compute atmospheric boundary fluxes, net flux profiles throughout the atmosphere, heating rate profiles, and top‐of‐the‐atmosphere forcing by CO2, in the longwave for clear skies. We evaluate the method against two modern correlated k‐distribution models and find that we can achieve comparable errors with 32 spectral points. We also examine the effect of minimizing different cost functions, and find that in order to accurately represent heating rates and CO2 forcing, these quantities must be included in the cost function.
Poor response to methylphenidate is associated with a smaller dorsal attentive network in adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Authors: Parlatini Valeria , Radua Joaquim , Solanes Font Aleix , Wichers Rob , Maltezos Stefanos , Sanefuji Masafumi , Dell’Acqua Flavio , Catani Marco , Thiebaut de Schotten Michel , Murphy Declan 
Published: September 2023

AbstractStimulants, such as methylphenidate (MPH), are effective in treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but there is individual variability in response, especially in adults. To improve outcomes, we need to understand the factors associated with adult treatment response. This longitudinal study investigated whether pre-treatment anatomy of the fronto-striatal and fronto-parietal attentional networks was associated with MPH treatment response. 60 adults with ADHD underwent diffusion brain imaging before starting MPH treatment, and response was measured at two months. We tested the association between brain anatomy and treatment response by using regression-based approaches; and compared the identified anatomical characteristics with those of 20 matched neurotypical controls in secondary analyses. Finally, we explored whether combining anatomical with clinical and neuropsychological data through machine learning provided a more comprehensive profile of factors associated with treatment response. At a group level, a smaller left dorsal superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF I), a tract responsible for the voluntary control of attention, was associated with a significantly lower probability of being responders to two-month MPH-treatment. The association between the volume of the left SLF I and treatment response was driven by improvement on both inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. Only non-responders significantly differed from controls in this tract metric. Finally, our machine learning approach identified clinico-neuropsychological factors associated with treatment response, such as higher cognitive performance and symptom severity at baseline. These novel findings add to our understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying response to MPH, pointing to the dorsal attentive network as playing a key role.