Climate change, with warming and drying weather conditions, is reducing the growth, seed production, and survival of fire-adapted plants in fire-prone regions such as Mediterranean-type ecosystems. These effects of climate change on local plant demographics have recently been shown to reduce the persistence time of local populations of the fire-killed shrub dramatically. In principle, extinctions of local populations may be partly compensated by recolonization events through long-distance dispersal mechanisms of seeds, such as post-fire wind and bird-mediated dispersal, facilitating persistence in spatially structured metapopulations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHoney bees (Apis mellifera) are exposed to multiple stressors such as pesticides, lack of forage, and diseases. It is therefore a long-standing aim to develop robust and meaningful indicators of bee vitality to assist beekeepers While established indicators often focus on expected colony winter mortality based on adult bee abundance and honey reserves at the beginning of the winter, it would be useful to have indicators that allow detection of stress effects earlier in the year to allow for adaptive management. We used the established honey bee simulation model BEEHAVE to explore the potential of different indicators such as population size, number of capped brood cells, flight activity, abundance of Varroa mites, honey stores and a brood-bee ratio.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNanoparticles exhibit superior physical and chemical properties, making them highly desirable for various applications. Flame spray pyrolysis (FSP) is a versatile technique for synthesizing size and composition-controlled metal oxide/sulfide nanoparticles through a gas-phase reaction. To understand the fundamental mechanisms governing nanoparticle formation in FSP, simplified single-droplet experiments have proven to unravel the physicochemical mechanisms of liquid metal precursor combustions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe moisture content within the concrete pore network significantly influences the mechanical, thermal, and durability characteristics of concrete structures. This paper introduces a novel fully embedded wireless temperature and relative humidity sensor connected to an automatic acquisition system designed for continuous concrete monitoring. Relative humidity measurements from this new sensor are compared with those obtained by a commercial system based on the borehole method at different depths (2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To evaluate the diagnostic performance and generalizability of the winning DL algorithm of the RSNA 2020 PE detection challenge to a local population using CTPA data from two hospitals.
Materials And Methods: Consecutive CTPA images from patients referred for suspected PE were retrospectively analysed. The winning RSNA 2020 DL algorithm was retrained on the RSNA-STR Pulmonary Embolism CT (RSPECT) dataset.