Genotypic traits and tradeoffs of fast growth in silver birch, a pioneer tree.

Fast-growing and slow-growing plant species are suggested to show integrated economics spectrums and the tradeoffs of fast growth are predicted to emerge as susceptibility to herbivory and resource competition. We tested if these predictions also hold for fast-growing and slow-growing genotypes within a silver birch, Betula pendula population. We exposed cloned saplings of 17 genotypes with slow, medium or fast height growth to reduced insect herbivory, using an insecticide, and to increasing resource competition, using naturally varying field plot grass cover.

Smart integration of sensors, computer vision and knowledge representation for intelligent monitoring and verbal human-computer interaction.

The details presented in this article revolve around a sophisticated monitoring framework equipped with knowledge representation and computer vision capabilities, that aims to provide innovative solutions and support services in the healthcare sector, with a focus on clinical and non-clinical rehabilitation and care environments for people with mobility problems. In contemporary pervasive systems most modern virtual agents have specific reactions when interacting with humans and usually lack extended dialogue and cognitive competences. The presented tool aims to provide natural human-computer multi-modal interaction via exploitation of state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision, speech recognition and synthesis, knowledge representation, sensor data analysis, and by leveraging prior clinical knowledge and patient history through an intelligent, ontology-driven, dialogue manager with reasoning capabilities, which can also access a web search and retrieval engine module.

Insect herbivory dampens Subarctic birch forest C sink response to warming.

Climate warming is anticipated to make high latitude ecosystems stronger C sinks through increasing plant production. This effect might, however, be dampened by insect herbivores whose damage to plants at their background, non-outbreak densities may more than double under climate warming. Here, using an open-air warming experiment among Subarctic birch forest field layer vegetation, supplemented with birch plantlets, we show that a 2.

Elevated temperature and ozone modify structural characteristics of silver birch (Betula pendula) leaves.

To study the effects of slightly elevated temperature and ozone (O3) on leaf structural characteristics of silver birch (Betula pendula Roth), saplings of four clonal genotypes of this species were exposed to elevated temperature (ambient air temperature +0.8-1.0 °C) and elevated O3 (1.