Effects of invasion on the community structure and diversity of wetland soil bacteria in the Yellow River Delta.

The exotic plant is expanding rapidly along China's coast regions, seriously threatening native ecosystems. Soil bacteria are important for biogeochemical cycles, including those of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, in wetland ecosystems. There is growing evidence that microorganisms are important in case of plant invasion.

Using a multiscale image processing method to characterize the periodic growth patterns on scallop shells.

The fine periodic growth patterns on shell surfaces have been widely used for studies in the ecology and evolution of scallops. Modern X-ray CT scanners and digital cameras can provide high-resolution image data that contain abundant information such as the shell formation rate, ontogenetic age, and life span of shellfish organisms. We introduced a novel multiscale image processing method based on matched filters with Gaussian kernels and partial differential equation (PDE) multiscale hierarchical decomposition to segment the small tubular and periodic structures in scallop shell images.