As part of the U.S. 2003 National Report on Sustainable Forests, four metrics of forest fragmentation--patch size, edge amount, inter-patch distance, and patch contrast--were measured within 137744 non-overlapping 5625 ha analysis units on land-cover maps derived from satellite imagery for the 48 conterminous States. The perimeter of a typical forest patch is about 100 m from the perimeter of i...

Root conductance increases under high nitrate conditions. This plasticity might increase water and nutrient transport between parallel xylem pathways, but restrictions to lateral flow – called sectoriality – are expected to limit this crossover. We simulated the effects of a high nitrate patch on root conductance, water uptake and inter-sector water transport, then empirically tested whether a ...

We present a novel method for detecting occlusions and in-painting unknown areas of a light field photograph, based on previous work in obstruction-free photography and light field completion. An initial guess at separating the occluder from the rest of the photograph is computed by aligning backgrounds of the images and using this information to generate an occlusion mask. The masked pixels ar...

Allergic contact dermatitis (ACD) is a type IV delayed hypersensitivity reaction. The gold standard for diagnosis is patch testing. The prevalence of positive patch tests in referred patients with suspected ACD ranges from 27 to 95.6%. The relationship between ACD and atopic dermatitis (AD) is complicated with conflicting reports of prevalence in the literature; however, in a patient with derma...

The aim of the present study was to clarify the identity of slow spontaneous currents, the underlying mechanism and possible role for impulse generation in neurons of the rat medial preoptic nucleus (MPN). Acutely dissociated neurons were studied with the perforated patch-clamp technique. Spontaneous outward currents, at a frequency of approximately 0.5 Hz and with a decay time constant of appr...

Loss of species richness and reduced abundance have been the main responses to perturbations of smalland medium-sized mammals in arid and semi-arid areas. Nonetheless, some mammal species whose habitat requirements are met in disturbed patches may benefit from structural changes in the environment brought about by perturbations. In desert areas of Argentina different mammal responses are attrib...

Certain applications require the extraction of patches of color from an image, their size and location. These applications may be: color harmonization algorithms, non-photorealistic rendering, etc. These applications use not too big a palette of colors, and in both cases large areas of homogeneous color are favored along with high detail preserved in the smaller areas with a lot of color activi...