The Neoproterozoic Akademikerbreen Group in northeastern Svalbard comprises 2 km of nearly pure carbonate section. The carbonates are generally highly C-enriched (δCN5‰), but this trend is interrupted by an ∼325 m interval of low δC values (−4 to 0‰) in the upper Grusdievbreen and lower Svanbergfjellet formations. An abrupt negative isotopic shift at the onset of this low δC interval is reprodu...

The Tool for Exploratory Landscape Scenario Analyses (TELSA) is a spatially explicit model of vegetation succession, natural disturbances, and forest management activities. TELSA is a strategic planning tool designed to support adaptive management by projecting the consequences of alternative scenarios at the scale of landscape units (i.e. 10 000–200 000 ha) over time frames of decades to centu...

Recent studies suggest that regeneration following large-scale disturbance in Kibale National Park, Uganda, is slow or possibly arrested. Here, data is provided on the growth and mortality of seedlings in the forest understory, treefall gaps, and in large gaps that suggest that this pattern of arrested succession can be attributed partially to the fact that this East African community lacks agg...

– We introduce a simple computational model that, with microscopic dynamics driven by natural selection and mutation alone, allows the description of true speciation events. A statistical analysis of the evolutionary tree so generated captures realistic features showing power laws for frequency distributions in time and size. Finally, some possible interpretations of the absence of punctuated d...

Local distributions of black spruce (Picea mariana) and white spruce (Picea glauca) are largely determined by edaphic and topographic factors in the interior of Alaska, with black spruce dominant on moist permafrost sites and white spruce dominant on drier upland sites. Given the recent evidence for climate warming and permafrost degradation, the distribution of white spruce is expected to expa...

As a result of extensive deforestation, the survival of many tropical forest species may depend on disturbed forests. However, recent studies demonstrate that tree regeneration following logging can be slow, decreasing the conservation value of disturbed forests. Here we test whether the dominating herb, Acanthus pubescens, in the understory of logged forest, suppresses tree regeneration in Kib...

The quality of static phones (e.g. vowels, fricatives, nasals, laterals) generated by articulatory speech synthesizers has reached a high level in the last years. Our goal is to expand this high quality to dynamic speech, i.e. whole syllables, words, and utterances by re-synthesizing natural acoustic speech data. Re-synthesis means that vocal tract action units or articulatory gestures, describ...

Recognising human actions in real-time can provide users with a natural user interface (NUI) enabling a range of innovative and immersive applications. A NUI application should not restrict users’ movements; it should allow users to transition between actions in quick succession, which we term as compound actions. However, the majority of action recognition researchers have focused on individua...

ECO is a method for the recursive generation, and thereby also the enumeration of classes of combinatorial objects. It has already found successful application in recent literature both to the exhaustive generation and to the uniform random generation of various objects classified according to several parameters of interest, as well as to their enumeration. In this paper we extend this approach...

Ecological succession itself could be a theoretical reference for ecosystem restoration and reconstruction. Glacier forelands are ideal places for investigating plant succession because there are representative ecological succession records at long temporal scales. Based on field observations and experimental data on the foreland of Baishui number 1 Glacier on Mt. Yulong, the succession and dis...