Precipitation and temperature are important drivers of soil respiration. The role of moisture and temperature are generally explored at seasonal or inter-annual timescales; however, significant variability also occurs on hourly to daily time-scales. We used small (1.54 m(2)), throughfall exclusion shelters to evaluate the role soil moisture and temperature as temporal controls on soil CO2 efflu...

Graphic representations that show how the design process changes over the course of solving a problem are powerful tools for researchers. This paper presents three such representations—timelines, cumulative time plots, and progress time plots—and describes how they provide insights into the design process of engineers.

Soil loss and nutrient concentrations in runoff were evaluated to determine the effects of site preparation burning on a recently harvested loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) site in east Texas. Soil and nutrient losses prior to treatment were approximately the same from control plots and pretreatment burn plots. Nutrient analysis of runoff samples indicated that the prescribed burn caused increase...

Though the general contribution of diagnostic plots to statistics is accepted, sometimes diagnostic plots seem more of a fashion than a tool. There are uncountable possibilities to design diagnostic plots, not all being of equal use. Diagnostic plots can and should be judged the same way as any other statistical method. We have to ask: What is their power ? What is their reliability ? While we ...

We sought to assess impacts of fire and grazing by reindeer and caribou on lichen communities in northwestern Alaska. Macrolichen abundance was estimated from 45, 0.38-ha plots. Eighteen of those plots, scattered throughout the southern Seward Peninsula, represented two levels of grazing, heavy and light. We found lightly grazed areas had taller lichens and greater total lichen cover than heavi...

Dot plots are a standard method for local comparison of biological sequences. In a dot plot, a substring to substring distance is computed for all pairs of fixed-size windows in the input strings. Commonly, the Hamming distance is used since it can be computed in linear time. However, the Hamming distance is a rather crude measure of string similarity, and using an alignment-based edit distance...