While global fears mount about the dwindling numbers of many amphibian species as a result of disease and other unknown factors, three separate teams of researchers have announced the discovery of several new species and other organisms in the mountain rainforests of Colombia, Tanzania and India. Scientists in Bogata carried out a ‘rapid assessment program’ expedition over three weeks in the mo...

Mountain torrent disaster warning system is a significant non-engineering flood prevention measure for achieving the goals of flood prevention and disaster reduction in the related small rivers. After analyzing the design principle and objective of the system, we proposed a mountain torrent disaster warning system based on WEB GIS technology and the distributed hydrological model (DHM) of the r...

Online, accessible performance and heart rate data from running competitions are posted publicly or semi-publicly to social media. We tested the efficacy of one such data resource- Strava- as a tool in exercise physiology investigations by exploring heart rate differences in mountain racing and road racing running events. Heart rate and GPS pace data were gathered from Strava activities posted ...

In Fennoscandia, mountain hare (Lepus timidus) and brown hare (Lepus europaeus) hybridize and produce fertile offspring, resulting in gene flow across the species barrier. Analyses of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) show that introgression occur frequently, but unavailability of appropriate nuclear DNA markers has made it difficult to evaluate the scale- and significance for the ...

Mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is the most significant mortality agent in pine forests of western North America. Silvicultural treatments that reduce the number of susceptible host trees, alter age and size class distributions, and diversify species composition are considered viable, long-term options for reducing stand susceptibility to mountain pine beetle-caused tree ...

The purpose of the study was to investigate determinants of acute mountain sickness after rapid ascent to high altitude. A total of 21 climbers were studied ascending from <1,200 m to Capanna Regina Margherita, a hut in the Alps at 4,559 m, within <24 h. During their overnight stay at 4,559 m, breathing patterns and ventilation were recorded by calibrated respiratory inductive plethysmography a...

Bokermannohyla nanuzae (Bokermann & Sazima 1973) and B. feioi (Napoli & Caramaschi 2004) belong to the B. cir-cumdata species group. The type locality of the former is Serra do Cipó, Espinhaço mountain range, and of the latter is Parque Estadual do Ibitipoca, Mantiqueira mountain range, both in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. Differences on dorsal draw-ing pattern of adults, oral disc morphology of...

This paper introduces a teacher-student framework for reinforcement learning. In this framework, a teacher agent instructs a student agent by suggesting actions the student should take as it learns. However, the teacher may only give such advice a limited number of times. We present several novel algorithms that teachers can use to budget their advice effectively, and we evaluate them in two ex...