Previous studies of migratory sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) have made significant progress explaining evolution of this group at the species scale, but have been unsuccessful in explaining the geographically partitioned variation in morphology seen on the population scale. The objectives of this study were to assess the population structure and gene flow patterns among migratory sandhill cr...

In recent years numerous studies have documented the effects of a changing climate on the world's biodiversity. Although extreme weather events are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity and are challenging to organisms, there are few quantitative observations on the survival, behaviour and energy expenditure of animals during such events. We provide the first data on activity and ene...

The unicellular blood parasites in the order Haemosporida are highly diverse, infect many vertebrates, are responsible for a large disease burden among humans and animals, and have reemerged as an important model system to understand the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of host-parasite interactions. The phylogenetics and systematics of Haemosporida are limited by poor sampling of different...

The midcontinental population of sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) includes about 500,000 birds and provides valuable recreational crane-watching and hunting opportunities in Canada and the United States. It comprises three subspecies, one of which (G. c. rowani) was of uncertain taxonomic status and another of which (G. c. tabida) merited protection from excessive harvest due to its small popul...

Gut microbes of animals play critical roles in processes such as digestion and immunity. Therefore, identifying gut microbes will shed light on understanding the annual life of animal species, particularly those that are threatened or endangered. In the present study, we conducted nucleotide sequence analyses of the 16S rRNA genes of gut microbiome of the hooded cranes (Grus monacha) wintering ...

The management of a container terminal is a complex process that involves a vast number of decisions. The berth is the most important resource that affects the capacity of the terminal. The problem is here to allocate berths to arriving vessels and to determine which cranes in the berths process the docked vessels. For creating the berth schedule, the calling schedule of vessels, favourable ber...

Management of container terminal operations is essentially the allocation and scheduling of the expensive resources such as berths, quay cranes, storage space, yard cranes, and container carriers. Each of these resources plays an indispensable role in the interlocking processes in a container terminal. In this survey we give a critical review and a comparative study on various decision problems...

In a container terminal, containers unloaded from a ship are moved to the yard during the import operation. The export operation is the reverse of the import process. When a ship is served by multiple shore-cranes having both loading and unloading activities at the same time, a yard-machine can process an import container and an export container in one single round-trip. This paper investigates...

In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous trains, which is an essential requirement of hub-and-spoke railway systems. An important problem during ...

Due to the central role of cranes in construction operations, specialists in the construction industries have cooperated in the development of structured methods and software to help select the best crane type in construction sites. Crane selection is a time consuming process which needs extensive data exploitation. Moderately few systems have been developed to aid in selecting cranes and in se...