In the United States, many state and federally funded conservation programs are required to quantify the water quality benefits resulting from their efforts. The objective of this research was to evaluate the impact of conservation practices subsidized by the Oklahoma Conservation Commission on phosphorus and sediment loads to Lake Wister. Conservation practices designed to increase vegetative ...

According to a result of Kočinac and Scheepers, the Hurewicz covering property is equivalent to a somewhat simpler selection property: For each sequence of large open covers of the space one can choose finitely many elements from each cover to obtain a groupable cover of the space. We simplify the characterization further by omitting the need to consider sequences of covers: A set of reals X sa...

The purpose of this report is to provide a review of optical snow cover algorithms to assist algorithm selection in the CryoRisk project. The first part of the report provides a brief review of the state of the art for snow cover retrieval algorithms developed internationally. The review covers classification algorithms (snow/non-snow algorithms), fractional snow cover algorithms (snow fraction...

The capacity of organisms to rapidly evolve in response to environmental changes is a key feature of evolution, and studying mutation compensation is a way to evaluate whether alternative routes of evolution are possible or not. Common carps (Cyprinus carpio) carrying a homozygous loss-of-function mutation for the scale cover gene fgfr1a1, causing the 'mirror' reduced scale cover, were introduc...

In molecular biology, microarray technology is widely and successfully utilized to efficiently measure gene activity. If working with less studied organisms, methods to design custom-made microarray probes are available. One design criterion is to select probes with minimal melting temperature variances thus ensuring similar hybridization properties. If the microarray application focuses on the...

Forests in Washington State generate substantial economic revenue from commercial timber harvesting on private lands. To investigate the rates, causes, and spatial and temporal patterns of forest harvest on private tracts throughout the Cascade Mountains, we relied on a new generation of annual land-use/land-cover (LULC) products created from the application of the Continuous Change Detection a...

Dynamic models for range expansion provide a promising tool for assessing species' capacity to respond to climate change by shifting their ranges to new areas. However, these models include a number of uncertainties which may affect how successfully they can be applied to climate change oriented conservation planning. We used RangeShifter, a novel dynamic and individual-based modelling platform...

This paper is an attempt to analyze the interaction between Alice and Warden in Steganography using the Game Theory. We focus on the modern steganographic embedding paradigm based on minimizing an additive distortion function. The strategies of both players comprise of the probabilistic selection channel. The Warden is granted the knowledge of the payload and the embedding costs, and detects em...

After centuries of range contraction, many megafauna species are recolonizing parts of Europe. One example is the red deer (Cervus elaphus), which was able to expand its range and is now found in half the areas it inhabited in the beginning of the 19th century. Herbivores are important ecosystem engineers, influencing e.g. vegetation. Knowledge on their habitat selection and their influence on ...

Breeding site selection can be linked to population dynamics through pre-emptive site selection, by which an individual selects the best (in terms of fitness) available site, preventing others from sharing it. We examined the pattern of territorial settlement and its fitness consequences during a study of sedge warblers Acrocephalus schoenobaenus inhabiting two study plots in the Nida Wetlands ...