Recent studies indicate that species richness can enhance the ability of plant assemblages to support multiple ecosystem functions. To understand how and when ecosystem services depend on biodiversity, it is valuable to expand beyond experimental grasslands. We examined whether plant diversity improves the capacity of agroecosystems to sustain multiple ecosystem services-production of wood and ...

1. The breakdown of leaf litter in streams is in ̄uenced strongly by leaf quality and the concentration of dissolved nutrients, primarily inorganic nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the water. We examined the effect of nutrient enrichment on the breakdown of three species of leaves in a hardwater, nutrient-rich stream. The rate of microbial respiration was also measured on the decomposing leave...

Adsorption is an effective remediation technique for petroleum hydrocarbons because of its ease of use and high efficiency. The utilization of high-carbon content industrial by-products in such applications can present significant economic and environmental advantages. In this study, batch adsorption tests and petrographic analyses were used to investigate the adsorption of two nonpolar petrole...

Expanding upon work by Diessel & Tomasello (2005, hereafter D&T) and Gries (to appear), 1 this study explores particle positioning in child language as a gradual cognitive-pragmatic development based on statistical distribution of input. The phenomenon of particle position alternation is peculiar insofar as it defines a category of combinations which show syntactic variation without concomitant...

OLAP cubes are a powerful database technology to join tables and aggregate data to discover interesting trends. However, OLAP cubes exhibit limitations to uncover fractional relationships on a measure aggregated at multiple granularity levels. One prominent example is the percentage, an intuitive probablistic metric, used in practically every analytic application. With such motivation in mind, ...

Considering the importance of bleaching earth with activated carbon in reduction of impurities in vegetable oils, this study was conducted to investigate the effects of bleaching process on physicochemical properties of the bleached soybean oil. The bleaching process was carried out with bleaching earth (1 % w/w) containing different concentrations of activated carbon (0.1 % up to 0.5 % w/w). T...

Commercial 2D carbon materials are shown to be largely nanographite with a small percentage of single layer material present.

In this paper, finite element method is used to obtain thermal conductivity coefficients of single-walled carbon nanotube reinforced polypropylene. For this purpose, the two-dimensional representative volume elements are modeled. The effect of different parameters such as nanotube dispersion pattern, nanotube volume percentage in polymer matrix, interphase thickness between nanotube and surroun...