Hydrologic and ecologic studies in mountainous terrain are sensitive to the temporal and spatial distribution of precipitation. In this study a geostatistical model, Auto-Searched Orographic and Atmospheric Effects Detrended Kriging (ASOADeK), is introduced to map mountain precipitation using only precipitation gauge data. The ASOADeK model considers both precipitation spatial covariance and or...

The vegetation of an area of the Upper Clutha basin, New Zealand, with a 'semi-arid' climate, was sampled with 95 quadrats in a nested randomised design. All types of vegetation were sampled, from nearnatural to managed pastures. Twenty four environmental factors were measured in each quadrat. Five 'formations' are described, and 14 'communities' recognised within them, although there are few c...

In this work, a Markov random field based phase locked loop is proposed for phase unwrapping. The neighboring pixels are used to update the phase estimate of the centering pixel. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for both synthetic and real interferometric phase. For terrains with relatively low slopes, the phase unwrapping is done successfully. However, in case of high fringe...

Methods We use the fossil record of extant and extinct bivalve taxa and information on global palaeoclimate states to evaluate how the climate state at the beginning of the evolutionary history of individual families influenced (a) their diversification dynamics through subsequent climate changes and (b) their present-day LDG. For (a), we estimated per-family genus origination and extinction ra...

Talus slopes in western North America frequently are bordered by vegetation that differs in biomass, cover, height, and species composition from vegetation located farther from talus. These areas are grazed by pikas (Ochotona princess, which nest in that talus. Foraging theory predicts that pikas will produce a gradient of grazing pressure, which could produce the observed vegetational zonation...

It has long been known that neural networks can learn faster when their input and hidden unit activities are centered about zero; recently we have extended this approach to also encompass the centering of error signals 2]. Here we generalize this notion to all factors involved in the network's gradient, leading us to propose centering the slope of hidden unit activation functions as well. Slope...

The community structure of hard and soft corals, with an emphasis on hard corals, was determined by means of line-transects on 9 onand off-shore reefs of different type and different wave exposure in the Northern Red Sea near Hurghada in Egypt. Coral communities were found to differentiate along a horizontal windand wave-exposure gradient. Exposed communities were dominated by Acropora species,...

The hydraulics of steep mountain streams differ from lower gradient rivers due to shallow and rough flows, energetic subsurface flow, and macro-scale form drag from immobile boulders and channel and bed forms. Heightened flow resistance and reduced sediment transport rates in steep streams are commonly attributed to macro-scale form drag; however, little work has explored steep river hydrodynam...

Galactic and extragalactic abundance studies of H II regions, planetary nebulae, and supernova remnants are compiled and their implications briefly reviewed. Galaxy global metallicity appears to be related directly to total mass and morphology, while gradient slopes are uncorrelated with these parameters, although barred spirals tend to have flatter profiles than non-barred spirals. N/O behavio...

The fluvial system is a major concern in modeling landform evolution in response to tectonic deformation. Three stream bed types (bedrock, coarse-bed alluvial, and fine-bed alluvial) differ in factors controlling their occurrence and evolution and in appropriate modeling approaches. Spatial and temporal transitions among bed types occur in response to changes in sediment characteristics and tec...