Seed dispersal is a fundamental process in plant ecology and is of critical importance for the restoration of tropical communities. The lands of the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge (CRNWR), formerly under agriculture, were abandoned in the 1970s and colonized mainly by non-native tree species of degraded pastures. Here we described the seed rain under the most common native and non-native tr...

Attempts to profile authors according to their characteristics extracted from textual data, including native language, have drawn attention in recent years, via various machine learning approaches utilising mostly lexical features. Drawing on the idea of contrastive analysis, which postulates that syntactic errors in a text are to some extent influenced by the native language of an author, this...

In this paper we describe a process for rapid development of semantic analysis grammars for Interlingual Machine Translation. The technique applies to existing systems and can be used to extend coverage into new languages quickly by separating the informant tasks performed by native speakers from the grammar writing tasks performed by engineers familiar with the system. A tool for automatic man...

Xtatic is an extension of C with native support for statically typed XML processing. It features XML trees as built-in values, “tree grep” pattern matching, and an XML-specific type system. An implementation ofXtatic must address a number of issues common to any language supporting a declarative style of XML processing (e.g., XQuery, XSLT, XDuce, CDuce, Xact, Xen, etc.). In particular, it must ...

This opinion paper proposes the use of parallel treebank as learner corpus. We show how an L1-L2 parallel treebank — i.e., parse trees of non-native sentences, aligned to the parse trees of their target hypotheses — can facilitate retrieval of sentences with specific learner errors. We argue for its benefits, in terms of corpus reuse and interoperability, over a conventional learner corpus anno...

The establishment of non-native species is commonly described as occurring in three phases: arrival, establishment, and dispersal. Both arrival and dispersal by the Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis Motschulsky), a xylophagous Cerambycid native to China and the Korean peninsula, has been documented for multiple locations in both North America and Europe, however the transitional...

Forest restoration is an increasingly important tool to offset and indeed reverse global deforestation rates. One low cost strategy to accelerate forest recovery is conserving scattered native trees that persist across disturbed landscapes and which may act as seedling recruitment foci. Ficus trees, which are considered to be critically important components of tropical ecosystems, may be partic...

We present a method for incorporating missing data into general forecasting problems which use non-parametric statistical learning. We focus on a tree-based method, Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), enhanced with “Missingness Incorporated in Attributes,” an approach recently proposed for incorporating missingness into decision trees. This procedure extends the native partitioning mecha...

Wood is one of the major renewable materials. To compensate for the ever-increasing demand for wood and to reduce pressure on native forests, more wood of higher quality will need to be produced on less land by planting highly productive trees. Biotechnology has shown great promise for forest tree improvement and over the past 10 years this field has flourished. Not only has the potential of tr...

Dutch elm disease is caused by the fungal pathogen Ophiostoma novo-ulmi which is transmitted by the native elm bark beetle, Hylurgopinus rufipes. We have found that four semiochemicals (the monoterpene (-)-beta-pinene and the sesquiterpenes (-)-alpha-cubebene, (+)-spiroaxa-5,7-diene and (+)-delta-cadinene) from diseased American elms, Ulmus americana, synergistically attract H. rufipes, and tha...