The Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI), a drought monitoring index based on an empirical parameterization of the Land Surface Temperature (LST)–Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) space, has been widely implemented in a variety of ecosystems worldwide because it does not depend on ancillary data. However, the simulation of dry/wet edges in the TVDI model can be problematic be...

The macula or macula lutea (originally from Latin macula, “spot” and lutea, “yellow”) is an oval-shaped spot, five mm in diameter, located temporal to the optical nerve and near the centre of the human retina. Although it comprises only a small part of the retina, it is responsible for the sharp central vision and colour vision. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a disease in which the n...

Animals living in patchy environments may depend on resource pulses to meet the high energetic demands of breeding. We developed two primary a priori hypotheses to examine relationships between three categories of wading bird prey biomass and covariates hypothesized to affect the concentration of aquatic fauna, a pulsed resource for breeding wading bird populations during the dry season. The fi...

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is still a great concern, and recognition of the carrier is essential for appropriate infection control in intensive care units. The utility of wet swab compared to dry swab as an intranasal screening test has not been well assessed yet. A comparative study of the wet and dry swab in its ability to detect the organism was performed against critically ...

This paper describes the results of self-healing behavior in early-age Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC). Uniaxially pre-loaded ECC with tensile strain of 0.3 or 0.5% were subjected to different number of wet-dry cycles. Then, resonant frequency test and reloading test were carried out to assess the recovery rate as a function of the number of wet-dry cycles. These two tests indicated di...

the effective patterns and mechanisms of synoptic systems during the wet and dry spells in midwest of iran(mwi) analyzed and discussed on seasonal scales from 1974 to 2003. synoptic analysis is based on synoptic chartson sea level pressure (slp), 850 and 500 hpa levels. the results of synoptic analysis show that dry spells in mwiare mostly corresponded to azores high (azh) intensifying and its ...

Beef finishing and dairy lactation experiments were conducted to evaluate the nutritional value of distillers grains (DG) from sorghum or corn fermentation, in both wet (35.4% DM) and dry (92.2% DM) form (dairy trial only). In the finishing experiment, 60 yearling steers were used in a completely randomized design with three diets that were fed for 127 d: 1) control diet with 86% (DM basis) dry...

Worldwide, efforts to manage atmospheric CO2 are being explored both by reducing emissions and by sequestering more carbon (C). Stem biomass, C, and nitrogen (N) parameters were measured in plots of first-generation (F1), 32-year-old black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.) from four full-sib families studied previously for drought tolerance and differential productivity on both a dry and a ...

Similar to vascular plants, non-vascular plant mosses have different periods of seasonal growth. There has been little research on the spectral variations of moss soil crust (MSC) over different growth periods. Few studies have paid attention to the difference in spectral characteristics between wet MSC that is photosynthesizing and dry MSC in suspended metabolism. The dissimilarity of MSC spec...