Research Highlights: We make use of long term observation data from a selection forest in Bavaria. Despite the changing environmental conditions, stand level productivity remains constant over time. Maintaining species and structural diversity by management can contribute to resilient ecosystems. Background Objectives: Forests mountains are similarly affected changes like those northern latitud...

The goal of this research is to devise a new architecture for integrating aspect oriented methodologies existing in the software engineering community to develop an Adaptive Composition and Runtime Environment (ACRE) for unmanaged adaptation of multimedia applications. The architecture of ACRE presented in this paper can transform non-adaptive applications by injecting adaptive behaviors into t...

Green world: The presence of decaying trees in primeval and unmanaged woodlands is an important factor in supporting biodiversity. (Photo: Ralf Lotys/Wikipedia.) After the end of the last glacial period around 11,700 years ago, forests took over most of Europe, replacing the tundra and steppe and reconquering the land that had been covered by glaciers. Over the last three millennia, Europeans h...

Abstract Phytoliths preserved in soils and sediments can be used to provide unique insights into past vegetation dynamics response human climate change. reconstruct local terrestrial where pollen grains typically decay, providing a range of markers (or lack thereof) that document activities. The ca. 6 million km 2 Amazonian forests have relatively few baseline datasets documenting changes phyto...

We compiled data from several independent, long-term silvicultural studies on USDA Forest Service experimental forests across a latitudinal gradient in the northeastern and north-central U.S.A. to evaluate factors influencing aboveground live-tree carbon sequestration mortality. Data represent five sites with more than 70,000 repeated tree records spanning eight decades, ecoregions, range of st...

Health insurers are generally guided by the principle of "actuarial fairness," according to which they distinguish among various risks on the basis of cost-related factors. Thus, insurers often limit or deny coverage for vision care, hearing aids, mental health care, and even AIDS treatment based on actuarial justifications. Furthermore, approximately forty-two million Americans have no health ...

Biological diversity is known to play an important role in generating and maintaining ecosystem productivity and other functions, and has consequently become a central focus of many efforts to preserve ecosystem services. Theoretical parallels suggest the diversity of fishing fleets may have a similarly important role in determining the productivity and ecological impacts of fisheries, but this...

Abstract Many organisms respond to anthropogenic environmental change through shifts in their phenology. In plants, flowering is largely driven by temperature, and therefore affected climate change. However, on smaller scales climatic conditions are also influenced other factors, including habitat structure. A group of plants with a particularly distinct phenology the understory herbs temperate...