We tested whether Tundra Swans use information on the spatial distribution of cryptic food items (below ground Sago pondweed tubers) to shape their movement paths. In a continuous environment, swans create their own food patches by digging craters, which they exploit in several feeding bouts. Series of short (<1 m) intra-patch movements alternate with longer inter-patch movements (>1 m). Tuber ...

Few studies have focused explicitly on the later stages of the fragmentation process, or "late-stage fragmentation", during which habitat area and patch number decrease simultaneously. This lack of attention is despite the fact that many of the anthropogenically fragmented habitats around the world are, or soon will be, in late-stage fragmentation. Understanding the ecological processes and pat...

Patch-based denoising techniques have proved to be very efficient. Indeed, they account for the correlations that exist among the patches of natural images, even when degraded by noise. In this context, we propose a denoising method which tries to minimize over-smoothing of textured areas (an effect observed with NLmeans), to avoid staircase effects in monotonically varying areas (an effect obs...

A development quadratic model of the heterogeneous biological population consisting of a few sub-populations is investigated. The classic stabilization problem of solutions for the system of ordinary quadratic differential equations, which describing this model, is solved. Examples are given. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Two types of immunoassays, radioimmunoassay (RIA) and microplate enzyme immunoassay (EIA), were compared for their ability to detect and quantitate cocaine and metabolites or heroin and metabolites in extracts of sweat patches. Experiments used sweat patches that had been fortified with cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BE), and ecgonine methyl ester (EME) or 6-acetylmorphine (6-AM), heroin, and morphi...

A low-profile and broad steerable patch array antenna is presented. The improvement of the multi-directional functions from broadside very limited for antenna. In this work, number directional beams enhanced by 40% using a novel approach, inter-parasitic element expansion technique adopted only four PIN diode switches. Results in simulation measurement have verified that parasitic capable -of g...

In order to investigate how the movement of dogs affects the geographically inter-provincial spread of rabies in Mainland China, we propose a multi-patch model to describe the transmission dynamics of rabies between dogs and humans, in which each province is regarded as a patch. In each patch the submodel consists of susceptible, exposed, infectious, and vaccinated subpopulations of both dogs a...

Metapopulation theory is one of the most popular approaches to identify the factors affecting the spatial and temporal dynamics of populations in fragmented habitat networks. Habitat quality, patch area and isolation are mainly focused on when analyzing distribution patterns in fragmented landscapes. The effects of landscape heterogeneity in the non-occupied matrix, however, have been largely n...