Article
Mathematics
Shasha Li
Summary: The paper discusses Steiner trees in graphs and their internal and edge disjoint properties, as well as the concepts of k-tree connectivity and k-tree edge-connectivity. The research confirms a conjecture about connected graphs and highlights the sharpness of the bounds.
DISCRETE MATHEMATICS
(2021)
Article
Ecology
F. Mestre, B. Silva
Summary: The lconnect R package is a user-friendly tool for assessing landscape connectivity and prioritizing habitat patches, which helps understand and address the challenges in biodiversity conservation.
ECOLOGICAL MODELLING
(2023)
Article
Biology
Shuzo Oita, Alicia Ibanez, Francois Lutzoni, Jolanta Miadlikowska, Jozsef Geml, Louise A. Lewis, Erik F. Y. Hom, Ignazio Carbone, Jana M. U'Ren, A. Elizabeth Arnold
Summary: Understanding how tree diversity is structured in tropical forests by abiotic factors, climate, and biotic interactions, with seasonality playing a key role at landscape scales, researchers found that endophyte richness varies negatively with temperature seasonality. The structure and composition of endophyte communities reflect both temperature seasonality and climate, highlighting the vital role of climate-related factors in shaping the hyperdiversity of these symbionts that form the foundations of tropical forest biodiversity.
COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Thermodynamics
L. E. Martinez-Alvarado, F. A. Godinez, O. Chavez
Summary: The performance of a fractal geometry blade for cooling hot water by natural convection and evaporation was studied numerically and experimentally. The behavior of the fractal blade was compared with that of a benchmark heat sink that does not include the Sierpinski pattern in its construction. The experimental and numerical results agree well with each other and show a better performance of the reference heat sink when cooling water.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THERMAL SCIENCES
(2023)
Article
Plant Sciences
Mark A. Davis, Richard Condit
Summary: The successful management of fire-prone woody ecosystems requires understanding the spatial arrangement of trees and how tree distribution patterns affect subsequent fires. This study found that positive interactions among neighboring trees can help maintain clumped patterns of trees in open landscapes. The presence of neighbors reduced tree growth but consistently facilitated survival, regardless of whether they were the same or different tree species. This facilitation is likely due to a reduction in fuel within tree clumps. The study highlights the importance of landscape heterogeneity for the resilience of fire-prone tree ecosystems.
JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Multidisciplinary
Oluwafemi Ojo, Kourosh Shoele
Summary: This study investigates the role of flexibility and branching patterns of trees in their reconfiguration and stress mitigation capabilities using a numerical model. The results show that the breaking risk of trees from the stem to terminal foliage strongly depends on the cross section changes in the branching nodes, the overall tree geometry, and the level of tree flexibility. The optimal branching pattern for both flexible and rigid trees is to have a uniform stress distribution throughout the tree's height, except for very flexible branched plants which are strongly influenced by the reconfigurability of the tree.
BIOINSPIRATION & BIOMIMETICS
(2022)
Article
Environmental Studies
Juan Von Thaden, Robert H. Manson, G. Congalton, Fabiola Lopez-Barrera, Kelly W. Jones
Summary: Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are effective in reducing deforestation, but have limitations in achieving higher additionality due to enrolling mostly areas of lower deforestation risk. Research suggests that the effectiveness of PES programs is closely linked to payment density, with higher density areas resulting in significantly greater reductions in deforestation.
Article
Chemistry, Physical
Shengli Jiang, Nanqi Bao, Alexander D. Smith, Shraddha Byndoor, Reid C. Van Lehn, Manos Mavrikakis, Nicholas L. Abbott, Victor M. Zavala
Summary: Chemoresponsive liquid crystals (LCs) can generate information-rich optical responses when exposed to gases. Topological descriptors are used to extract different types of information from these responses, enabling the design of sensors and gaining insights into sensor responses. The combination of topological descriptors with space-time filtration and color representations enhances the extracted information, which can be used for unsupervised and supervised machine learning tasks. The scalability of these descriptors allows the analysis of high-resolution space-time data.
JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY C
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Ravi Jambhekar, Kavita Isvaran
Summary: A fundamental question in ecology is to understand how species are distributed in a landscape. This study investigated the population responses of butterfly species to patch size and connectivity in naturally heterogeneous tropical forest-grassland complexes, and found that ecological specialization and matrix resistance played important roles in predicting population responses.
Article
Genetics & Heredity
Ana Gracanin, Monica L. Knipler, Katarina M. Mikac
Summary: Habitat loss and fragmentation are major factors in the decline of arboreal mammal populations. Wildlife corridors can help mitigate the negative effects by promoting animal movement and reducing population isolation. This study investigated the genetic diversity of sugar gliders in a fragmented landscape and found that the presence of a major highway did not significantly hinder dispersal.
Article
Forestry
Zhenyang Hui, Zhaochen Cai, Peng Xu, Yuanping Xia, Penggen Cheng
Summary: This paper developed two new kinds of feature vectors, fractal geometry-based feature vectors and QSM-based feature vectors, to improve the performance of tree species classification. By conducting feature vector dimension reduction using the CART method, the developed feature vectors outperformed traditional learning methods and showed better performance compared to a relevant method. The results indicate the effectiveness of the fractal geometry-based and QSM-based feature vectors.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Junhao Zhang, Xinjun Wang, Yujing Xie
Summary: The study highlights the importance of buffer zones in maintaining connectivity around nature reserves, with habitat proportion in different sites impacting the effectiveness of buffer zones. Analyzing the impact of different buffer zone sizes on patch importance can help determine the optimal buffer zone delimitation strategy.
Article
Ecology
Teresa Goicolea, M. Cruz Mateo-Sanchez
Summary: Climate and land-use changes have an impact on species connectivity. Static methods often overlook these changes, while dynamic methods can provide valuable information to guide improved and enduring measures in changing landscapes.
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
Anne-Kathleen Malchow, Greta Bocedi, Stephen C. F. Palmer, Justin M. J. Travis, Damaris Zurell
Summary: Reliably modeling species responses to environmental changes is crucial for conservation and management planning. Process-based and individual-based models are valuable tools for this purpose. RangeShiftR is a flexible individual-based modeling platform implemented in R, offering fast simulations and additional functions for model analysis.
Article
Ecology
Gabriela Borja-Martinez, Daniel Tapia-Flores, Aaron B. A. Shafer, Ella Vazquez-Dominguez
Summary: This study evaluates how the environmental complexity of La Malinche volcano influences patterns of genomic variation in Peromyscus melanotis. The researchers found that the forest environmental complexity has a significant impact on dispersal, genomic structure, and connectivity patterns in this rodent. Higher elevation populations show reduced genetic variation, limited connectivity, and isolation, while intermediate elevation populations exhibit higher genetic diversity and lower connectivity.
Article
Mechanics
Michael T. Gastner, Beata Oborny, Mate Gulyas
JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS-THEORY AND EXPERIMENT
(2018)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Michael T. Gastner, Vivien Seguy, Pratyush More
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2018)
Review
Biology
Beata Oborny
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2019)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Michael T. Gastner, Karoly Takacs, Mate Gulyas, Zsuzsanna Szvetelszky, Beata Oborny
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Adam Kun, Beata Oborny, Ulf Dieckmann
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2019)
Article
Physics, Multidisciplinary
Michael T. Gastner, Kota Ishida
JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL
(2019)
Article
Ecology
Robert Juhasz, Beata Oborny
ECOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
(2020)
Article
Computer Science, Software Engineering
Ian K. Duncan, Shi Tingsheng, Simon T. Perrault, Michael T. Gastner
Summary: Cartograms are map-based data visualizations where the area of each region is proportional to a numeric value, with contiguous cartograms conforming to this area principle. They have been criticized for being difficult to read due to their distorted appearance, but a study showed that interactivity, especially animations, can significantly improve readability. Basic tasks were performed equally well with and without interactivity, but more complex tasks required interactive features for better performance on contiguous cartograms displayed on computer screens.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
(2021)
Article
Plant Sciences
Beata Oborny, Soma Marcso
Summary: This article used a spatially explicit dynamic model to study the relationship between stochastic ramet and genet mortality in clonal plants. Contrary to the naive hypothesis, the simulations showed that genet mortality does not increase monotonically with ramet mortality. The results also revealed that terminal ramets and internal ramets have different effects on the genet's survival probability.
Review
Education, Scientific Disciplines
Beata Oborny
Summary: The voter model is a widely studied paradigmatic model of competition between alternative states in groups, with applications in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, the interpretation of the agents in the model as individual organisms is often misplaced. Instead, a site-based approach is proposed, considering the transitional states of the agents and letting the network evolve accordingly to broaden its biological applicability.
Article
Mathematics, Interdisciplinary Applications
Geza Odor, Michael T. Gastner, Jeffrey Kelling, Gustavo Deco
Summary: This review discusses critical dynamics of simple nonequilibrium models on large connectomes representing the white matter of the human brain, including graph theoretical and topological analysis, synchronization phenomena studied by the Kuramoto model, and rare-region effects leading to robust Griffiths phases. The models exhibit dynamical scaling behavior in agreement with brain experimental data if local homeostasis is provided.
JOURNAL OF PHYSICS-COMPLEXITY
(2021)
Article
Physics, Fluids & Plasmas
Kota Ishida, Beata Oborny, Michael T. Gastner
Summary: Competition between alternative states is crucial in both social and biological networks, and neutral competition can be represented by an unbiased random drift process. Real-world processes introduce three limiting factors that affect the direction and rate of spread. The effectiveness of a heterogeneous mean-field theory allows for quantitative predictions of consensus even without a complete reconstruction of network edges from empirical data.
Review
Mathematics
Beata Oborny