26 research outputs found
Green Consensus and High Quality Development
This open access book is based on the research outputs of China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) in 2020. It covers major topics of Chinese and international attention regarding green development, such as climate, biodiversity, ocean, BRI, urbanization, sustainable production and consumption, technology, finance, value chain, and so on. It also looks at the progress of China’s environmental and development policies,and the impacts from CCICED. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book, providing insight for policy makers in environmental issues
Piospheres in semi-arid rangeland: Consequences of spatially constrained plant-herbivore interactions
This thesis explains two aspects of animal spatial foraging behaviour arising as a direct consequence
of animals' need to drink water: the concentration of animal impacts, and the response of animals to
those impacts.
In semi-arid rangelands, the foraging range of free-ranging large mammalian herbivores is constrained
by the distribution of drinking water during the dry season. Animal impacts become concentrated
around these watering sites according to the geometrical relationship between the available foraging
area and the distance from water, and the spatial distribution of animal impacts becomes organised
along a utilisation gradient termed a "piosphere". During the dry season the temporal distribution of
the impacts is determined by the day-to-day foraging behaviour of the animals. The specific
conditions under which these spatial foraging processes determine the piosphere pattern have been
identified in this thesis.
At the core of this investigation are questions about the response of animals to the heterogeneity of
their resources. Aspects of spatial foraging are widely commented on whilst explaining the
consequences of piosphere phenomena for individual animal intake, population dynamics, feeding
strategies and management. Implicated are our notions of optimal foraging, scale in animal response,
and resource matching. This thesis addressed each of these. In the specific context of piospheres, the
role of energy balance in optimal foraging was also tested.
Field experiments for this thesis showed a relationship between goat browsing activity and measures
of spatial impact. As a preliminary step to investigating animal response to resource heterogeneity, the
spatial pattern of foraging behaviour/impacts was described using spatial statistics. Browsing activity
varied daily revealing animal assessment of the spatial heterogeneity of their resources and an
energetic basis for foraging decisions. This foraging behaviour was shown to be determined by
individual plants rather than at larger scales of plant aggregation. A further experiment investigated
the claim that defoliation has limited impact on browser intake rate, suggesting that piospheres may
have few consequences for browser intake. This experiment identified a constraining influence of
browse characteristics at the small scale on goat foraging by relating animal intake rate to plant bite
size and distribution.
Computer simulation experiments for this thesis supported these empirical findings by showing that
the distribution of spatial impacts was sensitive to the marginal value of forage resources, and
identified plant bite size and distribution as the causal factors in limiting animal intake rate in the
presence of a piosphere. As a further description of spatial pattern, piospheres were characterised by
applying a contemporary ecological theory that ranks resource patches into a spatial hierarchy.
Ecosystem dynamics emerge from the interactions between these patches, with piospheres being an
emergent property of a natural plant-herbivore system under specific conditions of constrained
foraging. The generation of a piosphere was shown to be a function of intake constraints and available
foraging area, whilst piosphere extent was shown to be independent of daily energy balance including
expenditure on travel costs. A threshold distance for animal foraging range arising from a
hypothesised conflict between daily energy intake and expenditure was shown not to exist, whereas
evidence for an intermediate distance from water as a focus for accumulated foraging activity was
identified.
Individual animal foraging efficiency in the computer model was shown to be sensitive to the
piosphere, while animal population dynamics were found to be determined in the longer term by dry
season key resources near watering points. Time lags were found to operate in the maintenance of the
gradient, and the density dependent moderation of the animal population. The latter was a direct result
of the inability of animal populations to match the distribution of their resources with the distribution
of their foraging behaviour, because of their daily drinking requirements. The result is that animal
forage intake was compromised by the low density of dry season forage in the vicinity of a water
point.
This thesis also proposes that piospheres exert selection pressures on traits to maximise energy gain
from the spatial heterogeneity of dry season resources, and that these have played a role in the
evolution of large mammalian herbivores
Green Consensus and High Quality Development
This open access book is based on the research outputs of China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) in 2020. It covers major topics of Chinese and international attention regarding green development, such as climate, biodiversity, ocean, BRI, urbanization, sustainable production and consumption, technology, finance, value chain, and so on. It also looks at the progress of China’s environmental and development policies,and the impacts from CCICED. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book, providing insight for policy makers in environmental issues
Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud
Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp
Shortest Route at Dynamic Location with Node Combination-Dijkstra Algorithm
Abstract— Online transportation has become a basic
requirement of the general public in support of all activities to go
to work, school or vacation to the sights. Public transportation
services compete to provide the best service so that consumers
feel comfortable using the services offered, so that all activities
are noticed, one of them is the search for the shortest route in
picking the buyer or delivering to the destination. Node
Combination method can minimize memory usage and this
methode is more optimal when compared to A* and Ant Colony
in the shortest route search like Dijkstra algorithm, but can’t
store the history node that has been passed. Therefore, using
node combination algorithm is very good in searching the
shortest distance is not the shortest route. This paper is
structured to modify the node combination algorithm to solve the
problem of finding the shortest route at the dynamic location
obtained from the transport fleet by displaying the nodes that
have the shortest distance and will be implemented in the
geographic information system in the form of map to facilitate
the use of the system.
Keywords— Shortest Path, Algorithm Dijkstra, Node
Combination, Dynamic Location (key words
Urban Informatics
This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity
Urban Informatics
This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity
Urban Informatics
This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity