376,411 research outputs found
Combining multiple isotopes and metagenomic to delineate the role of tree canopy nitrification in European forests along nitrogen deposition and climate gradients
Forest canopies influence our climate through carbon, water and energy exchanges with the atmosphere. However, less investigated is whether and how tree canopies change the chemical composition of precipitation, with important implications on forest nutrient cycling. Recently, we provided for the first time isotopic evidence that biological nitrification in tree canopies was responsible for significant changes in the amount of nitrate from rainfall to throughfall across two UK forests at high nitrogen (N) deposition [1]. This finding strongly suggested that bacteria and/or Archaea species of the phyllosphere are responsible for transforming atmospheric N before it reaches the soil. Despite microbial epiphytes representing an important component of tree canopies, attention has been mostly directed to their role as pathogens, while we still do not know whether and how they affect nutrient cycling. Our study aims to 1) characterize microbial communities harboured in tree canopies for two of the most dominant species in Europe (Fagus sylvatica L. and Pinus sylvestris L.) using metagenomic techniques, 2) quantify the functional genes related to nitrification but also to denitrification and N fixation, and 3) estimate the contribution of NO3 derived from biological canopy nitrification vs. atmospheric NO3 input by using \u3b415N, \u3b418O and \u3b417O of NO3in forest water. We considered i) twelve sites included in the EU ICP long term intensive forest monitoring network, chosen along a climate and nitrogen deposition gradient, spanning from Fennoscandia to the Mediterranean and ii) a manipulation experiment where N mist treatments were carried out either to the soil or over tree canopies. We will present preliminary results regarding microbial diversity in the phyllosphere, water (rainfall and throughfall) and soil samples over the gradient. Furthermore, we will report differences between the two investigated tree species for the phyllosphere core microbiome in terms of relative abundance of bacterial and Archaea classes and those species related to N cycling. Finally we will assess whether there are differences among tree species and sites in the number of functional genes related to N cycling and how they are related to the N deposition and/or climate. [1] Guerrieri et al. 2015 Global Change and Biology 21 (12): 4613-4626
Distributed Computing on Core-Periphery Networks: Axiom-based Design
Inspired by social networks and complex systems, we propose a core-periphery
network architecture that supports fast computation for many distributed
algorithms and is robust and efficient in number of links. Rather than
providing a concrete network model, we take an axiom-based design approach. We
provide three intuitive (and independent) algorithmic axioms and prove that any
network that satisfies all axioms enjoys an efficient algorithm for a range of
tasks (e.g., MST, sparse matrix multiplication, etc.). We also show the
minimality of our axiom set: for networks that satisfy any subset of the
axioms, the same efficiency cannot be guaranteed for any deterministic
algorithm
Hedonic Games with Graph-restricted Communication
We study hedonic coalition formation games in which cooperation among the
players is restricted by a graph structure: a subset of players can form a
coalition if and only if they are connected in the given graph. We investigate
the complexity of finding stable outcomes in such games, for several notions of
stability. In particular, we provide an efficient algorithm that finds an
individually stable partition for an arbitrary hedonic game on an acyclic
graph. We also introduce a new stability concept -in-neighbor stability- which
is tailored for our setting. We show that the problem of finding an in-neighbor
stable outcome admits a polynomial-time algorithm if the underlying graph is a
path, but is NP-hard for arbitrary trees even for additively separable hedonic
games; for symmetric additively separable games we obtain a PLS-hardness
result
Parallel and Distributed Algorithms for the Housing Allocation Problem
We give parallel and distributed algorithms for the housing allocation
problem. In this problem, there is a set of agents and a set of houses. Each
agent has a strict preference list for a subset of houses. We need to find a
matching such that some criterion is optimized. One such criterion is Pareto
Optimality. A matching is Pareto optimal if no coalition of agents can be
strictly better off by exchanging houses among themselves. We also study the
housing market problem, a variant of the housing allocation problem, where each
agent initially owns a house. In addition to Pareto optimality, we are also
interested in finding the core of a housing market. A matching is in the core
if there is no coalition of agents that can be better off by breaking away from
other agents and switching houses only among themselves.
In the first part of this work, we show that computing a Pareto optimal
matching of a house allocation is in {\bf CC} and computing the core of a
housing market is {\bf CC}-hard. Given a matching, we also show that verifying
whether it is in the core can be done in {\bf NC}. We then give an algorithm to
show that computing a maximum Pareto optimal matching for the housing
allocation problem is in {\bf RNC}^2 and quasi-{\bf NC}^2. In the second part
of this work, we present a distributed version of the top trading cycle
algorithm for finding the core of a housing market. To that end, we first
present two algorithms for finding all the disjoint cycles in a functional
graph: a Las Vegas algorithm which terminates in rounds with high
probability, where is the length of the longest cycle, and a deterministic
algorithm which terminates in rounds, where is the
number of nodes in the graph. Both algorithms work in the synchronous
distributed model and use messages of size
Geo-Social Group Queries with Minimum Acquaintance Constraint
The prosperity of location-based social networking services enables
geo-social group queries for group-based activity planning and marketing. This
paper proposes a new family of geo-social group queries with minimum
acquaintance constraint (GSGQs), which are more appealing than existing
geo-social group queries in terms of producing a cohesive group that guarantees
the worst-case acquaintance level. GSGQs, also specified with various spatial
constraints, are more complex than conventional spatial queries; particularly,
those with a strict NN spatial constraint are proved to be NP-hard. For
efficient processing of general GSGQ queries on large location-based social
networks, we devise two social-aware index structures, namely SaR-tree and
SaR*-tree. The latter features a novel clustering technique that considers both
spatial and social factors. Based on SaR-tree and SaR*-tree, efficient
algorithms are developed to process various GSGQs. Extensive experiments on
real-world Gowalla and Dianping datasets show that our proposed methods
substantially outperform the baseline algorithms based on R-tree.Comment: This is the preprint version that is accepted by the Very Large Data
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