Abundance and species richness of lombric macrofauna in a semi-arid forest ecosystem

The importance of earthworms for soils has evolved over time. Our study was conducted in the forest of Ouled yagoub (North East Algerian).Sampling at three different altitudes resulted in a total of forty-nine individuals (49) and only three species were identified: Octodrilus complanatus, Allolobophora molleri and Aporrectodea rosea. Spread over two ecological categories. The specific richness is higher in the site of 1400 m of altitude. The Simpson index (Is) varies between 0.44 and 0.49 for the three study sites. The Shannon index fluctuates between 0.41 and 0.74. The values of the Hill index vary between 1 and 1.5 in the three Sites.Keywords: Abundance, earthworm, species richness, biodiversit

Impact of earthworm activity on the chemical fertility of irrigated soil with urban effluents

The reuse of urban effluents to irrigate the soils of peri-urban grasslands in the vicinity of the town of Setif (northeastern Algeria) is an old and widespread practice. In this context, the present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of the irrigation with urban effluents on the biological and chemical behavior of soils. Effluents analysis showed significant organic and particulate pollution, the latter contributed to earthworm abundance and increased the richness of irrigated soils with nutrients. The analysis of turricules revealed the role of earthworms through the activity of bioturbation in the increase of the rate of organic matter as well as in the bioavailability of the nutrients of the irrigated soils. In space, permanent vegetation cover has played an important role as a biofilter. This was confirmed by the inter-site differences recorded through the measured variables particularly organic ones.Keywords: Natural grasslands, urban effluents, earthworm activity, turricles, organic matte

An Efficient Human Activity Recognition Technique Based on Deep Learning

In this paper, we present a new deep learning-based human activity recognition technique. First, we track and extract human body from each frame of the video stream. Next, we abstract human silhouettes and use them to create binary space-time maps (BSTMs) which summarize human activity within a defined time interval. Finally, we use convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features from BSTMs and classify the activities. To evaluate our approach, we carried out several tests using three public datasets: Weizmann, Keck Gesture and KTH Database. Experimental results show that our technique outperforms conventional state-of-the-art methods in term of recognition accuracy and provides comparable performance against recent deep learning techniques. It’s simple to implement, requires less computing power, and can be used for multi-subject activity recognition

DOES EARTHWORMS DENSITY REALLY MODIFY SOIL'S HYDRODYNAMIC PROPERTIES IN IRRIGATED SYSTEMS WITH RECYCLED WATER?

<p>Our study has the general objective to understand the impact of the valuation of treated water on earthworm abundance and total porosity of the soil and the effect of the interaction between these two physical-biological components of the hydrological functioning of soils. It was carried out on the meadows soils of the valley of Wadi Bousselam.</p><p>Although the treated water has high organic and particulate filler, it improved the earthworm abundance, total porosity and hydraulic conductivity of the soil.</p

Long-term effects of wastewater reuse on hydro physicals characteristics of grassland grown soil in semi-arid Algeria

The raw and treated wastewaters are often evacuated downstream of settlements and widely reused in pre-urban agricultural irrigation. Our study highlights the impact of wastewaters on the soil hydro-physical properties as well as biological activity. Our study was conducted in eastern part of Algeria, on long-term (>60 years) wastewater irrigated grassland to determine the biological component and hydrodynamic soil behavior under these practices. Effects of three wastewater types (raw urban, treated and agricultural effluents) on soil were studied and water was characterized both physically and chemically. Assessment of the effects involved soil porosity, soil hydraulic conductivity and earthworms abundance. The results revealed that waters contain high concentrations of organics (BOD 5&COD) and suspended solids (SS). Hydro-physical properties and biological activity showed that irrigation with raw urban wastewater enhances soil earthworm density, porosity and higher water transfer via hydraulic conductivity. Biological activity resulted in ideal pore architecture for materials and solutes transfer, induced a variety of micro morphological transformations in relation to the abundance of earthworm communities mostly endogeic and anecic. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V