Managed Bumblebees Outperform Honeybees in Increasing Peach Fruit Set in China: Different Limiting Processes with Different Pollinators

© 2015 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The file attached is the published version of the article

Efficient Semantic Segmentation via Self-Attention and Self-Distillation

Lightweight models are pivotal in efficient semantic segmentation, but they often suffer from insufficient context information due to limited convolution and small receptive field. To address this problem, we propose a tailored approach to efficient semantic segmentation by leveraging two complementary distillation schemes for supplementing context information to small networks: 1) a self-attention distillation scheme, which transfers long-range context knowledge adaptively from large teacher networks to small student networks; and 2) a layer-wise context distillation scheme, which transfers structured context from deep layers to shallow layers within student networks for promoting semantic consistency of the shallow layers. Extensive experiments on the ADE20K, Cityscapes, and Camvid datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal

Stereoscopic visual saliency prediction based on stereo contrast and stereo focus

© 2017, The Author(s). In this paper, we exploit two characteristics of stereoscopic vision: the pop-out effect and the comfort zone. We propose a visual saliency prediction model for stereoscopic images based on stereo contrast and stereo focus models. The stereo contrast model measures stereo saliency based on the color/depth contrast and the pop-out effect. The stereo focus model describes the degree of focus based on monocular focus and the comfort zone. After obtaining the values of the stereo contrast and stereo focus models in parallel, an enhancement based on clustering is performed on both values. We then apply a multi-scale fusion to form the respective maps of the two models. Last, we use a Bayesian integration scheme to integrate the two maps (the stereo contrast and stereo focus maps) into the stereo saliency map. Experimental results on two eye-tracking databases show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art saliency models

Interactions of soil moisture and plant community properties in meadows restored from abandoned farmlands on the Sanjiang Plain, China

Abstract Soil moisture is a major driving force of plant community succession in restored meadows. Existing studies mainly focus on diversity-productivity relationships. However, studies which determine the effects of soil moisture on the plant community properties in restored meadows are lacking. In this study, we conducted a chronosequence analysis of the interactions between soil water content variation and plant community properties in meadows following passive restoration (3-, 5-, 9-, 14-, 17-, 21-year restoration) of abandoned farmlands on the Sanjiang Plain, China. Results showed that the plant community was characterized by ruderal plants in the initial year of succession, and then by perennial plants such as Calamagrostis angustifolia and Carex spp. in older restored meadows. Similarity of restored community to target site increased across succession time whereas species diversity gradually decreased. Plant height, coverage and biomass increased with restoration time, with plant density being the exception. The community height, coverage and root/shoot ratio were positively related to the water content in the surface soil layer (0–10 cm). Conversely, plant density was significantly and negatively related with soil moisture at 0–10 cm soil depth. Plant diversity (Shannon index, Richness index and evenness) was closely correlated to soil water content at the soil depth of 0–10 cm. Our findings indicate that vegetation of cultivated meadows could be effectively restored by passive restoration. Change of plant species diversity is an especially important response to hydrological recovery in restored meadows on the Sanjiang Plain

The radio structure of 3C 316, a galaxy with double-peaked narrow optical emission lines

The galaxy 3C\,316 is the brightest in the radio band among the optically-selected candidates exhibiting double-peaked narrow optical emission lines. Observations with the Very Large Array (VLA), Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network (e-MERLIN), and the European VLBI Network (EVN) at 5\,GHz have been used to study the radio structure of the source in order to determine the nature of the nuclear components and to determine the presence of radio cores. The e-MERLIN image of 3C 316 reveals a collimated coherent east-west emission structure with a total extent of about 3 kpc. The EVN image shows seven discrete compact knots on an S-shaped line. However, none of these knots could be unambiguously identified as an AGN core. The observations suggest that the majority of the radio structure belongs to a powerful radio AGN, whose physical size and radio spectrum classify it as a compact steep-spectrum source. Given the complex radio structure with radio blobs and knots, the possibility of a kpc-separation dual AGN cannot be excluded if the secondary is either a naked core or radio quiet.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in the MNRA

Comparative study on the thermoelectric effect of parent oxypnictides LaTTAsO (TT = Fe, Ni)

The thermopower and Nernst effect were investigated for undoped parent compounds LaFeAsO and LaNiAsO. Both thermopower and Nernst signal in iron-based LaFeAsO are significantly larger than those in nickel-based LaNiAsO. Furthermore, abrupt changes in both thermopower and Nernst effect are observed below the structural phase transition temperature and spin-density wave (SDW) type antiferromagnetic (AFM) order temperature in Fe-based LaFeAsO. On the other hand, Nernst effect is very small in the Ni-based LaNiAsO and it is weakly temperature-dependent, reminiscent of the case in normal metals. We suggest that the effect of SDW order on the spin scattering rate should play an important role in the anomalous temperature dependence of Hall effect and Nernst effect in LaFeAsO. The contrast behavior between the LaFeAsO and LaNiAsO systems implies that the LaFeAsO system is fundamentally different from the LaNiAsO system and this may provide clues to the mechanism of high $T_c$ superconductivity in the Fe-based systems.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure