5,710 research outputs found
Effect of Coriaria arborea on seed banks during primary succession on Mt Tarawera, New Zealand
An experiment was conducted over two years to investigate the effect of Coriaria arborea, a native nitrogen-fixing shrub, on soil seed banks at sites representing a post-volcanic successional sequence on Mt Tarawera, New Zealand. The sites ranged from bare volcanic ash and lapilli substrate, through low-growing pre-Coriaria vegetation, to dense stands of Coriaria scrub. Soils (to a depth of 50 mm) under recently established Coriaria and older stands had more seedlings (1096 and 1585 seedlings 0.4 m-2, respectively) and species (37 and 45 species 0.4 m-2, respectively) emerge than where there was no Coriaria (243-320 seedlings 0.4 m-2, 14-25 species 0.4 m-2) and were the only soils with Coriaria seedlings. In total, 3488 seedlings representing 63 taxa were recorded. Seeds were still germinating after 24 months but rates declined markedly in the second year. For example, Coriaria reached a germination peak at 8 weeks but continued to germinate sporadically over the 2-year period. Tree species present in young forest within 0.5 km of the sites were absent. Establishment of Coriaria greatly accelerated an underlying trend of gradually increasing abundance and diversity of seeds in the soil with vegetation age. Adventive, wind-dispersed, and annual species were over-represented in the seed banks compared with the regional evergreen forest-dominated flora. These proportions are expected to decline as succession to forest gradually occurs
Waiwhakareke Restoration Plantings: Establishment of Monitoring Plots 2005-06
Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park is being developed to reconstruct native lowland and wetland ecosystems as were once widespread in the Waikato Region. The 60ha Natural Heritage Park is located on the north-west outskirts of Hamilton City and includes a peat lake (Horseshoe Lake) which is surrounded by introduced willow trees. There is some native marginal vegetation around the lake, including rushes and sedges, and an extensive area of gently sloping pasture completes the catchment. The restoration and recreation of the native plant and animal communities is being lead by the Hamilton City Council in partnership with The University of Waikato, Wintec, Nga Mana Toopu o Kirikiriroa Limited Resource Management and Cultural Consultants and Tui 2000 (McQueen 2005; McQueen & Clarkson 2003)
Soliton Solutions to the Einstein Equations in Five Dimensions
We present a new class of solutions in odd dimensions to Einstein's equations
containing either a positive or negative cosmological constant. These solutions
resemble the even-dimensional Eguchi-Hanson--(anti)-de Sitter ((A)dS) metrics,
with the added feature of having Lorentzian signatures. They provide an
affirmative answer to the open question as to whether or not there exist
solutions with negative cosmological constant that asymptotically approach
AdS, but have less energy than AdS. We present
evidence that these solutions are the lowest-energy states within their
asymptotic class.Comment: 9 pages, Latex; Final version that appeared in Phys. Rev. Lett; title
changed by journal from original title "Eguchi-Hanson Solitons
An application of software design and documentation language
The software design and documentation language (SDDL) is a general purpose processor to support a lanugage for the description of any system, structure, concept, or procedure that may be presented from the viewpoint of a collection of hierarchical entities linked together by means of binary connections. The language comprises a set of rules of syntax, primitive construct classes (module, block, and module invocation), and language control directives. The result is a language with a fixed grammar, variable alphabet and punctuation, and an extendable vocabulary. The application of SDDL to the detailed software design of the Command Data Subsystem for the Galileo Spacecraft is discussed. A set of constructs was developed and applied. These constructs are evaluated and examples of their application are considered
Industrial evaluation of FBS Linkage – a method to support engineering change management
Engineering changes are raised throughout the product lifecycle and their management can determine the commercial success of products. A well-established method to support engineering change management is the Change Prediction Method (CPM). The FBS Linkage method enhances CPM with a function-behaviour-structure (FBS) scheme and allows more detailed modelling and analysis of engineering changes. The goal of this paper is to provide an industrial evaluation of the FBS Linkage method. For that purpose, we provide first an overview of the FBS Linkage method, before applying it to a diesel engine design and evaluating it by a group of ten experienced engineers from the diesel engine manufacturer. Overall, the engineers favoured the FBS Linkage method and ranked it on average 3.7 out of 5.0 against a set of 25 different requirements for ECM methods. The evaluation underlines the benefits of the method in terms of a systematic way for capturing, explaining and transferring knowledge about the product and effects of engineering changes on it. Identified improvement areas include more guidelines on the scope of the method, reduction of the effort required to build FBS Linkage models, and an integration of the method into other applied systems.This research was funded by a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral Prize, awarded to the first author.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09544828.2015.101578
Eguchi-Hanson Solitons in Odd Dimensions
We present a new class of solutions in odd dimensions to Einstein's equations
containing either a positive or negative cosmological constant. These solutions
resemble the even-dimensional Eguchi-Hanson-(A)dS metrics, with the added
feature of having Lorentzian signatures. They are asymptotic to
(A)dS. In the AdS case their energy is negative relative to that of
pure AdS. We present perturbative evidence in 5 dimensions that such metrics
are the states of lowest energy in their asymptotic class, and present a
conjecture that this is generally true for all such metrics. In the dS case
these solutions have a cosmological horizon. We show that their mass at future
infinity is less than that of pure dS.Comment: 26 pages, Late
Finding Pairwise Intersections Inside a Query Range
We study the following problem: preprocess a set O of objects into a data
structure that allows us to efficiently report all pairs of objects from O that
intersect inside an axis-aligned query range Q. We present data structures of
size and with query time
time, where k is the number of reported pairs, for two classes of objects in
the plane: axis-aligned rectangles and objects with small union complexity. For
the 3-dimensional case where the objects and the query range are axis-aligned
boxes in R^3, we present a data structures of size and query time . When the objects and
query are fat, we obtain query time using storage
Symmetries of a class of nonlinear fourth order partial differential equations
In this paper we study symmetry reductions of a class of nonlinear fourth
order partial differential equations \be u_{tt} = \left(\kappa u + \gamma
u^2\right)_{xx} + u u_{xxxx} +\mu u_{xxtt}+\alpha u_x u_{xxx} + \beta u_{xx}^2,
\ee where , , , and are constants. This
equation may be thought of as a fourth order analogue of a generalization of
the Camassa-Holm equation, about which there has been considerable recent
interest. Further equation (1) is a ``Boussinesq-type'' equation which arises
as a model of vibrations of an anharmonic mass-spring chain and admits both
``compacton'' and conventional solitons. A catalogue of symmetry reductions for
equation (1) is obtained using the classical Lie method and the nonclassical
method due to Bluman and Cole. In particular we obtain several reductions using
the nonclassical method which are no} obtainable through the classical method
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