Developing a predictive modelling capacity for a climate change-vulnerable blanket bog habitat: Assessing 1961-1990 baseline relationships

Aim: Understanding the spatial distribution of high priority habitats and developing predictive models using climate and environmental variables to replicate these distributions are desirable conservation goals. The aim of this study was to model and elucidate the contributions of climate and topography to the distribution of a priority blanket bog habitat in Ireland, and to examine how this might inform the development of a climate change predictive capacity for peat-lands in Ireland. Methods: Ten climatic and two topographic variables were recorded for grid cells with a spatial resolution of 1010 km, covering 87% of the mainland land surface of Ireland. Presence-absence data were matched to these variables and generalised linear models (GLMs) fitted to identify the main climatic and terrain predictor variables for occurrence of the habitat. Candidate predictor variables were screened for collinearity, and the accuracy of the final fitted GLM was evaluated using fourfold cross-validation based on the area under the curve (AUC) derived from a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) plot. The GLM predicted habitat occurrence probability maps were mapped against the actual distributions using GIS techniques. Results: Despite the apparent parsimony of the initial GLM using only climatic variables, further testing indicated collinearity among temperature and precipitation variables for example. Subsequent elimination of the collinear variables and inclusion of elevation data produced an excellent performance based on the AUC scores of the final GLM. Mean annual temperature and total mean annual precipitation in combination with elevation range were the most powerful explanatory variable group among those explored for the presence of blanket bog habitat. Main conclusions: The results confirm that this habitat distribution in general can be modelled well using the non-collinear climatic and terrain variables tested at the grid resolution used. Mapping the GLM-predicted distribution to the observed distribution produced useful results in replicating the projected occurrence of the habitat distribution over an extensive area. The methods developed will usefully inform future climate change predictive modelling for Irelan

Systematic literature review: Teaching novices programming using robots

Teaching programming to novices is a difficult task due to the complex nature of the subject, the negative stereotypes are associated with programming and because introductory programming courses often fail to encourage student understanding. This study investigates the effectiveness of using robots as tools in the teaching of introductory programming and to determine whether such technology can help to overcome the current barriers for learners in this context. The systematic literature review (SLR) methodology is used to address this aim. Nine electronic databases, the proceedings from six conferences and two journals were searched for relevant literature and exclusion criteria, and after performing several validation exercises, in total, 75% of included papers report that robots are an effective teaching tool and can help novice programmers in their studies. Most of these papers focus on the use of physical robots, however, and further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of using simulated robots

Prototype Implementations of an Architectural Model for Service-Based Flexible Software

The need to change software easily to meet evolving business requirements is urgent, and a radical shift is required in the development of software, with a more demand-centric view leading to software which will be delivered as a service, within the framework of an open marketplace. We describe a service architecture and its rationale, in which components may be bound instantly, just at the time they are needed and then the binding may be disengaged. This allows highly flexible software services to be evolved in "Internet time". The paper focuses on early results: some of the aims have been demonstrated and amplified through two experimental implementations, enabling us to assess the strengths and weakness of the approach. It is concluded that some of the key underpinning concepts discovery and late binding - are viable and demonstrate the basic feasibility of the architecture

Dynamic Data Integration: a service-based broker approach

We address the problem of large-scale data integration, where the data sources are unknown at design time, are from autonomous organisations and may evolve. Experiments are described involving a demonstrator system in the field of health services data integration within the UK. Current web services technology has been used extensively and largely successfully in these distributed prototype systems. This paper shows that web services provide a good infrastructure layer, but integration demands a high-level 'broker' architectural layer. The first version of the demonstrator is mostly based on static linking. Lessons from this are extracted, and used to design and implement the current version, in which a more dynamic broker-based integration using service-oriented architecture, late binding and domain ontology is described

A broker architecture for integrating data using a web services environment

The web service protocol stack provides capabilities for loosely integrating software services but does not provide the higher level support needed for rapid evolution. An experimental system is described for integrating the data from autonomous organizations within the UK health service domain. The results of this experiment have confirmed the need for an integration layer on top of the web service stack to provide the required higher level functionality. In this paper, we summarise our progress to date, and highlight several key research issues of general concern to the web services field, which have emerged from our prototype system. These are set in a general context of providing better ways to provide a service-based model to IT users