Immediate effects of microclimate modification enhance native shrub encroachment

Shrubs have become more dense and expanded beyond their range all over the world for a variety of reasons including increased temperatures, overgrazing, and alteration of historical fire regime. Native shrubs have been encroaching on Virginia barrier island grasslands for over half a century for unknown reasons. Species composition, soil nutrients, leaf area index (LAI), and ground and air temperature were recorded across the shrub to grass transition and at free-standing shrubs in a coastal grassland in order to determine the effect of shrub encroachment on plant community and microclimate. Species richness was significantly lower inside shrub thickets. Soil water content, organic matter, nitrogen (N), carbon (C), and LAI were higher in shrub thickets and free-standing shrubs compared to grasslands. Summer and fall maximum temperatures were lower and more moderate where shrubs were present. Fall and winter minimum temperatures were highest inside shrub thickets. Native shrubs impact microclimate and species composition immediately upon encroachment. These shrubs lower overall species composition, increase soil nutrients and moisture, moderate summer temperature, and increase winter temperature, which has consequences on a larger scale. As barrier islands are critical for protecting marsh and mainland habitats, understanding this mechanism for shrub expansion is important to predict future encroachment of shrubs and displacement of grassland habitat

Mechanisms of Surviving Burial: Dune Grass Interspecific Differences Drive Resource Allocation After Sand Deposition

Sand dunes are important geomorphic formations of coastal ecosystems that are critical in protecting human populations that live in coastal areas. Dune formation is driven by ecomorphodynamic interactions between vegetation and sediment deposition. While there has been extensive research on responses of dune grasses to sand burial, there is a knowledge gap in understanding mechanisms of acclimation between similar, coexistent, dune-building grasses such as Ammophila breviligulata (C3), Spartina patens (C4), and Uniola paniculata (C4). Our goal was to determine how physiological mechanisms of acclimation to sand burial vary between species. We hypothesize that (1) in the presence of burial, resource allocation will be predicated on photosynthetic pathway and that we will be able to characterize the C3 species as a root allocator and the C4 species as leaf allocators. We also hypothesize that (2) despite similarities between these species in habitat, growth form, and life history, leaf, root, and whole plant traits will vary between species when burial is not present. Furthermore, when burial is present, the existing variability in physiological strategy will drive species-specific mechanisms of survival. In a greenhouse experiment, we exposed three dune grass species to different burial treatments: 0 cm (control) and a one-time 25-cm burial to mimic sediment deposition during a storm. At the conclusion of our study, we collected a suite of physiological and morphological functional traits. Results showed that Ammophila decreased allocation to aboveground biomass to maintain root biomass, preserving photosynthesis by allocating nitrogen (N) into light-exposed leaves. Conversely, Uniola and Spartina decreased allocation to belowground production to increase elongation and maintain aboveground biomass. Interestingly, we found that species were functionally distinct when burial was absent; however, all species became more similar when treated with burial. In the presence of burial, species utilized functional traits of rapid growth strategy, although mechanisms of change were interspecifically variable

Eco-efficiency

none4openMassari, Stefania; Miglietta, Pier Paolo; De Leo, Federica; Ruberti, MarcelloMassari, Stefania; Miglietta, Pier Paolo; De Leo, Federica; Ruberti, Marcell

Conceptualising sustainability in UK urban Regeneration: a discursive Formation

Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that conceptualisations of sustainability are fundamentally limited. The conceptualisation of sustainability operating within urban regeneration schemes should powerfully shape how they make manifest (or do not) the principles of sustainable development. Documents guide, but people implement regeneration—and the disparate conceptualisations of stakeholders demonstrate even less coherence than policy. The actions towards achieving sustainability have become a policy ‘fix’ in Eastside: a necessary feature of urban policy discourse that is limited to solutions within market-based constraints

Search for Higgs bosons of the Universal Extra Dimensions at the Large Hadron Collider

The Higgs sector of the Universal Extra Dimensions (UED) has a rather involved setup. With one extra space dimension, the main ingredients to the construct are the higher Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations of the Standard Model Higgs boson and the fifth components of the gauge fields which on compactification appear as scalar degrees of freedom and can mix with the former thus leading to physical KK-Higgs states of the scenario. In this work, we explore in detail the phenomenology of such a Higgs sector of the UED with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in focus. We work out relevant decay branching fractions involving the KK-Higgs excitations. Possible production modes of the KK-Higgs bosons are then discussed with an emphasis on their associated production with the third generation KK-quarks and that under the cascade decays of strongly interacting UED excitations which turn out to be the only phenomenologically significant modes. It is pointed out that the collider searches of such Higgs bosons face generic hardship due to soft end-products which result from severe degeneracies in the masses of the involved excitations in the minimal version of the UED (MUED). Generic implications of either observing some or all of the KK-Higgs bosons at the LHC are discussed.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures and 1 tabl

Spin and Chirality Effects in Antler-Topology Processes at High Energy e+e−e^+e^- Colliders

We perform a model-independent investigation of spin and chirality correlation effects in the antler-topology processes $e^+e^-\to\mathcal{P}^+\mathcal{P}^-\to (\ell^+ \mathcal{D}^0) (\ell^-\mathcal{\bar{D}}^0)$ at high energy $e^+e^-$ colliders with polarized beams. Generally the production process $e^+e^-\to\mathcal{P}^+\mathcal{P}^-$ can occur not only through the $s$-channel exchange of vector bosons, $\mathcal{V}^0$, including the neutral Standard Model (SM) gauge bosons, $\gamma$ and $Z$, but also through the $s$- and $t$-channel exchanges of new neutral states, $\mathcal{S}^0$ and $\mathcal{T}^0$, and the $u$-channel exchange of new doubly-charged states, $\mathcal{U}^{--}$. The general set of (non-chiral) three-point couplings of the new particles and leptons allowed in a renormalizable quantum field theory is considered. The general spin and chirality analysis is based on the threshold behavior of the excitation curves for $\mathcal{P}^+\mathcal{P}^-$ pair production in $e^+e^-$ collisions with longitudinal and transverse polarized beams, the angular distributions in the production process and also the production-decay angular correlations. In the first step, we present the observables in the helicity formalism. Subsequently, we show how a set of observables can be designed for determining the spins and chiral structures of the new particles without any model assumptions. Finally, taking into account a typical set of approximately chiral invariant scenarios, we demonstrate how the spin and chirality effects can be probed experimentally at a high energy $e^+e^-$ collider.Comment: 50 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables, matches version published in EPJ

Single hadron response measurement and calorimeter jet energy scale uncertainty with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

The uncertainty on the calorimeter energy response to jets of particles is derived for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). First, the calorimeter response to single isolated charged hadrons is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo simulation using proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) = 900 GeV and 7 TeV collected during 2009 and 2010. Then, using the decay of K_s and Lambda particles, the calorimeter response to specific types of particles (positively and negatively charged pions, protons, and anti-protons) is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo predictions. Finally, the jet energy scale uncertainty is determined by propagating the response uncertainty for single charged and neutral particles to jets. The response uncertainty is 2-5% for central isolated hadrons and 1-3% for the final calorimeter jet energy scale.Comment: 24 pages plus author list (36 pages total), 23 figures, 1 table, submitted to European Physical Journal

Measurements of Higgs boson production and couplings in diboson final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements are presented of production properties and couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson using the decays into boson pairs, H →γ γ, H → Z Z∗ →4l and H →W W∗ →lνlν. The results are based on the complete pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb−1. Evidence for Higgs boson production through vector-boson fusion is reported. Results of combined fits probing Higgs boson couplings to fermions and bosons, as well as anomalous contributions to loop-induced production and decay modes, are presented. All measurements are consistent with expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Measurement of the top quark pair cross section with ATLAS in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV using final states with an electron or a muon and a hadronically decaying τ lepton

A measurement of the cross section of top quark pair production in proton-proton collisions recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is reported. The data sample used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 2.05 fb -1. Events with an isolated electron or muon and a τ lepton decaying hadronically are used. In addition, a large missing transverse momentum and two or more energetic jets are required. At least one of the jets must be identified as originating from a b quark. The measured cross section, σtt-=186±13(stat.)±20(syst.)±7(lumi.) pb, is in good agreement with the Standard Model prediction