619 research outputs found
A-DInSAR Monitoring of Landslide and Subsidence Activity: A Case of Urban Damage in Arcos de la Frontera, Spain
Terrain surface displacements at a site can be induced by more than one geological process. In this work, we use advanced differential interferometry SAR (A-DInSAR) to measure ground deformation in Arcos de la Frontera (SW Spain), where severe damages related to landslide activity and subsidence have occurred in recent years. The damages are concentrated in two residential neighborhoods constructed between 2001 and 2006. One of the neighborhoods, called La Verbena, is located at the head of an active retrogressive landslide that has an extension of around 0.17 × 106 m2 and developed in weathered clayey soils. Landslide motion has caused building deterioration since they were constructed. After a heavy rainfall period in winter 2009–2010, the movement was accelerated, worsening the situation. The other neighborhood, Pueblos Blancos, was built over a poorly compacted artificial filling undergoing a spatially variable consolidation process which has also led to severe damage to buildings. For both cases, a short set of C-band data from the “ENVISAT 2010+” project has been used to monitor surface displacement for the period spanning April 2011–January 2012. In this work we characterize the mechanism of both ground deformation processes using in situ and remote sensing techniques along with a detailed geological interpretation and urban damage distribution
The origin of power-law distributions in deterministic walks: the influence of landscape geometry
We investigate the properties of a deterministic walk, whose locomotion rule
is always to travel to the nearest site. Initially the sites are randomly
distributed in a closed rectangular ( landscape and, once
reached, they become unavailable for future visits. As expected, the walker
step lengths present characteristic scales in one () and two () dimensions. However, we find scale invariance for an intermediate
geometry, when the landscape is a thin strip-like region. This result is
induced geometrically by a dynamical trapping mechanism, leading to a power law
distribution for the step lengths. The relevance of our findings in broader
contexts -- of both deterministic and random walks -- is also briefly
discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Improving the k-Nearest Neighbour Rule by an Evolutionary Voting Approach
This work presents an evolutionary approach to modify the
voting system of the k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN). The main novelty of
this article lies on the optimization process of voting regardless of the
distance of every neighbour. The calculated real-valued vector through
the evolutionary process can be seen as the relative contribution of every
neighbour to select the label of an unclassified example. We have tested
our approach on 30 datasets of the UCI repository and results have
been compared with those obtained from other 6 variants of the kNN
predictor, resulting in a realistic improvement statistically supported
Association of VAV2 and VAV3 polymorphisms with cardiovascular risk factors
Hypertension, diabetes and obesity are cardiovascular risk factors closely associated to the development of renal and cardiovascular target organ damage. VAV2 and VAV3, members of the VAV family proto-oncogenes, are guanosine nucleotide exchange factors for the Rho and Rac GTPase family, which is related with cardiovascular homeostasis. We have analyzed the relationship between the presence of VAV2 rs602990 and VAV3 rs7528153 polymorphisms with cardiovascular risk factors and target organ damage (heart, vessels and kidney) in 411 subjects. Our results show that being carrier of the T allele in VAV2 rs602990 polymorphism is associated with an increased risk of obesity, reduced levels of ankle-brachial index and diastolic blood pressure and reduced retinal artery caliber. In addition, being carrier of T allele is associated with increased risk of target organ damage in males. On the other hand, being carrier of the T allele in VAV3 rs7528153 polymorphism is associated with a decreased susceptibility of developing a pathologic state composed by the presence of hypertension, diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular damage, and with an increased risk of developing altered basal glycaemia. This is the first report showing an association between VAV2 and VAV3 polymorphisms with cardiovascular risk factors and target organ damage
First passage and arrival time densities for L\'evy flights and the failure of the method of images
We discuss the first passage time problem in the semi-infinite interval, for
homogeneous stochastic Markov processes with L{\'e}vy stable jump length
distributions (),
namely, L{\'e}vy flights (LFs). In particular, we demonstrate that the method
of images leads to a result, which violates a theorem due to Sparre Andersen,
according to which an arbitrary continuous and symmetric jump length
distribution produces a first passage time density (FPTD) governed by the
universal long-time decay . Conversely, we show that for LFs the
direct definition known from Gaussian processes in fact defines the probability
density of first arrival, which for LFs differs from the FPTD. Our findings are
corroborated by numerical results.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, iopart.cls style, accepted to J. Phys. A (Lett
Abundance of unknots in various models of polymer loops
A veritable zoo of different knots is seen in the ensemble of looped polymer
chains, whether created computationally or observed in vitro. At short loop
lengths, the spectrum of knots is dominated by the trivial knot (unknot). The
fractional abundance of this topological state in the ensemble of all
conformations of the loop of segments follows a decaying exponential form,
, where marks the crossover from a mostly unknotted
(ie topologically simple) to a mostly knotted (ie topologically complex)
ensemble. In the present work we use computational simulation to look closer
into the variation of for a variety of polymer models. Among models
examined, is smallest (about 240) for the model with all segments of the
same length, it is somewhat larger (305) for Gaussian distributed segments, and
can be very large (up to many thousands) when the segment length distribution
has a fat power law tail.Comment: 13 pages, 6 color figure
Effectiveness of habitat management in the recovery of low-density populations of wild rabbit.
Understanding the relationship between spatial patterns of landscape attributes and population presence and abundance is essential for understanding population processes as well as supporting management and conservation strategies. This study evaluates the influence of three factors: environment, habitat management, and season on the presence and abundance of the wild rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), an important prey species for Mediterranean endangered predator species. To address this issue, we estimated wild rabbit presence and abundance by latrine counting in transects located in 45 plots within a 250×250 m grid from June 2007 until June 2009 in a 1,200 ha hunting area in southern Portugal.We then analyzed how wild rabbit presence and abundance correlatewith the aforementioned factors. Our results showed that the main variable influencing wild rabbit presence and abundance was the distance to the artificial warrens. North and northeast slope directions were negatively related to wild rabbit presence. Conversely, rabbit presence was positively correlated with short distances to ecotone, artificial warrens, and spring. Regarding rabbit abundance, in addition to artificial warrens, soft soils, bushes, and season also had a positive effect. We found that environmental variables, management practices, and season each affect wild rabbit presence and abundance differently at a home range scale in low-density population. Thus, our major recommendations are reducing the distance to artificial warrens and ecotone, ideally to less than 100 m, and promoting habitat quality improvement on slopes with plenty of sun exposure
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