Network resilience

Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure systems, and social convention changes in human and animal networks. Such a regime shift demonstrates a system's resilience that characterizes the ability of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. In the past 50 years, attention was almost exclusively given to low dimensional systems and calibration of their resilience functions and indicators of early warning signals without considerations for the interactions between the components. Only in recent years, taking advantages of the network theory and lavish real data sets, network scientists have directed their interest to the real-world complex networked multidimensional systems and their resilience function and early warning indicators. This report is devoted to a comprehensive review of resilience function and regime shift of complex systems in different domains, such as ecology, biology, social systems and infrastructure. We cover the related research about empirical observations, experimental studies, mathematical modeling, and theoretical analysis. We also discuss some ambiguous definitions, such as robustness, resilience, and stability.Comment: Review chapter

Microbial diversity and community composition of fecal microbiota in dual-purpose and egg type ducks

IntroductionDucks are important agricultural animals, which can be divided into egg and dual-purpose type ducks according to economic use. The gut microbiota of ducks plays an important role in their metabolism, immune regulation, and health maintenance.MethodsHere, we use 16S rDNA V4 hypervariable amplicon sequencing to investigate the compositions and community structures of fecal microbiota between egg (five breeds, 96 individuals) and dual-purpose type ducks (four breeds, 73 individuals) that were reared under the same conditions.ResultsThe alpha diversity of fecal microflora in egg type ducks was significantly higher than that in dual-type ducks. In contrast, there is no significant difference in the fecal microbial community richness between the two groups. MetaStat analysis showed that the abundance of Peptostreptococcaceae, Streptococcaceae, Lactobacillus, Romboutsia, and Campylobacter were significantly different between the two groups. The biomarkers associated with the egg and dual-purpose type ducks were identified using LEfSe analysis and IndVal index. Function prediction of the gut microbiota indicated significant differences between the two groups. The functions of environmental information processing, carbohydrate metabolism, lipid metabolism, xenobiotic biodegradation and metabolism, and metabolism of terpenoids and polyketides were more abundant in egg type ducks. Conversely, the genetic information processing, nucleotide metabolism, biosynthesis of amino acids and secondary metabolites, glycan biosynthesis and metabolism, fatty acid elongation, and insulin resistance were significantly enriched in dual-purpose type ducks.DiscussionThis study explored the structure and diversity of the gut microbiota of ducks from different economic-use groups, and provides a reference for improving duck performance by using related probiotics in production

Model-observations synergy in the coastal ocean

Integration of observations of the coastal ocean continuum, from regional oceans to shelf seas and estuaries/deltas with models, can substantially increase the value of observations and enable a wealth of applications. In particular, models can play a critical role at connecting sparse observations, synthesizing them, and assisting the design of observational networks; in turn, whenever available, observations can guide coastal model development. Coastal observations should sample the two-way interactions between nearshore, estuarine and shelf processes and open ocean processes, while accounting for the different pace of circulation drivers, such as the fast atmospheric, hydrological and tidal processes and the slower general ocean circulation and climate scales. Because of these challenges, high-resolution models can serve as connectors and integrators of coastal continuum observations. Data assimilation approaches can provide quantitative, validated estimates of Essential Ocean Variables in the coastal continuum, adding scientific and socioeconomic value to observations through applications (e.g., sea-level rise monitoring, coastal management under a sustainable ecosystem approach, aquaculture, dredging, transport and fate of pollutants, maritime safety, hazards under natural variability or climate change). We strongly recommend an internationally coordinated approach in support of the proper integration of global and coastal continuum scales, as well as for critical tasks such as community-agreed bathymetry and coastline products

A survey on heterogeneous face recognition: Sketch, infra-red, 3D and low-resolution

Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) refers to matching face imagery across different domains. It has received much interest from the research community as a result of its profound implications in law enforcement. A wide variety of new invariant features, cross-modality matching models and heterogeneous datasets are being established in recent years. This survey provides a comprehensive review of established techniques and recent developments in HFR. Moreover, we offer a detailed account of datasets and benchmarks commonly used for evaluation. We finish by assessing the state of the field and discussing promising directions for future research

Study on Distribution of Edible Fungus Variety Rights of Mori Sangyo Co., Ltd.

Taking the variety rights of Japanese edible fungus production enterprise Mori Sangyo Co., Ltd. as the research object, this paper analyzed the application authorization trend, variety certification period, effective varieties, etc. to clarify the key breeding fields, key breeders, and variety characteristics of Mori Sangyo Co., Ltd., and discussed its distribution of edible fungus variety rights in Japan. In addition, it provided the general methods and related indicators for analysis of variety rights

Comparison of Ti/BDD and Ti/SnO2-Sb2O5 electrodes for pollutant oxidation

Anodic oxidation is a promising process for degrading toxic and biologically refractory organic pollutants present in wastewater treatment. Proper selection of electrodes is the key to reach effective and economic operation. In this study, two types of electrodes, i.e. the recently developed Ti/BDD and Ti/SnO2 - Sb2O5, which is generally believed to be superior to the conventional electrodes, were compared under the same conditions. It was found that the Ti/ BDD electrode could mineralize both phenol and reactive dyes effectively. But the Ti/SnO2 - Sb2O5 electrode could only mineralize phenol. When oxidizing more refractory reactive dyes, it demonstrated very poor activity. In addition, the Ti/ BDD electrode had a service life of 264 h in an accelerated life test, but the Ti/SnO2 - Sb2O5 was irreversibly damaged within several seconds. The direct experimental comparison in the present study indicates that the Ti/ BDD electrode is much better than the Ti/SnO2 - Sb2O5 electrode for pollutant oxidation

Basic Characteristics and Spatial Patterns of Pseudo-Settlements—Taking Dalian as An Example

A person’s living behavior patterns are closely related to three types of settlements: real-life settlements, imagined settlements, and pseudo-settlements. The term “pseudo-settlement” (PS) refers to the places that are selectively recorded and represented after the mass media chose and restructure the residence information. As the mass media rapidly develops and people’s way of obtaining information gradually change, PS has already become one of the main ways for people to recognize and understand real-life settlements, as well as describe their impressions of imagined settlements. PS also has a profound impact on tourism, employment, investment, migration, real estate development, etc. Thus, the study of PSs has important theoretical and practical significance. This paper proposes to put forward residential quarters where the mass media is displayed as the object of study and establishes the pseudo-settlement index system of Dalian in and elaborate analysis of the concept of PSs. From three aspects, including pseudo-buildings, pseudo-districts and pseudo-culture, this paper uses the ArcGIS 10.0 kernel density (spacial analyst) to analyze and interpret the basic characteristics and spatial patterns of 14 elements of the PS in Dalian. Through systemic clustering analysis, it identifies eight major types of PSs in Dalian. Then it systematically elaborates current situations and characteristics of the spatial pattern of PSs in Dalian, namely: regionally concentrated, widely scattered and blank spaces without pseudo-settlements. Finally, this paper discusses the mechanism of formation of PSs in Dalian

Robustness of interdependent networks based on bond percolation

Understanding the robustness of interdependent networks has attracted much attention in recent years. In many real scenarios, links may fail instead of nodes and how the interdependent networks behave in this case has not been adequately addressed. In this work, we investigate the link failures propagation mechanism for both two-layer and n-layer interdependent networks by using the self-consistent probabilities method which significantly simplifies the mathematical analysis of such systems. For bond percolation in which initial link failures occur in one layer, we find, analytically and via simulations, that the critical percolation threshold, pc, of this system is lower than that of site percolation. Furthermore, for interdependent ER networks, in contrast to site percolation, bond percolation results show that pc varies nonlinearly with the inverse of average degree. We also find, for the case of bond percolation where initial link failures occur in all layers, that the critical percolation threshold is the same as that of site percolation, but the behavior of the giant component above pc is different. Our research brings insight to better understand the vulnerability of interdependent networks due to link failures