The Abundance and Distribution of Mallards in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley of Arkansas

The management of wintering waterfowl in North America requires flexibility because of constantly changing landscapes and conditions. Many mallards use the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) for wintering habitat, making this an area of emphasis for improving management strategies. In this study, I used mallard observation data from 2009-2014 aerial surveys collected in the Arkansas portion of the lower MAV to explain the abundance and distribution and of mallards. Using spatial hierarchical models and breaking covariate data to 2x2 km grid cells, I analyzed how covariates relate to the changes of abundance and distributions within and among surveys. Mallard abundance and distributions responded positively to surface water along with the land cover habitat inundated by that water. Rice fields, wetlands, soybean fields, and fallow (uncultivated) fields were used most by mallards. My models also showed a strong spatial pattern of mallard abundance across the MAV suggesting that covariates other than the ones used here may be important in better explaining mallard distribution. Biologists in the lower MAV can use these results to better conserve and manage lands for mallards

Non-Skeletal Biomineralization by Eukaryotes: Matters of Moment and Gravity

Skeletal biomineralisation by microbial eukaryotes significantly affects the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon, silicon and calcium. Non-skeletal biomineralisation by eukaryotic cells, with precipitates retained within the cell interior, can duplicate some of the functions of skeletal minerals, e.g., increased cell density, but not the mechanical and antibiophage functions of extracellular biominerals. However, skeletal biomineralisation does not duplicate many of the functions of non-skeletal biominerals. These functions include magnetotaxis (magnetite), gravity sensing (intracellular barite, bassanite, celestite and gypsum), buffering and storage of elements in an osmotically inactive form (calcium as carbonate, oxalate, polyphosphate and sulfate; phosphate as polyphosphate) and acid-base regulation, disposing of excess hydroxyl ions via an osmotically inactive product (calcium carbonate, calcium oxalate). Although polyphosphate has a wide phylogenetic distribution among microbial eukaryotes, other non-skeletal minerals have more restricted distributions, and as yet there seems to be no definitive evidence that the alkaline earth components (Ba and Sr) of barite and celestite are essential for completion of the life cycle in organisms that produce these minerals.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

An Online Decision-Theoretic Pipeline for Responder Dispatch

The problem of dispatching emergency responders to service traffic accidents, fire, distress calls and crimes plagues urban areas across the globe. While such problems have been extensively looked at, most approaches are offline. Such methodologies fail to capture the dynamically changing environments under which critical emergency response occurs, and therefore, fail to be implemented in practice. Any holistic approach towards creating a pipeline for effective emergency response must also look at other challenges that it subsumes - predicting when and where incidents happen and understanding the changing environmental dynamics. We describe a system that collectively deals with all these problems in an online manner, meaning that the models get updated with streaming data sources. We highlight why such an approach is crucial to the effectiveness of emergency response, and present an algorithmic framework that can compute promising actions for a given decision-theoretic model for responder dispatch. We argue that carefully crafted heuristic measures can balance the trade-off between computational time and the quality of solutions achieved and highlight why such an approach is more scalable and tractable than traditional approaches. We also present an online mechanism for incident prediction, as well as an approach based on recurrent neural networks for learning and predicting environmental features that affect responder dispatch. We compare our methodology with prior state-of-the-art and existing dispatch strategies in the field, which show that our approach results in a reduction in response time with a drastic reduction in computational time.Comment: Appeared in ICCPS 201

The ERATO Systems Biology Workbench: Architectural Evolution

Systems biology researchers make use of a large number of different software packages for computational modeling and analysis as well as data manipulation and visualization. To help developers easily provide the ability for their applications to communicate with other tools, we have developed a simple, open-source, application integration framework, the ERATO Systems Biology Workbench (SBW). In this paper, we discuss the architecture of SBW, focusing on our motivations for various design decisions including the choice of the message-oriented communications infrastructure

The ERATO Systems Biology Workbench: An Integrated Environment for Multiscale and Multitheoretic Simulations in Systems Biology

Over the years, a variety of biochemical network modeling packages have been developed and used by researchers in biology. No single package currently answers all the needs of the biology community; nor is one likely to do so in the near future, because the range of tools needed is vast and new techniques are emerging too rapidly. It seems unavoidable that, for the foreseeable future, systems biology researchers are likely to continue using multiple packages to carry out their work. In this chapter, we describe the ERATO Systems Biology Workbench (SBW) and the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), two related efforts directed at the problems of software package interoperability. The goal of the SBW project is to create an integrated, easy-to-use software environment that enables sharing of models and resources between simulation and analysis tools for systems biology. SBW uses a modular, plug-in architecture that permits easy introduction of new components. SBML is a proposed standard XML-based language for representing models communicated between software packages; it is used as the format of models communicated between components in SBW

Does microbicide use in consumer products promote antimicrobial resistance? A critical review and recommendations for a cohesive approach to risk assessment

The increasing use of microbicides in consumer products is raising concerns related to enhanced microbicide resistance in bacteria and potential cross resistance to antibiotics. The recently published documents on this topic from the European Commission have spawned much interest to better understand the true extent of the putative links for the benefit of the manufacturers, regulators, and consumers alike. This white paper is based on a 2-day workshop (SEAC-Unilever, Bedford, United Kingdom; June 2012) in the fields of microbicide usage and resistance. It identifies gaps in our knowledge and also makes specific recommendations for harmonization of key terms and refinement/standardization of methods for testing microbicide resistance to better assess the impact and possible links with cross resistance to antibiotics. It also calls for a better cohesion in research in this field. Such information is crucial to developing any risk assessment framework on microbicide use notably in consumer products. The article also identifies key research questions where there are inadequate data, which, if addressed, could promote improved knowledge and understanding to assess any related risks for consumer and environmental safety

The ERATO Systems Biology Workbench: Enabling Interaction and Exchange Between Software Tools for Computational Biology

Researchers in computational biology today make use of a large number of different software packages for modeling, analysis, and data manipulation and visualization. In this paper, we describe the ERATO Systems Biology Workbench (SBW), a software framework that allows these heterogeneous application components--written in diverse programming languages and running on different platforms--to communicate and use each others' data and algorithmic capabilities. Our goal is to create a simple, open-source software infrastructure which is effective, easy to implement and easy to understand. SBW uses a broker-based architecture and enables applications (potentially running on separate, distributed computers) to communicate via a simple network protocol. The interfaces to the system are encapsulated in client-side libraries that we provide for different programming languages. We describe the SBW architecture and the current set of modules, as well as alternative implementation technologies

Next Generation Simulation Tools: The Systems Biology Workbench and BioSPICE Integration

Researchers in quantitative systems biology make use of a large number of different software packages for modelling, analysis, visualization, and general data manipulation. In this paper, we describe the Systems Biology Workbench (SBW), a software framework that allows heterogeneous application components—written in diverse programming languages and running on different platforms—to communicate and use each others' capabilities via a fast binary encoded-message system. Our goal was to create a simple, high performance, opensource software infrastructure which is easy to implement and understand. SBW enables applications (potentially running on separate, distributed computers) to communicate via a simple network protocol. The interfaces to the system are encapsulated in client-side libraries that we provide for different programming languages. We describe in this paper the SBW architecture, a selection of current modules, including Jarnac, JDesigner, and SBWMeta-tool, and the close integration of SBW into BioSPICE, which enables both frameworks to share tools and compliment and strengthen each others capabilities

CANTERBURY (Reino Unido) (Inglaterra). Planos de población (1768). 1:3000

Escala gráfica de 1200 pies ingleses [= 11,2 cm]. Orientado con lis en rosa de ocho vientosOrografía por sombreadoIndica los nombres de las calles y edificios principales de la ciudadEl margen inferior, recoge una nota referente a una próxima edición de mapas del condado de KentTítulo y fecha enmarcado en cartela decorada con motivos costumbristas y vegetale