725 research outputs found
Fall feeding aggregations of fin whales off Elephant Island (Antarctica)
From 13 March to 09 April 2012 Germany conducted a fisheries survey on board RV Polarstern in the Scotia Sea (Elephant Island - South Shetland Island - Joinville Island area) under the auspices of CCAMLR. During this expedition, ANT-XXVIII/4, an opportunistic marine mammal survey was carried out. Data were collected for 26 days along the externally preset cruise track, resulting in 295 hrs on effort.
Within the study area 248 sightings were collected, including three different species of baleen whales (fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), and Antarctic minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis) and one toothed whale species, killer whale (Orcinus orca). More than 62% of the sightings recorded were fin whales (155 sightings) which were mainly related to the Elephant Island area (116 sightings). Usual group sizes of the total fin whale sightings ranged from one to five individuals, also including young animals associated with adults during some encounters. Larger groups of more than 20 whales, and on two occasions more than 100 indivuduals, were observed as well. These large pods of fin whales were observed feeding in shallow waters (< 300 m) on the north-western shelf off Elephant Island, concordant with large aggregations of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). This observation suggests that Elephant Island constitutes an important feeding area for fin whales in early austral fall, with possible implications regarding the regulation of (krill) fisheries in this area
Comment on “Variations in northern vegetation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981 to 1999” by L. Zhou et al.
Possible manifestation of spin fluctuations in the temperature behavior of resistivity in Sm_{1.85}Ce_{0.15}CuO_4 thin films
A pronounced step-like (kink) behavior in the temperature dependence of
resistivity is observed in the optimally-doped
thin films around and attributed to
manifestation of strong spin fluctuations induced by moments with the
energy . In addition to fluctuation
induced contribution due to thermal broadening effects (of the
width ), the experimental data are found to be well fitted
accounting for residual (zero-temperature) , electron-phonon and electron-electron contributions. The
best fits produced , ,
, and for estimates of the plasmon frequency, the
impurity scattering rate, electron-phonon coupling constant, and the Fermi
energy, respectively.Comment: 6 pages (REVTEX4), 2 EPS figures; accepted for publication in JETP
Letter
Traumatic Myiasis Caused by an Association of <i>Sarcophaga tibialis</i> (Diptera: Sarcophagidae) and <i>Lucilia sericata</i> (Diptera: Calliphoridae) in a Domestic Cat in Italy
received: 2015-05-07 accepted: 2015-06-30 published: 2015-08-25© 2015, Korean Society for Parasitology and Tropical Medicine
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The attached file is the published version of the article.© 2015, Korean Society for Parasitology and Tropical Medicine
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The attached file is the published version of the article
Evolução da superação da dormência de sementes de capim sudão durante o armazenamento - resultados parciais.
Orientador: Luiz Eichelberger
Irreversibility line and low-field grain-boundary pinning in electron-doped superconducting thin films
AC magnetic susceptibilities of electron-doped Pr_{1.85}Ce_{0.15}CuO_4 (PCCO)
and Sm_{1.85}Ce_{0.15}CuO_4 (SCCO) granular thin films have been measured as a
function of temperature and magnetic-field strength. Depending on the level of
homogeneity of our films, two different types of the irreversibility line (IL)
defined as the intergrain-loss peak temperature in the imaginary part of
susceptibility have been found. The obtained results are described via the
critical-state model taking into account the low-field grain-boundary pinning.
The extracted pinning-force densities in more granular SCCO films turn out to
be four times larger than their counterparts in less granular PCCO films
OPTIMAL SITING FOR MARINE RENEWABLES ENERGY INSTALLATIONS ALONG THE CALIFORNIAN COAST USING A MARINE SPATIAL PLANNING APPROACH
Investigation of microwave dielectric relaxation process in the antiferroelectric phase of NaNbO3 ceramics
This letter reports microwave dielectric measurements performed in the
antiferroelectric phase of NaNbO3 ceramics from 100 to 450 K. Remarkable
dielectric relaxations were found within the antiferroelectric phase and in the
vicinity of ferroelectric-antiferroelectric phase transition. Such dielectric
relaxation process was associated with relaxations of polar nanoregions with
strong relaxor-like characteristic. In addition, the microwave dielectric
measurements also revealed an unexpected and unusual anomaly in the relaxation
strength, which was related to a disruption of the antiferroelectric order
induced by a possible AFE-AFE phase transition.Comment: 4 pages and 4 figures - Paper accepted for publication in the Solid
State Communication
A first assessment of the Sentinel-2 Level 1-C cloud mask product to support informed surface analyses
Abstract Cloud detection in optical remote sensing images is a crucial problem because undetected clouds can produce misleading results in the analyses of surface and atmospheric parameters. Sentinel-2 provides high spatial resolution satellite data distributed with associated cloud masks. In this paper, we evaluate the ability of Sentinel-2 Level-1C cloud mask products to discriminate clouds over a variety of biogeographic scenarios and in different cloudiness conditions. Reference cloud masks for the identification of misdetection were generated by applying a local thresholding method that analyses Sentinel-2 Band 2 (0.490 μm) and Band 10 (1.375 μm) separately; histogram-based thresholds were locally tuned by checking the single bands and the natural color composite (B4B3B2); in doubtful cases, NDVI and DEM were also analyzed to refine the masks; the B2B11B12 composite was used to separate snow. The analysis of the cloud classification errors obtained for our test sites allowed us to get important inferences of general value. The L1C cloud mask generally underestimated the presence of clouds (average Omission Error, OE, 37.4%); this error increased (OE > 50%) for imagery containing opaque clouds with a large transitional zone (between the cloud core and clear areas) and cirrus clouds, fragmentation emerged as a major source of omission errors (R2 0.73). Overestimation was prevalently found in the presence of holes inside the main cloud bodies. Two extreme environments were particularly critical for the L1C cloud mask product. Detection over Amazonian rainforests was highly inefficient (OE > 70%) due to the presence of complex cloudiness and high water vapor content. On the other hand, Alpine orography under dry atmosphere created false cirrus clouds. Altogether, cirrus detection was the most inefficient. According to our results, Sentinel-2 L1C users should take some simple precautions while waiting for ESA improved cloud detection products
Quantifying the Preferential Direction of the Model Gradient in Adversarial Training With Projected Gradient Descent
Adversarial training, especially projected gradient descent (PGD), has been
the most successful approach for improving robustness against adversarial
attacks. After adversarial training, gradients of models with respect to their
inputs have a preferential direction. However, the direction of alignment is
not mathematically well established, making it difficult to evaluate
quantitatively. We propose a novel definition of this direction as the
direction of the vector pointing toward the closest point of the support of the
closest inaccurate class in decision space. To evaluate the alignment with this
direction after adversarial training, we apply a metric that uses generative
adversarial networks to produce the smallest residual needed to change the
class present in the image. We show that PGD-trained models have a higher
alignment than the baseline according to our definition, that our metric
presents higher alignment values than a competing metric formulation, and that
enforcing this alignment increases the robustness of models.Comment: Updates for second version: added methods/analysis for multiclass
datasets; added new references found since last submission; removed claims
about interpretability; overall editin
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