Banking Fees in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Import 05/08/2014Cílem práce je zhodnotit významnost bankovních poplatků pro vybrané banky České republiky a Slovenska v letech 2007-2012 a posoudit výši poplatků českých a slovenských klientů v roce 2014. V teoretické části je obecně vymezen bankovní systém. V další kapitole je popsán bankovní systém ČR. Závěrečná kapitola je věnována analýze bankovních poplatků. V práci je použita metoda deskripce a komparace. Z výsledků analýzy vyplývá, že elektronické bankovnictví je pro klienta levnější alternativou běžného využívání bankovních služeb. Pro klienta v ČR jsou výrazně levnější malé banky. Ze srovnání nákladovosti bankovních služeb českých a slovenský bank vyplývá, že nejdražší bankou je Slovenská spořitelna, nejlevnější bankou je česká UniCredit Bank. Dle podílu čistých výnosů z poplatků na provozních výnosech banky jsou poplatky nejvýznamnější pro Českou spořitelnu, nejmenší váhu mají pro českou ČSOB.In this thesis, the importance of banking fees for banks in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2007-2012 is examined. The thesis is also focused on the amount of banking fees for the customers of the Czech and Slovak banks in 2014. The theoretical chapter defines a banking system in general. The following chapter describes the Czech banking system. The final chapter contains banking fees analysis. In the thesis, the descriptive method and the comparison method are used. The findings show us that services of the small banks are less expensive than that of the large banks in the Czech Republic. Slovenská spořitelna is the most expensive bank from the large Czech and Slovak banks. Czech UniCredit Bank is bank with the lowest fees. The results of the analysis also show that the internet banking is the cheapest alternative for the customers. Fee income is most important for Česká spořitelna; it is the bank with the highest share of net fee income on the operating income. The Czech ČSOB was identified as the bank with the lowest share of net fee income.156 - Katedra národohospodářskávelmi dobř

Threatened plant translocation in Australia: A review

Translocation of plants has become a common approach in conservation biology in the past two decades, but it is not clear how successful it is in achieving long-term conservation outcomes. We combined a literature review with extensive consultations with translocation practitioners to compile data on translocations of threatened Australian plants. We documented 1001 translocations involving 376 taxa, concentrated in regions and habitats with high numbers of threatened species. Only 109 translocation attempts encompassing 71 taxa are documented in peer-reviewed literature. Over 85% of translocations have occurred since 2000 and half since 2010, with an especially rapid increase in development mitigation translocations, which account for 30% of all translocations documented. Many translocations involved extremely small numbers of propagules, with 45% using 250. Of the 724 translocations with sufficient data to assess performance, 42% have <10 plants surviving, and 13% have at least 50 plants surviving and some second-generation recruitment into the population. Translocation performance, measured by number of plants surviving and second-generation recruitment, was highly variable between plant lifeforms, habitats and propagule type. However, species was more variable than all of these, suggesting that some species are more conducive to translocation than others. Use of at least 500 founder individuals increased the chances of creating a viable population. Four decades after the first conservation translocations, our evaluation highlights the need to consider translocation in the broad context of conservation actions for species recovery and the need for long-term commitment to monitoring, site maintenance and documentation.J.L. Silcock, C.L. Simmons, L. Monks, R. Dillon, N. Reiterc, M. Jusaitise, P.A. Veskg, M. Byrne, D.J. Coate

Active adaptive conservation of threatened species in the face of uncertainty

Adaptive management has a long history in the natural resource management literature, but despite this, few practitioners have developed adaptive strategies to conserve threatened species. Active adaptive management provides a framework for valuing learning by measuring the degree to which it improves long-run management outcomes. The challenge of an active adaptive approach is to find the correct balance between gaining knowledge to improve management in the future and achieving the best short-term outcome based on current knowledge. We develop and analyze a framework for active adaptive management of a threatened species. Our case study concerns a novel facial tumor disease affecting the Australian threatened species Sarcophilus harrisii: the Tasmanian devil. We use stochastic dynamic programming with Bayesian updating to identify the management strategy that maximizes the Tasmanian devil population growth rate, taking into account improvements to management through learning to better understand disease latency and the relative effectiveness of three competing management options. Exactly which management action we choose each year is driven by the credibility of competing hypotheses about disease latency and by the population growth rate predicted by each hypothesis under the competing management actions. We discover that the optimal combination of management actions depends on the number of sites available and the time remaining to implement management. Our approach to active adaptive management provides a framework to identify the optimal amount of effort to invest in learning to achieve long-run conservation objectives

Threatened plant translocation in Australia: A review

Translocation of plants has become a common approach in conservation biology in the past two decades, but it is not clear how successful it is in achieving long-term conservation outcomes. We combined a literature review with extensive consultations with translocation practitioners to compile data on translocations of threatened Australian plants. We documented 1001 translocations involving 376 taxa, concentrated in regions and habitats with high numbers of threatened species. Only 109 translocation attempts encompassing 71 taxa are documented in peer-reviewed literature. Over 85% of translocations have occurred since 2000 and half since 2010, with an especially rapid increase in development mitigation translocations, which account for 30% of all translocations documented. Many translocations involved extremely small numbers of propagules, with 45% using 250. Of the 724 translocations with sufficient data to assess performance, 42% have <10 plants surviving, and 13% have at least 50 plants surviving and some second-generation recruitment into the population. Translocation performance, measured by number of plants surviving and second-generation recruitment, was highly variable between plant lifeforms, habitats and propagule type. However, species was more variable than all of these, suggesting that some species are more conducive to translocation than others. Use of at least 500 founder individuals increased the chances of creating a viable population. Four decades after the first conservation translocations, our evaluation highlights the need to consider translocation in the broad context of conservation actions for species recovery and the need for long-term commitment to monitoring, site maintenance and documentation.This research was funded by the National Environmental Science Program through the Threatened Species Recovery Hu

Predicting reliability through structured expert elicitation with the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process

As replications of individual studies are resource intensive, techniques for predicting the replicability are required. We introduce the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process, a new method for eliciting expert predictions about the replicability of research. This process is a structured expert elicitation approach based on a modified Delphi technique applied to the evaluation of research claims in social and behavioural sciences. The utility of processes to predict replicability is their capacity to test scientific claims without the costs of full replication. Experimental data supports the validity of this process, with a validation study producing a classification accuracy of 84% and an Area Under the Curve of 0.94, meeting or exceeding the accuracy of other techniques used to predict replicability. The repliCATS process provides other benefits. It is highly scalable, able to be deployed for both rapid assessment of small numbers of claims, and assessment of high volumes of claims over an extended period through an online elicitation platform, having been used to assess 3000 research claims over an 18 month period. It is available to be implemented in a range of ways and we describe one such implementation. An important advantage of the repliCATS process is that it collects qualitative data that has the potential to provide insight in understanding the limits of generalizability of scientific claims. The primary limitation of the repliCATS process is its reliance on human-derived predictions with consequent costs in terms of participant fatigue although careful design can minimise these costs. The repliCATS process has potential applications in alternative peer review and in the allocation of effort for replication studies

Determinants of woody encroachment and cover in African savannas

Savanna ecosystems are an integral part of the African landscape and sustain the livelihoods of millions of people. Woody encroachment in savannas is a widespread phenomenon but its causes are widely debated. We review the extensive literature on woody encroachment to help improve understanding of the possible causes and to highlight where and how future scientific efforts to fully understand these causes should be focused. Rainfall is the most important determinant of maximum woody cover across Africa, but fire and herbivory interact to reduce woody cover below the maximum at many locations. We postulate that woody encroachment is most likely driven by CO2 enrichment and propose a two-system conceptual framework, whereby mechanisms of woody encroachment differ depending on whether the savanna is a wet or dry system. In dry savannas, the increased water-use efficiency in plants relaxes precipitation-driven constraints and increases woody growth. In wet savannas, the increase of carbon allocation to tree roots results in faster recovery rates after disturbance and a greater likelihood of reaching sexual maturity. Our proposed framework can be tested using a mixture of experimental and earth observational techniques. At a local level, changes in precipitation, burning regimes or herbivory could be driving woody encroachment, but are unlikely to be the explanation of this continent-wide phenomenon

Species trait shifts in vegetation and soil seed bank during fen degradation

Fens in Central Europe are characterised by waterlogged organic substrate and low productivity. Human-induced changes due to drainage and mowing lead to changes in plant species composition from natural fen communities to fen meadows and later to over-drained, degraded meadows. Moderate drainage leads to increased vegetation productivity, and severe drainage results in frequent soil disturbances and less plant growth. In the present article, we analyse changes in plant trait combinations in the vegetation and the soil seed bank as well as changes in the seed bank types along gradient of drainage intensity. We hypothesize that an increase in productivity enhances traits related to persistence and that frequent disturbance selects for regeneration traits. We use multivariate statistics to analyse data from three disturbance levels: undisturbed fen, slightly drained fen meadow and severely drained degraded meadow. We found that the abundance of plants regenerating from seeds and accumulating persistent seed banks was increasing with degradation level, while plants reproducing vegetatively were gradually eliminated along the same trajectory. Plants with strong resprouting abilities increased during degradation. We also found that shifts in trait combinations were similar in the aboveground vegetation and in soil seed banks. We found that the density of short-term persistent seeds in the soil is highest in fen meadows and the density of long-term persistent seeds is highest in degraded meadows. The increase in abundance of species with strong regeneration traits at the cost of species with persistence-related traits has negative consequences for the restoration prospects of severely degraded sites

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research