Effect of alternative seed treatments on seed-borne fungal diseases in tomato

The fungus Didymella lycopersici infects tomato seed and results in great losses before and after germination. To control the disease, seed companies use thiram preventively, although human allergy problems have been reported. For this reason as well as to address needs in organic agriculture, this study has focused on the effects of alternative methods of control. Nitrite solutions and resistance inducers were tested in a growth chamber. Results showed that soaking the seed in a nitrite solution with a concentration of 300mΜ (in citric acid buffer, pH 2) for 10 minutes reduced losses due to low seed germination and disease incidence in the germinated seedlings completely. When applied for longer intervals sodium nitrite proved phytotoxic whereas in shorter intervals it was not as effective. The resistance inducer Tillecur (mustard seed extract) at the rate of 0.05g/ml was as much effective as sodium nitrite inhibiting disease incidence in germinated seedlings. None of the above treatments was significantly different to thiram and they could replace the fungicide in the control of seedborne D. lycopersici in tomato

The use of human behavioural cues by urban herring gulls

Populations of herring gulls (Larus argentatus) have declined rapidly in Britain and Ireland, but this species is increasingly breeding and foraging in urban areas and has become a source of human-wildlife conflict. Although there is a large body of literature on the behaviour of herring gulls in traditional rural colonies, urban-dwelling gulls and the behavioural drivers of their apparent success in urban areas have been less studied. Gaining a better understanding of the factors that lead to negative interactions between humans and gulls would provide an insight into how human-gull conflict can be mitigated. As gulls in urban areas often forage on anthropogenic food, they are likely to interact with humans regularly and may therefore make foraging decisions based on human cues. In this thesis, I investigate whether herring gulls use behavioural cues from humans when foraging in urban areas. I first tested whether herring gulls use the direction of human gaze when approaching an anthropogenic food source. I found that herring gulls do respond to this cue: gulls took longer to approach and peck at food when they were subjected to direct gaze. I then tested whether gulls respond specifically to human eyes rather than head direction, and whether this response is influenced by gull age or location. I found that both adult and juvenile gulls responded aversively to direct gaze, and that gulls in urban areas could be approached more closely than their counterparts in rural areas. Next, I considered whether herring gulls are attracted to objects with which humans have associated. To do this, I tested whether herring gulls peck at objects more frequently after observing a human handling the object. I found that the type of object was important: gulls pecked at handled objects comprised of packaged food, but were less likely to approach and peck at handled objects when they were not food-related. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that herring gulls foraging in urban areas use human cues. Finally, I developed an individual-based model to investigate how free-living, wild animals respond to humans in a landscape where some humans provide food or behave neutrally, while others present a threat. I showed that (a) a fast learning rate is adaptive when it would be better to avoid humans but not when it would be less energetically costly to remain close to humans, (b) an ability to recognise individual humans can help animals overcome this problem, but may only be useful if animals repeatedly encounter humans who differ inter-individually in their behaviour, and (c) socially learning about humans is likely to help animals approximate an optimal avoidance strategy. These findings provide an insight into how herring gulls, and potentially other animals, are able to forage successfully in human-dominated environments. Furthermore, by understanding the cues that gulls use, people have the opportunity to modify their behaviour to reduce the frequency of negative interactions with gulls

Achieving Efficient Strong Scaling with PETSc using Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Optimisation

The increasing number of processing elements and decreas- ing memory to core ratio in modern high-performance platforms makes efficient strong scaling a key requirement for numerical algorithms. In order to achieve efficient scalability on massively parallel systems scientific software must evolve across the entire stack to exploit the multiple levels of parallelism exposed in modern architectures. In this paper we demonstrate the use of hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelisation to optimise parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication in PETSc, a widely used scientific library for the scalable solution of partial differential equations. Using large matrices generated by Fluidity, an open source CFD application code which uses PETSc as its linear solver engine, we evaluate the effect of explicit communication overlap using task-based parallelism and show how to further improve performance by explicitly load balancing threads within MPI processes. We demonstrate a significant speedup over the pure-MPI mode and efficient strong scaling of sparse matrix-vector multiplication on Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 and Cray XE6 systems

Herring gulls respond to human gaze direction

This is the final version. Available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record. Human-wildlife conflict is one of the greatest threats to species populations worldwide. One species facing national declines in the UK is the herring gull (Larus argentatus), despite an increase in numbers in urban areas. Gulls in urban areas are often considered a nuisance owing to behaviours such as food-snatching. Whether urban gull feeding behaviour is influenced by human behavioural cues, such as gaze direction, remains unknown. We therefore measured the approach times of herring gulls to a food source placed in close proximity to an experimenter who either looked directly at the gull or looked away. We found that only 26% of targeted gulls would touch the food, suggesting that food-snatching is likely to be conducted by a minority of individuals. When gulls did touch the food, they took significantly longer to approach when the experimenter's gaze was directed towards them compared with directed away. However, inter-individual behaviour varied greatly, with some gulls approaching similarly quickly in both treatments, while others approached much more slowly when the experimenter was looking at them. These results indicate that reducing human-herring gull conflict may be possible through small changes in human behaviour, but will require consideration of behavioural differences between individual gulls.Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research fellowshi

Predator or provider? How wild animals respond to mixed messages from humans

Wild animals encounter humans on a regular basis, but humansvary widely in their behaviour: whereas many people ignorewild animals, some people present a threat, while othersencourage animals’presence through feeding. Humans thussend mixed messages to which animals must respondappropriately to be successful. Some species appear tocircumvent this problem by discriminating among and/orsocially learning about humans, but it is not clear whethersuch learning strategies are actually beneficial in most cases.Using an individual-based model, we consider how learningrate, individual recognition (IR) of humans, and social learning(SL) affect wild animals’ability to reach an optimal avoidancestrategy when foraging in areas frequented by humans. Weshow that‘true’IR of humans could be costly. We also findthat a fast learning rate, while useful when human populationsare homogeneous or highly dangerous, can cause unwarrantedavoidance in other scenarios if animals generalize. SL reducesthis problem by allowing conspecifics to observe benigninteractions with humans. SL and a fast learning rate alsoimprove the viability of IR. These results provide an insightinto how wild animals may be affected by, and how they maycope with, contrasting human behaviour

Urban herring gulls use human behavioural cues to locate food

This is the final version. Available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record.While many animals are negatively affected by urbanisation, some species appear to thrive in urban environments. Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) are commonly found in urban areas and often scavenge food discarded by humans. Despite increasing interactions between humans and gulls, little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of urban gull behaviour and to what extent they use human behavioural cues when making foraging decisions. We investigated whether gulls are more attracted to anthropogenic items when they have been handled by a human. We first presented free-living gulls with two identical food objects, one of which was handled, and found that gulls preferentially pecked at the handled food object. We then tested whether gulls’ attraction to human-handled objects generalises to non-food items by presenting a new sample of gulls with two non-food objects, where, again, only one was handled. While similar numbers of gulls approached food and non-food objects in both experiments, they did not peck at handled non-food objects above chance levels. These results suggest that urban gulls generally show low levels of neophobia, but that they use human handling as a cue specifically in the context of food. These behaviours may contribute to gulls’ successful exploitation of urban environments.Royal Society (Government

The role of animal cognition in human-wildlife interactions

This is the final version. Available on open access from Frontiers Media via the DOI in this record. Humans have a profound effect on the planet’s ecosystems, and unprecedented rates of human population growth and urbanization have brought wild animals into increasing contact with people. For many species, appropriate responses toward humans are likely to be critical to survival and reproductive success. Although numerous studies have investigated the impacts of human activity on biodiversity and species distributions, relatively few have examined the effects of humans on the behavioral responses of animals during human-wildlife encounters, and the cognitive processes underpinning those responses. Furthermore, while humans often present a significant threat to animals, the presence or behavior of people may be also associated with benefits, such as food rewards. In scenarios where humans vary in their behavior, wild animals would be expected to benefit from the ability to discriminate between dangerous, neutral and rewarding people. Additionally, individual differences in cognitive and behavioral phenotypes and past experiences with humans may affect animals’ ability to exploit human-dominated environments and respond appropriately to human cues. In this review, we examine the cues that wild animals use to modulate their behavioral responses toward humans, such as human facial features and gaze direction. We discuss when wild animals are expected to attend to certain cues, how information is used, and the cognitive mechanisms involved. We consider how the cognitive abilities of wild animals are likely to be under selection by humans and therefore influence population and community composition. We conclude by highlighting the need for long-term studies on free-living, wild animals to fully understand the causes and ecological consequences of variation in responses to human cues. The effects of humans on wildlife behavior are likely to be substantial, and a detailed understanding of these effects is key to implementing effective conservation strategies and managing human-wildlife conflict.Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Herring gull aversion to gaze in urban and rural human settlements

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordWith an increasing human population and expansion of urban settlements, wild animals are often exposed to humans. As humans may be a threat, a neutral presence, or a source of food, animals will benefit from continuously assessing the potential risk posed by humans in order to respond appropriately. Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) are increasingly breeding and foraging in urban areas, and thus have many opportunities to interact with humans. We recently found that herring gulls take longer to approach food when being watched by a human. However, it is not known whether aversion to human gaze arises from experience with humans, and whether individual differences in responsiveness are a result of differential exposure. Here, we test whether herring gulls’ responses to human gaze differ according to their age class and urbanisation of their habitat. We measured the gulls’ flight initiation distance when an experimenter approached with either a direct or averted gaze. Neither gull age class nor urbanisation significantly influenced the effect of human gaze on flight initiation distance. However, as recently fledged juveniles responded strongly to the experimenter’s gaze, aversion to human gaze may not require extensive exposure to humans to develop. Gulls in urban areas could be approached more closely than those in rural areas, consistent with findings in other species. These results indicate that gaze aversion is present early in development and that exposure to humans may influence gulls’ responses to perceived risk from humans. Investigating the processes generating individual differences in responses to humans will provide further insights into human-wildlife interactions and the effects of urbanisation.Royal Societ

ACTiCLOUD: Enabling the Next Generation of Cloud Applications

Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently. Resources are stranded and fragmented, ultimately limiting cloud systems' applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. Eliminating current technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources is essential to strengthen cloud computing's role as a critical cornerstone for the digital economy. ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud architecture that breaks the existing scale-up and share-nothing barriers and enables the holistic management of physical resources both at the local cloud site and at distributed levels. Specifically, it makes advancements in the cloud resource management stacks by extending state-of-the-art hypervisor technology beyond the physical server boundary and localized cloud management system to provide a holistic resource management within a rack, within a site, and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, ACTiCLOUD will adapt and optimize system libraries and runtimes (e.g., JVM) as well as ACTiCLOUD-native applications, which are extremely demanding, and critical classes of applications that currently face severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements to state-of-the-art cloud offerings