Six hundred years of South American tree rings reveal an increase in severe hydroclimatic events since mid-20th century

South American (SA) societies are highly vulnerable to droughts and pluvials, but lack of long-term climate observations severely limits our understanding of the global processes driving climatic variability in the region. The number and quality of SA climate-sensitive tree ring chronologies have significantly increased in recent decades, now providing a robust network of 286 records for characterizing hydroclimate variability since 1400 CE. We combine this network with a self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) dataset to derive the South American Drought Atlas (SADA) over the continent south of 12°S. The gridded annual reconstruction of austral summer scPDSI is the most spatially complete estimate of SA hydroclimate to date, and well matches past historical dry/wet events. Relating the SADA to the Australia–New Zealand Drought Atlas, sea surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure fields, we determine that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) are strongly associated with spatially extended droughts and pluvials over the SADA domain during the past several centuries. SADA also exhibits more extended severe droughts and extreme pluvials since the mid-20th century. Extensive droughts are consistent with the observed 20th-century trend toward positive SAM anomalies concomitant with the weakening of midlatitude Westerlies, while low-level moisture transport intensified by global warming has favored extreme rainfall across the subtropics. The SADA thus provides a long-term context for observed hydroclimatic changes and for 21st-century Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections that suggest SA will experience more frequent/severe droughts and rainfall events as a consequence of increasing greenhouse gas emissions

Lumber manufacturing support system

This study as a whole has touched several aspects concerning La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. Below is a numbered summary of it. 1. In order to gain considerable knowledge on the important aspects of the La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. specially the system being considered in this study, data gathering methods were employed and these are: a. interviews of persons directly involved in the system under consideration for this study. The persons interviewed came from the field office which the lumber manufacturing support system touches; b. studies of reports and sales and production documents from La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. concerning the steps and procedures followed; c. visits to field office and in yard to directly understand the problems encountered there; d. research on the needed information regarding five (5) major operations of La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. 2. The operation of the Lumber Manufacturing Support System involve three procedures which are validation of order, monitor lumber manufacturing, and generation of sales and production documents, the lumber manufacturing support system fulfills its functions. The validation of order covers the approval of customer purchase order up to its summarization. Monitoring Lumber Manufacturing involves the taking into account of all the operations for processing lumber. Finally, generation of sales and production documents involve the process of sales & production documents and distributed to its proper recipients. 3. The major objective of the proposed lumber manufacturing support system is to monitor the whole lumber operation in a systematic and efficient way. This, in the long run, is deemed an advantage to La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. because of the benefits it offers specially to the fulfillment of La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. objective to provide fast and accurate dissemination of information. The fulfillment of this primary objective is through the provision of the following system functions a. an automatic allocation of information that eliminate the tedious task of repetitive manual computations. b. a report generation function that generates automatically the reports and documents that are utilized by the main and field offices. c. a mechanism for the transfer of files and messages between main and field offices according to a certain hierarchy and an essential information that supports an effective lumber manufacturing support system. 4. The intended users of Lumber Manufacturing Support System are primarily the office clerk and stock clerk for the production of production documents in the Field Office. Then the sales clerk will take charge with all the sales documents in the Main Office. 5. The features offered by the LMSS in the design are in actual correspondence with that of the implemented features. In the main menu of company\u27s main office, the system provides five (5) options, namely: Validation of customer purchase order, Checking of stocks/inventories and the purchase order summarization. Generation of Delivery Receipt, Generation of Official Invoice, and the Generation of Monthly Sales Summary. The menu of Checking the inventories and purchase order summarization includes Machines/equipment\u27s, Inventories, and Generation of Cutting Order. The menu of Inventories includes Updating stocks/inventories and Generation of Inventory List. For the part of field office main menu, it includes air dry operation, resaw operation, kiln dry operation, rough mill operation, lumber finishing operation, and production report. The said operations are in order and should be strictly followed. An operation is considered finished if all of its sub-operations are through. Upon completion of the said five operations, only then the user is allowed to generate a production report. Specifically, upon choosing the air dry operation, the user is then presented with another set of choices-its sub-operations: lumber grading, sling/sorting, treating, air drying, air dry lumber grading, and summary report. Note that airdrying sub-operation should be distinguished from air dry operation. For resaw operation, there is no more sub-operation. The tally sheed produced from the operation already served as the summary report the KD operation sub-menu consists of six sub-operations namely: piling, KD charge, moisture test, heating, KD discharge, KD lumber grading, and summary report. For the sub-menu of roughmill operation, it includes the following: precutting, thicknessing, multi-ripping, table resawing, and summary report. For the sub-menu of Lumber finishing operation, it includes the following sub-operations: dressing, trimming, moulding, crating, and summary report. Note that the summary report can only be generated after going through all the sub-operations of a particular operation. Possible options of the sub-operations are the ff: add new entry, delete entry, view/edit entry, and print tally sheet/report. 6. To make possible the provision of all the above mentioned features it is necessary to employ design tools, techniques, and methodologies. The ones that are useful to the Lumber Manufacturing Support System are the structured analysis and design techniques, input-process-output, visual table of contents, data flow diagram, and data dictionary. 7. When the Lumber Manufacturing Support System is to be implemented institutionally, it is recommended that the hardware and software requirements be met. The initial requirements are the IBM PC/XTs in which are connected hard disk drives and removable disk drives and printers. On the software aspect, the dbase 111 PLUS language is used and the LMSS software\u27s are used for demonstration purposes of the complete Lumber Manufacturing Support System and upon the La Pedema Timber & Sales, Inc. discretion to actually implement Lumber Manufacturing Support System on their operations

Identification of selected CITES-protected Araucariaceae using DART TOFMS

Determining the species source of logs and planks suspected of being Araucaria araucana (Molina) K.Koch (CITES Appendix I) using traditional wood anatomy has been difficult, because its anatomical features are not diagnostic. Additionally, anatomical studies of Araucaria angustifolia (Bertol.) Kuntze, Araucaria heterophylla (Salisb.) Franco, Agathis australis (D.Don) Lindl., and Wollemia nobilis W.G.Jones, K.D.Hill & J.M.Allen have reported that these taxa have similar and indistinguishable anatomical characters from A. araucana. Transnational shipments of illegal timber obscure their geographic provenance, and therefore identification using wood anatomy alone is insufficient in a criminal proceeding. In this study we examine the macroscopic appearance of selected members of the Araucariaceae and investigate whether analysis of heartwood chemotypes using Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART) Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (TOFMS) is useful for making species determinations. DART TOFMS data were collected from 5 species (n =75 spectra). The spectra were analyzsed statistically using supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms. Results indicate that A. araucana can be distinguished from the look-alike taxa. Another statistical inference of the data suggests that Wollemia nobilis is more similar and within the same clade as Agathis australis. We conclude that DART TOFMS spectra can help in making species determination of the Araucariaceae even when the geographic provenance is unknown

Novel transcriptome assembly and improved annotation of the whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), a dominant crustacean in global seafood mariculture

We present a new transcriptome assembly of the Pacific whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), the species most farmed for human consumption. Its functional annotation, a substantial improvement over previous ones, is provided freely. RNA-Seq with Illumina HiSeq technology was used to analyze samples extracted from shrimp abdominal muscle, hepatopancreas, gills and pleopods. We used the Trinity and Trinotate software suites for transcriptome assembly and annotation, respectively. The quality of this assembly and the affiliated targeted homology searches greatly enrich the curated transcripts currently available in public databases for this species. Comparison with the model arthropod Daphnia allows some insights into defining characteristics of decapod crustaceans. This large-scale gene discovery gives the broadest depth yet to the annotated transcriptome of this important species and should be of value to ongoing genomics and immunogenetic resistance studies in this shrimp of paramount global economic importance