9,381 research outputs found
A silver ion water sterilization system
Small amounts of silver are incorporated in mixture of ion exchange resins, and water passing through this mixture is thus exposed to silver ion concentration. System is useful in self-contained water systems except city water systems where residual chlorine level is stipulated
Toward an Improved Conceptual Understanding of North American Tree Species Distributions
Species distributions have often been assumed to represent climatic limitations, yet recent evidence has challenged these assumptions and emphasized the potential importance of biotic interactions, dispersal limitation, and disturbance. Despite significant investigation into these factors, an integrated understanding of where and when they may be important is lacking. Here, we review evidence for the factors underlying the historical and contemporary distributions of North American tree species and argue that a cohesive conceptual framework must be informed by an understanding of species ecological and evolutionary history. We further demonstrate that available evidence offers little indication of a significant, independent influence of biotic interactions or dispersal limitation on species distributions. Disturbance may provide important constraints on distributions in limited contexts. Overall, historic and contemporary evidence suggests that species distributions are strongly influenced by climate, yet examples of disequilibrium with climate abound. We propose that differences among life stages and the impacts of human land use may contribute to explain these inconsistencies and are deserving of greater research attention
The Relative Influences of Climate and Competition on Tree Growth along Montane Ecotones in the Rocky Mountains
Distribution shifts of tree species are likely to be highly dependent upon population performance at distribution edges. Understanding the drivers of aspects of performance, such as growth, at distribution edges is thus crucial to accurately predicting responses of tree species to climate change. Here, we use a Bayesian model and sensitivity analysis to partition the effects of climate and crowding, as a metric of competition, on radial growth of three dominant conifer species along montane ecotones in the Rocky Mountains. These ecotones represent upper and lower distribution edges of two species, and span the distribution interior of the third species. Our results indicate a greater influence of climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation) than crowding on radial growth. Competition importance appears to increase towards regions of more favorable growing conditions, and precise responses to crowding and climate vary across species. Overall, our results suggest that climate will likely be the most important determinant of changes in tree growth at distribution edges of these montane conifers in the future
Corner wetting in a far-from-equilibrium magnetic growth model
The irreversible growth of magnetic films is studied in three-dimensional
confined geometries of size , where is the growing
direction. Competing surface magnetic fields, applied to opposite corners of
the growing system, lead to the observation of a localization-delocalization
(weakly rounded) transition of the interface between domains of up and down
spins on the planes transverse to the growing direction. This effective
transition is the precursor of a true far-from-equilibrium corner wetting
transition that takes place in the thermodynamic limit. The phenomenon is
characterized quantitatively by drawing a magnetic field-temperature phase
diagram, firstly for a confined sample of finite size, and then by
extrapolating results, obtained with samples of different size, to the
thermodynamic limit. The results of this work are a nonequilibrium realization
of analogous phenomena recently investigated in equilibrium systems, such as
corner wetting transitions in the Ising model.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. EPJ styl
Droplet shapes on structured substrates and conformal invariance
We consider the finite-size scaling of equilibrium droplet shapes for fluid
adsorption (at bulk two-phase co-existence) on heterogeneous substrates and
also in wedge geometries in which only a finite domain of the
substrate is completely wet. For three-dimensional systems with short-ranged
forces we use renormalization group ideas to establish that both the shape of
the droplet height and the height-height correlations can be understood from
the conformal invariance of an appropriate operator. This allows us to predict
the explicit scaling form of the droplet height for a number of different
domain shapes. For systems with long-ranged forces, conformal invariance is not
obeyed but the droplet shape is still shown to exhibit strong scaling
behaviour. We argue that droplet formation in heterogeneous wedge geometries
also shows a number of different scaling regimes depending on the range of the
forces. The conformal invariance of the wedge droplet shape for short-ranged
forces is shown explicitly.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. (Submitted to J.Phys.:Cond.Mat.
Alcohol/Leisure Complementarity: Empirical Estimates and Implications for Tax Policy
This paper provides a first attempt to estimate the cross-price elasticity between alcoholic beverages and leisure, which is critical for assessing how much alcohol taxation might be warranted on fiscal grounds. We estimate an Almost Ideal Demand System defined over alcohol, leisure, and other goods, using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and other sources. Our results suggest that alcohol is a relative complement for leisure over a range of specifications. This implies that the optimal alcohol tax may substantially exceed the Pigouvian tax, reinforcing the efficiency case for higher taxation. These findings should be viewed as preliminary however, given a number of data and other limitations of the analysis.alcohol tax, demand system, alcohol, labor supply, labor tax
Impact of Mesh Tracks and Low-Ground-Pressure Vehicle Use on Blanket Peat Hydrology
No abstract available
Coupled Fluctuations near Critical Wetting
Recent work on the complete wetting transition has emphasized the role played
by the coupling of fluctuations of the order parameter at the wall and at the
depinning fluid interface. Extending this approach to the wetting transition
itself we predict a novel crossover effect associated with the decoupling of
fluctuations as the temperature is lowered towards the transition temperature
T_W. Using this we are able to reanalyse recent Monte-Carlo simulation studies
and extract a value \omega(T_W)=0.8 at T_W=0.9T_C in very good agreement with
long standing theoretical predictions.Comment: 4 pages, LaTex, 1 postscript figur
The evidence-base for generational differences: where do we go from here?
Interest in generational diversity has exploded since the turn of the 21st century. While many researchers are supportive of the concept of generations, a growing number have questioned the validity of the idea that people are different according to when they were born. In this paper we review recent work in the area and build on our own previous studies; which have been highly critical of extant empirical work. Many studies utilize cross-sectional data that do not allow investigation of generational difference; and even when appropriate data are used, the a-priori assumption of four or five generational categories invalidates research findings. We present selected results from analyses we have undertaken to overcome these issues, and identify a more robust direction for the research. Essentially, the theoretical foundation for generational research has some validity, but the existence of generational differences has not been validly tested. We suggest that researchers must investigate whether any cohort-specific differences in attitudes are apparent, and where, if at all, these can be ‘cut’ to identify distinct ‘structural breaks’ between generations. Only by building a body of knowledge, across different social and economic phenomena will we obtain a true picture of where generational differences lie
Do Community-Level Models Account for the Effects of Biotic Interactions? A Comparison of Community-Level and Species Distribution Modeling of Rocky Mountain Conifers
Community-level models (CLMs) aim to improve species distribution modeling (SDM) methods by attempting to explicitly incorporate the influences of interacting species. However, the ability of CLMs to appropriately account for biotic interactions is unclear. We applied CLM and SDM methods to predict the distributions of three dominant conifer tree species in the U.S. Rocky Mountains and compared CLM and SDM predictive accuracy as well as the ability of each approach to accurately reproduce species co-occurrence patterns. We specifically evaluated the performance of two statistical algorithms, MARS and CForest, within both CLM and SDM frameworks. Across all species, differences in SDM and CLM predictive accuracy were slight and can be attributed to differences in model structure rather than accounting for the effects of biotic interactions. In addition, CLMs generally over-predicted species cooccurrence, while SDMs under-predicted cooccurrence. Our results demonstrate no real improvement in the ability of CLMs to account for biotic interactions relative to SDMs. We conclude that alternative modeling approaches are needed in order to accurately account for the effects of biotic interactions on species distributions
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