16,546 research outputs found
Mojave Applied Ecology Notes Summer 2010
Survey of monitoring and management for conservation of rare plants, Roadside restoration techniques in Joshua Tree NP, and an update on renewable energy developments in the Southwestern desert
Stellar and Molecular Gas Kinematics of NGC1097: Inflow Driven by a Nuclear Spiral
We present spatially resolved distributions and kinematics of the stars and
molecular gas in the central 320pc of NGC1097. The stellar continuum confirms
the previously reported 3-arm spiral pattern extending into the central 100pc.
The stellar kinematics and the gas distribution imply this is a shadowing
effect due to extinction by gas and dust in the molecular spiral arms. The
molecular gas kinematics show a strong residual (i.e. non-circular) velocity,
which is manifested as a 2-arm kinematic spiral. Linear models indicate that
this is the line-of-sight velocity pattern expected for a density wave in gas
that generates a 3-arm spiral morphology. We estimate the inflow rate along the
arms. Using hydrodynamical models of nuclear spirals, we show that when
deriving the accretion rate into the central region, outflow in the disk plane
between the arms has to be taken into account. For NGC1097, despite the inflow
rate along the arms being ~1.2Msun/yr, the net gas accretion rate to the
central few tens of parsecs is much smaller. The numerical models indicate that
the inflow rate could be as little as ~0.06Msun/yr. This is sufficient to
generate recurring starbursts, similar in scale to that observed, every
20-150Myr. The nuclear spiral represents a mechanism that can feed gas into the
central parsecs of the galaxy, with the gas flow sustainable for timescales of
a Gigayear.Comment: accepted by Ap
Mojave Applied Ecology Notes Summer 2009
BLM and wildfire protection in the Mojave, studies of the sticky ringstem flowering phenology in Lake Mead NRA, restoration work within gypsum soils, post-fire response synthesis for Mojave and Sonoran desert
Side-jumps in the spin-Hall effect: construction of the Boltzmann collision integral
We present a systematic derivation of the side-jump contribution to the
spin-Hall current in systems without band structure spin-orbit interactions,
focusing on the construction of the collision integral for the Boltzmann
equation. Starting from the quantum Liouville equation for the density operator
we derive an equation describing the dynamics of the density matrix in the
first Born approximation and to first order in the driving electric field.
Elastic scattering requires conservation of the total energy, including the
spin-orbit interaction energy with the electric field: this results in a first
correction to the customary collision integral found in the Born approximation.
A second correction is due to the change in the carrier position during
collisions. It stems from the part of the density matrix off-diagonal in wave
vector. The two corrections to the collision integral add up and are
responsible for the total side-jump contribution to the spin-Hall current. The
spin-orbit-induced correction to the velocity operator also contains terms
diagonal and off-diagonal in momentum space, which together involve the total
force acting on the system. This force is explicitly shown to vanish (on the
average) in the steady state: thus the total contribution to the spin-Hall
current due to the additional terms in the velocity operator is zero.Comment: Added references, expanded discussion, revised introductio
Correlations between hidden units in multilayer neural networks and replica symmetry breaking
We consider feed-forward neural networks with one hidden layer, tree
architecture and a fixed hidden-to-output Boolean function. Focusing on the
saturation limit of the storage problem the influence of replica symmetry
breaking on the distribution of local fields at the hidden units is
investigated. These field distributions determine the probability for finding a
specific activation pattern of the hidden units as well as the corresponding
correlation coefficients and therefore quantify the division of labor among the
hidden units. We find that although modifying the storage capacity and the
distribution of local fields markedly replica symmetry breaking has only a
minor effect on the correlation coefficients. Detailed numerical results are
provided for the PARITY, COMMITTEE and AND machines with K=3 hidden units and
nonoverlapping receptive fields.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, RevTex, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Vegetation Re-Establishment of Mojave Desert Plant Communities After 2005-2006 Wildland Fires
Examine biotic and abiotic patterns that determine vegetative regrowth after wildfires to better inform land managers about what to expect after fires and how to manage restoration efforts
Heat and smoke effects on red brome soil seed banks
Management of exotic plants that are annuals entails understanding and managing their soil seed banks. We completed a study of the influences of heat and liquid smoke on red brome (Bromus rubens) soil seed banks collected from Red Rock Canyon in southern Nevada as part of a collaborative fire effects monitoring effort with Bureau of Land Management - Las Vegas. We collected the samples from the 2005 Loop Fire, where we observed in a monitoring field study that exotic grasses such as red brome were relatively sparse in the first 2-3 years (which were during a dry period) following the fire. Based on these observations, we were interested in assessing whether the direct exposure to heat and smoke during fire may influence brome’s seed banks
Plant community response to fire: A chronosequence study
Fires are becoming more prevalent events across the landscape in the southwestern US. Over the next several decades the already arid southwest is predicted to become warmer and drier, with longer summers, and an increase of “extreme” weather events such as lightening inducing thunderstorms. While the “hotter and drier” forecast may indicate less abundant plant life, and thus less available biomass for fuel, exotic invasive plant species are becoming more dominant across the landscape with increases in human travel and commerce. Exotic species (particularly many of the invasive grasses) are adding fuel for the fires to burn when the annuals are left as skeletons at the end of summer
Trying to beat the brome: Understanding establishment thresholds and choosing competitive native species at Parashant National Monument
Desert fires fueled by exotic grasses like the omnipresent red brome (Bromus rubens) can be intense and cause widespread mortality of native vegetation. Native desert scrub communities such as those dominated by blackbrush (Coleogyne ramosissima) do not readily reestablish after fire (Abella 2009) and may even become more abundant in the post-burn landscape initiating a fire cycle that occurs at a greater frequency than the recovery time of the long-lived desert perennial community
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