Stand-level drivers of tree-species diversification in Mediterranean pine forests after abandonment of traditional practices

The progressive abandonment of traditional forest management over the last few decades has led to significant densification processes in most Mediterranean pine stands. In parallel, some of these stands have also shown tree-species diversification processes, the occurrence of which is considered essential for future adaptability and resilience to change. Here we aim to gain further understanding of the main factors driving these diversification processes via a case-study approach using the long-term-managed black pine (Pinus nigra Arn. ssp. salzmannii) forests of the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees (NE Spain). For this purpose, we sampled 155 plots distributed in 8 different stands and analyzed the role played by a number of microsite factors and stand attributes (including canopy openness and heterogeneity) on the abundance of seedlings (h 1.3 m; dbh < 7.5 cm) of the main tree-species in the area (i.e. black pine, evergreen oak and marcescent oaks). Results revealed ongoing black pine recruitment limitation processes mainly associated to the high canopy cover of the overstory and the increasing abundance of shrubs, which may compete with pines for light resources. In contrast, we found that current environmental and stand-level conditions favor the progressive advance of the recruitment of evergreen and marcescent oaks, which are able to establish successfully under the dominant pine canopy. However, in the absence of canopy openings, light levels may not allow the established oaks (in particular the evergreen Quercus ilex) to grow and progress to higher developmental stages. Our findings bring deeper insight into the role of stand-level factors regulating species diversification, and can be used by forest managers to adjust their practices (e.g. by modifying the spatial and temporal patterns of silvicultural treatments such as thinnings or selection cuttings) in order to favor this natural process and increase stand resilience.This research was primarily supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation via the RESILFOR project (AGL2012-40039-C02-01). It also was part of a cooperation agreement between the Forest Sciences Center of Catalonia and the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC) frameworking wider use of aerial remote-sensing data for forest characterization. The Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants provided S.M.A. with support through a ‘pre-doctoral’ grant (FI-DGR) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation provided L.C. with support through post-doctoral ‘Ramon y Cajal’ contracts. This work benefited from a short-term scientific mission grant provided by the COST Action EuMIXFOR (FP1206) to SMA, and from the Erasmus Mundus Master Course Mediterranean Forestry and Natural Resources Management (MEDfOR) which provided support to SS

Confirmatory factor analysis of the antisocial process screening device: self-report among incarcerated male juvenile offenders

The main aim of the present study was to examine the factor structure, internal consistency, and some additional psychometric properties of the Antisocial Process Screening Device-Self-Report (APSD-SR) among a large forensic sample of incarcerated male juvenile offenders (N = 438). The results, based on this forensic sample, support the use of the APSD-SR in terms of its factor structure, and internal consistency despite the fact an item had to be removed from the callous-unemotional (CU) dimension. Statistically significant positive associations were found with measures of psychopathic traits, CU traits, narcissism, and aggression, as well as negative associations with a measure of empathy. Findings provide support for the use of the APSD-SR among the incarcerated male juvenile offender population

Circadian rhythms regulate the environmental responses of net CO2 exchange in bean and cotton canopies

Studies on the dependence of the rates of ecosystem gas exchange on environmental parameters often rely on the up-scaling of leaf-level response curves ('bottom-up' approach), and/or the down-scaling of ecosystem fluxes ('top-down' approach), where one takes advantage of the natural diurnal covariation between the parameter of interest and photosynthesis rates. Partly independent from environmental variation, molecular circadian clocks drive ∼24 h oscillations in leaf-level photosynthesis, stomatal conductance and other physiological processes in plants under controlled laboratory conditions. If present and of sufficient magnitude at ecosystem scales, circadian regulation could lead to different results when using the bottom-up approach (where circadian regulation exerts a negligible influence over fluxes because the environment is modified rapidly) relative to the top-down approach (where circadian regulation could affect fluxes as it requires the passage of a few hours). Here we dissected the drivers of diurnal net CO2 exchange in canopies of an annual herb (bean) and of a perennial shrub (cotton) through a set of experimental manipulations to test for the importance of circadian regulation of net canopy CO2 exchange, relative to that of temperature and vapor pressure deficit, and to understand whether circadian regulation could affect the derivation of environmental flux dependencies. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we observed how circadian regulation exerted controls over net CO2 exchange that were of similar magnitude to the controls exerted by direct physiological responses to temperature and vapor pressure deficit. Diurnal patterns of net CO2 exchange could only be explained by considering effects of environmental responses combined with circadian effects. Consequently, we observed significantly different results when inferring the dependence of photosynthesis over temperature and vapor pressure deficit when using the top-down and the bottom up approaches.We remain indebted to E. Gerardeau, D. Dessauw, J. Jean, P. Prudent (Aïda CIRAD), J.-J. Drevon, C. Pernot (Eco&Sol INRA), B. Buatois, A. Rocheteau (CEFE CNRS), A. Pra, A. Mokhtar and the full Ecotron team, in particular C. Escape, for outstanding technical assistance during experiment set-up, plant cultivation and measurements. Earlier versions of the manuscript benefitted from comments by M. Dietze, B. Medlyn, R. Duursma and Y.-S. Lin. This study benefited from the CNRS human and technical resources allocated to the ECOTRONS Research Infrastructures as well as from the state allocation ‘Investissement d'Avenir’ ANR-11-INBS-0001, ExpeER Transnational Access program, Ramón y Cajal fellowships (RYC-2012-10970 to VRD and RYC-2008-02050 to JPF), the Erasmus Mundus Master Course Mediterranean Forestry and Natural Resources Management (MEDfOR) and internal grants from UWS-HIE to VRD and ZALF to AG. We thank the Associate Editor T. Vesala and two anonymous reviewers for their help to improve this manuscript

Interpersonal and affective dimensions of psychopathic traits in adolescents : development and validation of a self-report instrument

We report the development and psychometric evaluations of a self-report instrument designed to screen for psychopathic traits among mainstream community adolescents. Tests of item functioning were initially conducted with 26 adolescents. In a second study the new instrument was administered to 150 high school adolescents, 73 of who had school records of suspension for antisocial behavior. Exploratory factor analysis yielded a 4-factor structure (Impulsivity α = .73, Self-Centredness α = .70, Callous-Unemotional α = .69, and Manipulativeness α = .83). In a third study involving 328 high school adolescents, 130 with records of suspension for antisocial behaviour, competing measurement models were evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis. The superiority of a first-order model represented by four correlated factors that was invariant across gender and age was confirmed. The findings provide researchers and clinicians with a psychometrically strong, self-report instrument and a greater understanding of psychopathic traits in mainstream adolescents

Fairness Without Demographics in Human-Centered Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, making it suitable for decentralized human-centered AI applications. However, a significant research gap remains in ensuring fairness in these systems. Current fairness strategies in FL require knowledge of bias-creating/sensitive attributes, clashing with FL's privacy principles. Moreover, in human-centered datasets, sensitive attributes may remain latent. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel bias mitigation approach inspired by "Fairness without Demographics" in machine learning. The presented approach achieves fairness without needing knowledge of sensitive attributes by minimizing the top eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix during training, ensuring equitable loss landscapes across FL participants. Notably, we introduce a novel FL aggregation scheme that promotes participating models based on error rates and loss landscape curvature attributes, fostering fairness across the FL system. This work represents the first approach to attaining "Fairness without Demographics" in human-centered FL. Through comprehensive evaluation, our approach demonstrates effectiveness in balancing fairness and efficacy across various real-world applications, FL setups, and scenarios involving single and multiple bias-inducing factors, representing a significant advancement in human-centered FL

VeriSparse: Training Verified Locally Robust Sparse Neural Networks from Scratch

Several safety-critical applications such as self-navigation, health care, and industrial control systems use embedded systems as their core. Recent advancements in Neural Networks (NNs) in approximating complex functions make them well-suited for these domains. However, the compute-intensive nature of NNs limits their deployment and training in embedded systems with limited computation and storage capacities. Moreover, the adversarial vulnerability of NNs challenges their use in safety-critical scenarios. Hence, developing sparse models having robustness guarantees while leveraging fewer resources during training is critical in expanding NNs' use in safety-critical and resource-constrained embedding system settings. This paper presents 'VeriSparse'-- a framework to search verified locally robust sparse networks starting from a random sparse initialization (i.e., scratch). VeriSparse obtains sparse NNs exhibiting similar or higher verified local robustness, requiring one-third of the training time compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, VeriSparse performs both structured and unstructured sparsification, enabling storage, computing-resource, and computation time reduction during inference generation. Thus, it facilitates the resource-constraint embedding platforms to leverage verified robust NN models, expanding their scope to safety-critical, real-time, and edge applications. We exhaustively investigated VeriSparse's efficacy and generalizability by evaluating various benchmark and application-specific datasets across several model architectures.Comment: 21 pages, 13 tables, 3 figure

An Empirical Study on the Role of the Courts in Environmental Protection in India, Bangladesh and Ireland: Bridging the Gaps Between Academics and Practitioners

What determines the stance of the judiciary of a country? Is it the individual characteristics of judges or the understanding of legal norms by judges or the legal and political culture of a country? How much influence do academic writings have in judicial pronouncements? Existing literature shows that there are various determining factors behind judicial decision-making. With the development of legal scholarship on the environment, it is important to see how far judicial decision-making is getting the benefit of that research. It is also important to know how environmental academics and practitioners are viewing the stance taken by the courts in environmental litigations. This research applies socio-legal methods, particularly qualitative research, based on data gathered through semistructured interviews of judges, lawyers, academics, and researchers from India, Bangladesh, and Ireland to understand how they view the roles of the courts in environmental matters and how far the understandings of legal norms and writings of academics are reflected in environmental judicial decision making. Countries both from the east and the west based on constitutional and legal similarities have been selected to compare and contrast and to see if the research result is similar notwithstanding the socio-economic-political differences. This research adopts Thornberg’s informed grounded theory and in addition constant comparative method of data analysis is applied in analysing the collected data. Acknowledging the polycentric and interdisciplinary nature of environmental problems and considering the gaps accrued from collected data this paper provides recommendations to bridge the gaps between academics and practitioner

Critical evaluation of psychopathy measurement (PCL-R and SRP-III/SF) and recommendations for future research

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to review, summarize, and critically engage with the most recent findings into the dimensionality of the PCL-R, SRP-III, and SRP-SF. Another objective was to provide a set of directions for future research. Methods: A search in PubMed, PsychInfo, Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, and Google Scholar was performed. Twenty-one studies examining the dimensionality of the PCL-R and 11 studies assessing the factor structure of the SRP-III and SRP-SF were identified. Results: A critical review of the studies revealed inconsistent findings as to the underlying structure of the PCL-R and SRP-III/SF. Research has been limited by methodological and conceptual weaknesses, which calls into question the applicability of its findings. As such, it is suggested that prior results should be interpreted with caution. Conclusion: Future research should test competing models derived on the basis of previous research and theory, report the results of a differential predictive validity or alternative test, provide all relevant fit indices, utilize new data sets of appropriate size, avoid parceling procedures with short scales, and report the results of composite reliability. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd