1,448 research outputs found
Peatlands and the carbon cycle: from local processes to global implications - a synthesis
Peatlands cover only 3% of the Earth's land surface but boreal and subarctic peatlands store about 15-30% of the world's soil carbon ( C) as peat. Despite their potential for large positive feedbacks to the climate system through sequestration and emission of greenhouse gases, peatlands are not explicitly included in global climate models and therefore in predictions of future climate change. In April 2007 a symposium was held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, to advance our understanding of peatland C cycling. This paper synthesizes the main findings of the symposium, focusing on (i) small-scale processes, (ii) C fluxes at the landscape scale, and (iii) peatlands in the context of climate change. The main drivers controlling most are related to some aspects of hydrology. Despite high spatial and annual variability in Net Ecosystem Exchange ( NEE), the differences in cumulative annual NEE are more a function of broad scale geographic location and physical setting than internal factors, suggesting the existence of strong feedbacks. In contrast, trace gas emissions seem mainly controlled by local factors. Key uncertainties remain concerning the existence of perturbation thresholds, the relative strengths of the CO2 and CH4 feedback, the links among peatland surface climate, hydrology, ecosystem structure and function, and trace gas biogeochemistry as well as the similarity of process rates across peatland types and climatic zones. Progress on these research areas can only be realized by stronger co-operation between disciplines that address different spatial and temporal scales
Neural Collaborative Filtering
In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech
recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the
exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received
relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based
on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation -- collaborative
filtering -- on the basis of implicit feedback. Although some recent work has
employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model
auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic
features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in collaborative
filtering -- the interaction between user and item features, they still
resorted to matrix factorization and applied an inner product on the latent
features of users and items. By replacing the inner product with a neural
architecture that can learn an arbitrary function from data, we present a
general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative
Filtering. NCF is generic and can express and generalize matrix factorization
under its framework. To supercharge NCF modelling with non-linearities, we
propose to leverage a multi-layer perceptron to learn the user-item interaction
function. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show significant
improvements of our proposed NCF framework over the state-of-the-art methods.
Empirical evidence shows that using deeper layers of neural networks offers
better recommendation performance.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
Sublittoral soft bottom communities and diversity of Mejillones Bay in northern Chile (Humboldt Current upwelling system)
The macrozoobenthos of Mejillones Bay (23°S; Humboldt Current) was quantitatively investigated over a 7-year period from austral summer 1995/1996 to winter 2002. About 78 van Veen grab samples taken at six stations (5, 10, 20 m depth) provided the basis for the analysis of the distribution of 60 species and 28 families of benthic invertebrates, as well as of their abundance and biomass. Mean abundance (2,119 individuals m-2) was in the same order compared to a previous investigation; mean biomass (966 g formalin wet mass m-2), however, exceeded prior estimations mainly due to the dominance of the bivalve Aulacomya ater. About 43% of the taxa inhabited the complete depth range. Mean taxonomic Shannon diversity (H', Log e) was 1.54 ± 0.58 with a maximum at 20 m (1.95 ± 0.33); evenness increased with depth. The fauna was numerically dominated by carnivorous gastropods, polychaetes and crustaceans (48%). About 15% of the species were suspensivorous, 13% sedimentivorous, 11% detritivorous, 7% omnivorous and 6% herbivorous. Cluster analyses showed a significant difference between the shallow and the deeper stations. Gammarid amphipods and the polychaete family Nephtyidae characterized the 5-mzone, the molluscs Aulacomya ater, Mitrella unifasciata and gammarids the intermediate zone, while the gastropod Nassarius gayi and the polychaete family Nereidae were most prominent at the deeper stations. The communities of the three depth zones did not appear to be limited by hypoxia during non-El Niño conditions. Therefore, no typical change in community structure occurred during El Niño 1997–1998, in contrast to what was observed for deeper faunal assemblages and hypoxic bays elsewhere in the coastal Humboldt Current system
Helicity-dependent cross sections and double-polarization observable E in η photoproduction from quasifree protons and neutrons
Precise helicity-dependent cross sections and the double-polarization observable E were measured for η
photoproduction from quasifree protons and neutrons bound in the deuteron. The η → 2γ and η → 3π0 → 6γ
decay modes were used to optimize the statistical quality of the data and to estimate systematic uncertainties. The
measurement used the A2 detector setup at the tagged photon beam of the electron accelerator MAMI in Mainz.
A longitudinally polarized deuterated butanol target was used in combination with a circularly polarized photon
beam from bremsstrahlung of a longitudinally polarized electron beam. The reaction products were detected with
the electromagnetic calorimeters Crystal Ball and TAPS, which covered 98% of the full solid angle. The results
show that the narrow structure observed earlier in the unpolarized excitation function of η photoproduction off
the neutron appears only in reactions with antiparallel photon and nucleon spin (σ1/2). It is absent for reactions
with parallel spin orientation (σ3/2) and thus very probably related to partial waves with total spin 1/2. The
behavior of the angular distributions of the helicity-dependent cross sections was analyzed by fitting them with Legendre polynomials. The results are in good agreement with a model from the Bonn-Gatchina group, which
uses an interference of P11 and S11 partial waves to explain the narrow structure
Measurement of the transverse target and beam-target asymmetries in meson photoproduction at MAMI
We present new data for the transverse target asymmetry T and the very first
data for the beam-target asymmetry F in the
reaction up to a center-of-mass energy of W=1.9 GeV. The data were obtained
with the Crystal-Ball/TAPS detector setup at the Glasgow tagged photon facility
of the Mainz Microtron MAMI. All existing model predictions fail to reproduce
the new data indicating a significant impact on our understanding of the
underlying dynamics of meson photoproduction. The peculiar nodal
structure observed in existing T data close to threshold is not confirmed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in PR
A new measurement of the neutron detection efficiency for the NaI Crystal Ball detector
We report on a measurement of the neutron detection efficiency in NaI
crystals in the Crystal Ball detector obtained from a study of single p0
photoproduction on deuterium using the tagged photon beam at the Mainz
Microtron. The results were obtained up to a neutron energy of 400 MeV. They
are compared to previous measurements made more than 15 years ago at the pion
beam at the BNL AGS
T and F asymmetries in π0 photoproduction on the proton
The γp→π0p reaction was studied at laboratory photon energies from 425 to 1445 MeV with a transversely polarized target and a longitudinally polarized beam. The beam-target asymmetry F was measured for the first time and new high precision data for the target asymmetry T were obtained. The experiment was performed at the photon tagging facility of the Mainz Microtron (MAMI) using the Crystal Ball and TAPS photon spectrometers. The polarized cross sections were expanded in terms of associated Legendre functions and compared to recent predictions from several partial-wave analyses. The impact of the new data on our understanding of the underlying partial-wave amplitudes and baryon resonance contributions is discussed
Photoproduction of -pairs off protons and off neutrons
Total cross sections, angular distributions, and invariant-mass distributions
have been measured for the photoproduction of pairs off free
protons and off nucleons bound in the deuteron. The experiments were performed
at the MAMI accelerator facility in Mainz using the Glasgow photon tagging
spectrometer and the Crystal Ball/TAPS detector. The accelerator delivered
electron beams of 1508 and 1557~MeV, which produced bremsstrahlung in thin
radiator foils. The tagged photon beam covered energies up to 1400~MeV. The
data from the free proton target are in good agreement with previous
measurements and were only used to test the analysis procedures. The results
for differential cross sections (angular distributions and invariant-mass
distributions) for free and quasi-free protons are almost identical in shape,
but differ in absolute magnitude up to 15\%. Thus, moderate final-state
interaction effects are present. The data for quasi-free neutrons are similar
to the proton data in the second resonance region (final state invariant masses
up to 1550~MeV), where both reactions are dominated by the
decay. At higher energies,
angular and invariant-mass distributions are different. A simple analysis of
the shapes of the invariant-mass distributions in the third resonance region is
consistent with strong contributions of an decay
for the proton, while the reaction is dominated by a sequential decay via a
intermediate state for the neutron. The data are compared to
predictions from the Two-Pion-MAID model and the Bonn-Gatchina coupled channel
analysis.Comment: accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. J.
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