Climate-Driven Plant Response and Resilience on the Tibetan Plateau in Space and Time: A Review

Climate change variation on a small scale may alter the underlying processes determining a pattern operating at large scale and vice versa. Plant response to climate change on individual plant levels on a fine scale tends to change population structure, community composition and ecosystem processes and functioning. Therefore, we reviewed the literature on plant response and resilience to climate change in space and time at different scales on the Tibetan Plateau. We report that spatiotemporal variation in temperature and precipitation dynamics drives the vegetation and ecosystem function on the Tibetan Plateau (TP), following the water–energy dynamics hypothesis. Increasing temperature with respect to time increased the net primary productivity (NPP) on most parts of the Tibetan Plateau, but the productivity dynamics on some parts were constrained by 0.3 °C decade−1 rising temperature. Moreover, we report that accelerating studies on plant community assemblage and their contribution to ecosystem functioning may help to identify the community response and resilience to climate extremes. Furthermore, records on species losses help to build the sustainable management plan for the entire Tibetan Plateau. We recommend that incorporating long-term temporal data with multiple factor analyses will be helpful to formulate the appropriate measures for a healthy ecosystem on the Tibetan Plateau.publishedVersio

Does daily climate variation have an effect on species’ elevational range size?

In their recent paper published in Science (2016, 351, 1437–1439), Chan et al. analysed 137 montane gradients, concluding that they found a novel pattern—a negative relationship between mean elevational range size of species and daily temperature variation, which was claimed as empirical evidence for a novel macrophysiological principle (Gilchrist's hypothesis). This intriguing possibility was their key conceptual contribution. Unfortunately, as we show, the empirical evidence was flawed because of errors in the analyses and substantial sampling bias in the data. First, we re‐ran their analyses using their data, finding that their model should have been rejected. Second, we performed two additional re‐analyses of their data, addressing biases and pseudoreplication in different ways, both times again rejecting the evidence claimed to support Gilchrist's hypothesis. These results overturn the key empirical findings of Chan et al.'s study. Therefore, the “macrophysiological principle” should be regarded as currently remaining unsupported by empirical evidence

AutoPoster: A Highly Automatic and Content-aware Design System for Advertising Poster Generation

Advertising posters, a form of information presentation, combine visual and linguistic modalities. Creating a poster involves multiple steps and necessitates design experience and creativity. This paper introduces AutoPoster, a highly automatic and content-aware system for generating advertising posters. With only product images and titles as inputs, AutoPoster can automatically produce posters of varying sizes through four key stages: image cleaning and retargeting, layout generation, tagline generation, and style attribute prediction. To ensure visual harmony of posters, two content-aware models are incorporated for layout and tagline generation. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-task Style Attribute Predictor (SAP) to jointly predict visual style attributes. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, we propose the first poster generation dataset that includes visual attribute annotations for over 76k posters. Qualitative and quantitative outcomes from user studies and experiments substantiate the efficacy of our system and the aesthetic superiority of the generated posters compared to other poster generation methods.Comment: Accepted for ACM MM 202

Fungal community assemblages in a high elevation desert environment: absence of dispersal limitation and edaphic effects in surface soil

Recent studies have shown the significant effects of environmental selection and possible dispersal limitation on soil fungal communities. However, less is known about the role of soil depth in fungal community assemblages, especially under soil environments that are intensely cold, infertile and water-deficient. In Ngari drylands of the Asiatic Plateau, we studied fungal assemblages at two soil depths, using Illumina sequencing of the ITS2 region for fungal identification (0–15 cm as the surface soil and 15–30 cm as the subsurface soil). Fungal diversity in the surface soil was much higher than that in the subsurface soil (P < 0.001), and communities differed significantly between the two layers (P = 0.001). Neither soil properties nor dispersal limitation could explain variation in the surface-soil fungal community. For the subsurface, by contrast, soil, climate and space explained 27% of variation in fungal community. Collectively, these results point to high dispersal rates and absence of edaphic effects in the surface-soil fungal community assemblage in Ngari drylands. It also suggests that for soil fungi with highly effective dispersal, regional distributions may fit with Bass-Becking's paradigm that ‘Everything is everywhere’

Simultaneous measurement of orbital angular momentum spectra in a turbulent atmosphere without probe beam compensation

In free-space optical (FSO) communications, the orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing/demultiplexing of Bessel beams perturbed by atmospheric turbulence is of great significance. We used the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm without a beacon beam to compensate for the aberrant helical phase of the Bessel beam distorted by the turbulent atmosphere. The optical vortex Dammann axicon grating was applied for the simultaneous measurement of the intensities of the demodulated spectra of the OAM modes of the Bessel beams disturbed by atmospheric turbulence. The experimental results demonstrate that the distorted phase of the Bessel beam can be compensated and the mode purity of the target OAM mode is enhanced from 0.85 to 0.92 in case of weak turbulence. Our results will improve the quality of the OAM modes of Bessel beam (de)multiplexing in FSO communication systems

Do tropical forest leaves suffer more insect herbivory? A comparison of tropical versus temperate herbivory, estimated from leaf litter

It is generally believed that tropical forests suffer more herbivory, as a proportion of leaf area, than do temperate forests. Reviews so far have compared studies performed by different authors using very different methodologies. Here we carried out studies on 125 samples at 86 localities in eastern North America and on 75 samples taken at five localities in Malaysia and Singapore, including both mature secondary and primary forest. Samples in North America were spread over 3 years. In tropical Asia, the samples were taken at four time slices at least 8 months apart, scattered over a 4-year period. Total herbivore damage during the lifetime of tree leaves was estimated from the percentage area damaged in recently fallen, undecayed leaves from the forest floor, using scanner-linked software. In terms of percentage damage per leaf, the results suggest that lowland tropical forest has significantly higher leaf herbivory (5.82%) than temperate forest (5.48%). This is in accord with the general expectation that aseasonal tropical forests should have more herbivory damage. However, when percentage damage ‘per unit time of growing season’ is calculated based on an estimate of leaf lifetime in the tropics, tropical lowland herbivory damage turns out to be a fraction (about one half) of that in the temperate zone. Thus, these results tend to put in question the widely held view that herbivore damage is markedly more intense in the tropics. Over total leaf lifetime, the intensity of damage in the tropical area is only slightly higher than temperate regions. In terms of intensity of herbivory on leaves per unit of time, the opposite seems to be the case. It is uncertain which index should be taken as more significant in interpreting the selection pressure for anti-herbivore defenses in the tropics