Wilderness and recreation in the Šumava NP - typology of the relationship

The diploma thesis focuses on evaluating the relationship between wilderness and recreation, specifically in the Czech National Park Šumava. Šumava is one of the unique natural sites, not only due to its location in Central Europe, but also due to its unique natural wealth hidden in the heart of Europe. Moors, peat bogs, river springs, but also forest vegetation and much more are among the treasures of this Czech national park. These places are an attraction for many visitors. The work examines how to reconcile these two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, it is a desire to protect the natural environment and, on the other hand, it is the ever-increasing pressure of tourism and recreation. The diploma thesis is divided into two basic parts. The first part is a search of the evaluation of the "wilderness" itself and offers a view of this concept from different angles. It is evident that the view of the wilderness will be different in the world context from what we know from the Czech Republic. Furthermore, it is possible to get acquainted with the influence of recreation on the natural environment, resp. "Wilderness". The work examines the effects of recreation on fauna and flora in the most detail. The practical part of the work addresses the relationship between recreation and "wilderness" in...Diplomová práce je zaměřena na hodnocení vztahu mezi divočinou a rekreací, a to konkrétně na území českého Národního parku Šumava. Šumava se řadí mezi unikátní přírodní lokality, a to nejenom díky své poloze ve střední Evropě, ale i díky svému jedinečnému přírodnímu bohatství ukrytému v srdci Evropy. Slatě, rašeliniště, prameniště řek, ale například i pralesní vegetace a mnoho dalšího patří mezi poklady tohoto českého národního parku. Je zřejmé, že tato místa jsou lákadlem pro mnoho návštěvníků. Práce zkoumá, jak tyto dvě protichůdné tendence sladit. Z jedné strany je to touha ochránit přírodní prostředí a z druhé strany stále rostoucí tlak cestovního ruchu a rekreace. Diplomová práce je členěna do dvou základních částí. První část tvoří rešerše vyhodnocení samotné "divočiny" a nabízí pohledy na tento pojem z různých úhlů. Je patrné, že náhled na divočinu bude ve světovém kontextu odlišný od toho, jaký známe z České republiky. Dále je možné se v rešeršní části seznámit s tím, jaký vliv má rekreace na přírodní prostředí, resp. na "divočinu". Nejpodrobněji práce zkoumá vlivy rekreace na faunu a flóru. V praktické části je pak řešena problematika vztahu rekreace a "divočiny" na příkladu Národního parku Šumava. Zkoumány a vyhodnocovány jsou jak biotické systémy a jejich kvalita, tak i návštěvnost...Department of Physical Geography and GeoecologyKatedra fyzické geografie a geoekologieFaculty of SciencePřírodovědecká fakult

Computing Topology Preservation of RBF Transformations for Landmark-Based Image Registration

In image registration, a proper transformation should be topology preserving. Especially for landmark-based image registration, if the displacement of one landmark is larger enough than those of neighbourhood landmarks, topology violation will be occurred. This paper aim to analyse the topology preservation of some Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) which are used to model deformations in image registration. Mat\'{e}rn functions are quite common in the statistic literature (see, e.g. \cite{Matern86,Stein99}). In this paper, we use them to solve the landmark-based image registration problem. We present the topology preservation properties of RBFs in one landmark and four landmarks model respectively. Numerical results of three kinds of Mat\'{e}rn transformations are compared with results of Gaussian, Wendland's, and Wu's functions

Survey on the Prospects of Yiddish Studies in the Czech Republic

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Sufficient conditions for topological invariance of 2D images under rigid transformations

International audienceIn ℝ^2, rigid transformations are topology-preserving operations. However, this property is generally no longer true when considering digital images instead of continuous ones, due to digitization effects. In this article, we investigate this issue by studying discrete rigid transformations (DRTs) on ℤ^2. More precisely, we define conditions under which digital images preserve their topological properties under any arbitrary DRTs. Based on the recently introduced notion of DRT graph and the classical notion of simple point, we first identify a family of local patterns that authorize topological invariance under DRTs. These patterns are then involved in a local analysis process that guarantees topological invariance of whole digital images in linear time

The timing of leaf flush in European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) saplings

Spring phenology is considered one of the most important determinants of growth and survival in young stands. It is relatively easy to monitor and is expected to respond to climate changes that will affect the favourable period for growth in temperate regions. The response of trees to the environmental cues that govern spring phenology is largely under genetic control and inter-populational differences exist within species. This suggests that the trait undergoes site-specific selection. Data obtained through monitoring of bud burst at multiple beech provenance-trials were compared with specific site and weather data to reveal geographical clines in beech phenology. We fitted the Weibull function to harmonise phenology data collected using various flushing scales and at different intensities of monitoring. By comparing data from 20 annual census of phenology performed across 13 sites throughout Europe, we showed that accumulated temperature sum > 5°C modelled the timing and duration of flushing more consistently than other temperature sum models > 0°C or > 8°C, or simply Julian Day. Inconsistency in the number of degree hours required for flushing among sites, reinforced the need for testing of more complex mechanistic models that include photoperiod, chilling period, and summer drought in addition to temperature sum. South-North, East-West, and low-high elevational clines were confirmed from the analysis. These findings; reinforce the need for caution in planting provenances from the south-east of Europe, suited to warmer-drier summers, in more north-westerly sites; and highlight the location of some potentially valuable late-flushing populations that also tolerate warm dry temperatures.Peer reviewe

Variational Registration of Multiple Images with the SVD based SqN Distance Measure

Image registration, especially the quantification of image similarity, is an important task in image processing. Various approaches for the comparison of two images are discussed in the literature. However, although most of these approaches perform very well in a two image scenario, an extension to a multiple images scenario deserves attention. In this article, we discuss and compare registration methods for multiple images. Our key assumption is, that information about the singular values of a feature matrix of images can be used for alignment. We introduce, discuss and relate three recent approaches from the literature: the Schatten q-norm based SqN distance measure, a rank based approach, and a feature volume based approach. We also present results for typical applications such as dynamic image sequences or stacks of histological sections. Our results indicate that the SqN approach is in fact a suitable distance measure for image registration. Moreover, our examples also indicate that the results obtained by SqN are superior to those obtained by its competitors.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, accepted at the conference "Scale Space and Variational Methods" in Hofgeismar, Germany 201

Generalised median of a set of correspondences based on the hamming distance.

A correspondence is a set of mappings that establishes a relation between the elements of two data structures (i.e. sets of points, strings, trees or graphs). If we consider several correspondences between the same two structures, one option to define a representative of them is through the generalised median correspondence. In general, the computation of the generalised median is an NP-complete task. In this paper, we present two methods to calculate the generalised median correspondence of multiple correspondences. The first one obtains the optimal solution in cubic time, but it is restricted to the Hamming distance. The second one obtains a sub-optimal solution through an iterative approach, but does not have any restrictions with respect to the used distance. We compare both proposals in terms of the distance to the true generalised median and runtime

Globally aligned photomosaic of the Lucky Strike hydrothermal vent field (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 37°18.5′N) : release of georeferenced data, mosaic construction, and viewing software

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 9 (2008): Q12009, doi:10.1029/2008GC002204.We present a georeferenced photomosaic of the Lucky Strike hydrothermal vent field (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 37°18′N). The photomosaic was generated from digital photographs acquired using the ARGO II seafloor imaging system during the 1996 LUSTRE cruise, which surveyed a ∼1 km2 zone and provided a coverage of ∼20% of the seafloor. The photomosaic has a pixel resolution of 15 mm and encloses the areas with known active hydrothermal venting. The final mosaic is generated after an optimization that includes the automatic detection of the same benthic features across different images (feature-matching), followed by a global alignment of images based on the vehicle navigation. We also provide software to construct mosaics from large sets of images for which georeferencing information exists (location, attitude, and altitude per image), to visualize them, and to extract data. Georeferencing information can be provided by the raw navigation data (collected during the survey) or result from the optimization obtained from image matching. Mosaics based solely on navigation can be readily generated by any user but the optimization and global alignment of the mosaic requires a case-by-case approach for which no universally software is available. The Lucky Strike photomosaics (optimized and navigated-only) are publicly available through the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS, http://www.marine-geo.org). The mosaic-generating and viewing software is available through the Computer Vision and Robotics Group Web page at the University of Girona (http://eia.udg.es/∼rafa/mosaicviewer.html).This work has been supported by the EU Marie Curie RTNs MOMARNet (OD, RG, JE, LN, JF, NG) and FREESUBNet (RG, NG, XC), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant CTM2007–64751; RG, JE), CNRS and ANR (grant ANR NT05–3_42212, JE), ICREA (LN), and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (JE, RG). JF has been funded by MICINN under FPI grant BES-2006-12733 and NG has been supported by MICINN under the ‘‘Ramon y Cajal’’ program

Visualization and Analysis of 3D Microscopic Images

In a wide range of biological studies, it is highly desirable to visualize and analyze three-dimensional (3D) microscopic images. In this primer, we first introduce several major methods for visualizing typical 3D images and related multi-scale, multi-time-point, multi-color data sets. Then, we discuss three key categories of image analysis tasks, namely segmentation, registration, and annotation. We demonstrate how to pipeline these visualization and analysis modules using examples of profiling the single-cell gene-expression of C. elegans and constructing a map of stereotyped neurite tracts in a fruit fly brain

Digital hyperplane fitting

International audienceThis paper addresses the hyperplane fitting problem of discrete points in any dimension (i.e. in Z d). For that purpose, we consider a digital model of hyperplane, namely digital hyperplane, and present a combinatorial approach to find the optimal solution of the fitting problem. This method consists in computing all possible digital hyperplanes from a set S of n points, then an exhaustive search enables us to find the optimal hyperplane that best fits S. The method has, however, a high complexity of O(n d), and thus can not be applied for big datasets. To overcome this limitation, we propose another method relying on the Delaunay triangulation of S. By not generating and verifying all possible digital hyperplanes but only those from the elements of the triangula-tion, this leads to a lower complexity of O(n d 2 +1). Experiments in 2D, 3D and 4D are shown to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method