Ungulate herbivory modifies the effects of climate change on mountain forests

Recent temperature observations suggest a general warming trend that may be causing the range of tree species to shift to higher latitudes and altitudes. Since biotic interactions such as herbivory can change tree species composition, it is important to understand their contribution to vegetation changes triggered by climate change. To investigate the response of forests to climate change and herbivory by wild ungulates, we used the forest gap model ForClim v2.9.6 and simulated forest development in three climatically different valleys in the Swiss Alps. We used altitudinal transects on contrasting slopes covering a wide range of forest types from the cold (upper) to the dry (lower) treeline. This allowed us to investigate (1) altitudinal range shifts in response to climate change, (2) the consequences for tree species composition, and (3) the combined effect of climate change and ungulate herbivory. We found that ungulate herbivory changed species composition and that both basal area and stem numbers decreased with increasing herbivory intensity. Tree species responded differently to the change in climate, and their ranges did not change concurrently, thus causing a succession to new stand types. While climate change partially compensated for the reductions in basal area caused by ungulate herbivory, the combined effect of these two agents on the mix of the dominant species and forest type was non-compensatory, as browsing selectively excluded species from establishing or reaching dominance and altered competition patterns, particularly for light. We conclude that there is an urgent need for adaptive forest management strategies that address the joint effects of climate change and ungulate herbivor

Improving patient education about tobacco withdrawal and nicotine gum use by registered nurses in inpatient psychiatry: A feasibility study

IntroductionTobacco use is prohibited in most psychiatric facilities in the United States, yet many psychiatric inpatients are tobacco users. Psychiatric nurses have reported inadequate education about best practices for managing tobacco dependence.AimTo explore the feasibility of an educational intervention for psychiatric nurses designed to improve their ability to educate patients about best practices for managing tobacco dependence, as well as effective use of nicotine gum.MethodFourteen nurses on a psychiatric inpatient unit at a community hospital were educated about the targeted topics. Chart reviews of nonequivalent pre‐intervention and post‐intervention patient groups were conducted to explore the outcomes of the intervention.ResultsPatients received more teaching, and used nicotine gum more often, following the intervention. However, no statistically significant differences between the pre‐intervention and post‐intervention patient groups were found.DiscussionEducating nurses about best practices for managing tobacco withdrawal symptoms may have positive outcomes. Existing research suggests that such interventions may be most effective when support and structure are provided to ensure long‐term practice changes.Implications for practiceThis feasibility study demonstrates that a brief nurse education intervention has the potential to improve the experience of tobacco withdrawal for psychiatric inpatients. Future research that expands upon the current project is warranted.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146317/1/jpm12495.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146317/2/jpm12495_am.pd

Case 3782 – Nebela militaris Penard, 1890 (Arcellinida, Hyalospheniidae): proposed conservation of the specific name by giving it precedence over Nebela bursella Taranek, 1881

The purpose of this application, under Article 23.9.3 of the Code, is to conserve the specific name Nebela militaris Penard, 1890, a junior subjective synonym of Nebela bursella Taranek, 1881 – referred to as Nebela bursella Vejdovský in the literature. Due to the absence of any type or reference specimen and due to the confusing original description, doubts about the taxonomic status of N. bursella persist. A review of the literature revealed that the names N. militaris and N. bursella originally referred to the same species, with the name N. bursella later being applied erroneously to another species. According to the Principle of Priority, N. bursella is the valid name of the species generally known as N. militaris, but there has been no mention of the former taxon since 1964 and its name is unknown to most active testate amoeba researchers. To avoid confusion, we propose to conserve the widely used species name Nebela militaris Penard, 1890 by granting it conditional precedence over Nebela bursella Taranek, 1881, and to designate a neotype

Generating Non-Linear Interpolants by Semidefinite Programming

Interpolation-based techniques have been widely and successfully applied in the verification of hardware and software, e.g., in bounded-model check- ing, CEGAR, SMT, etc., whose hardest part is how to synthesize interpolants. Various work for discovering interpolants for propositional logic, quantifier-free fragments of first-order theories and their combinations have been proposed. However, little work focuses on discovering polynomial interpolants in the literature. In this paper, we provide an approach for constructing non-linear interpolants based on semidefinite programming, and show how to apply such results to the verification of programs by examples.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Sharper and Simpler Nonlinear Interpolants for Program Verification

Interpolation of jointly infeasible predicates plays important roles in various program verification techniques such as invariant synthesis and CEGAR. Intrigued by the recent result by Dai et al.\ that combines real algebraic geometry and SDP optimization in synthesis of polynomial interpolants, the current paper contributes its enhancement that yields sharper and simpler interpolants. The enhancement is made possible by: theoretical observations in real algebraic geometry; and our continued fraction-based algorithm that rounds off (potentially erroneous) numerical solutions of SDP solvers. Experiment results support our tool's effectiveness; we also demonstrate the benefit of sharp and simple interpolants in program verification examples

Subsumer-First: Steering Symbolic Reachability Analysis

Abstract. Symbolic reachability analysis provides a basis for the veri-fication of software systems by offering algorithmic support for the ex-ploration of the program state space when searching for proofs or coun-terexamples. The choice of exploration strategy employed by the anal-ysis has direct impact on its success, whereas the ability to find short counterexamples quickly and—as a complementary task—to efficiently perform the exhaustive state space traversal are of utmost importance for the majority of verification efforts. Existing exploration strategies can optimize only one of these objectives which leads to a sub-optimal reach-ability analysis, e.g., breadth-first search may sacrifice the exploration ef-ficiency and chaotic iteration can miss minimal counterexamples. In this paper we present subsumer-first, a new approach for steering symbolic reachability analysis that targets both minimal counterexample discovery and efficiency of exhaustive exploration. Our approach leverages the re-sult of fixpoint checks performed during symbolic reachability analysis to bias the exploration strategy towards its objectives, and does not require any additional computation. We demonstrate how the subsumer-first ap-proach can be applied to improve efficiency of software verification tools based on predicate abstraction. Our experimental evaluation indicates the practical usefulness of the approach: we observe significant efficiency improvements (median value 40%) on difficult verification benchmarks from the transportation domain.

The Reed-Stanton press rig for the generation of reproducible fingermarks : towards a standardised methodology for fingermark research

In the search for better or new methods/techniques to visualise fingermarks or to analyse them exploiting their chemical content, fingermarks inter-variability may hinder the assessment of the method effectiveness. Variability is due to changes in the chemical composition of the fingermarks between different donors and within the same donor, as well as to differential contact time, pressure and angle. When validating a method or comparing it with existing ones, it is not always possible to account for this type of variability. One way to compensate for these issues is to employ, in the early stages of the method development, a device generating reproducible fingermarks. Here the authors present their take on such device, as well as quantitatively describing its performance and benefits against the manual production of marks. Finally a short application is illustrated for the use of this device, at the method developmental stages, in an emerging area of fingerprinting research concerning the retrieval of chemical intelligence from fingermarks