Amount and distribution of coarse woody debris in Dalby Söderskog national park

Coarse Woody Debris (CWD) is a critical structural and functional component of all forest ecosystems and comprises non-living woody biomass, standing or lying, larger than 10 cm in diameter. This study provides the first inventory of coarse woody debris in the temperate broadleaf forest of Dalby Söderskog national park in southern Sweden. Specifically, the aims were (1) to quantify the amount of standing and lying CWD, and (2) to study the diameter distribution of CWD in Dalby Söderskog. Length and diameter of coarse woody debris including dead standing trees, cut stumps, and dead downed trees and branches were registered in 50 circular 100 m2 (5.64 m radius) sample plots. According to the results, Dalby Söderskog had an average of 227 m3/ha coarse woody debris. Out of this volume, 174 m3/ha were logs, 49 m3/ha were snags, and 4 m3/ha were cut stumps. The number of snags and logs was highest in the smallest diameter class (10-19 cm) and decreased with increasing diameter. However, the overall volume increased from the dbh class 10-19 cm to a maximum at the dbh class 30-39 cm, and decreased again at larger dbh classes. The amount of CWD per hectare measured in Dalby Söderskog is roughly ten times the average amounts found in both Swedish woodland key habitats, formally protected forests, and Natura 2000 forest areas in Sweden, which all contain around 20 m3/ha. Similar volumes as in Dalby Söderskog can, however, be found in central European temperate old-growth forests. Although no attempt was made in the present study to determine CWD to tree species, comparisons with previous tree inventories suggest that the exceptional high amount of CWD in Dalby Söderskog is related to greatly increased tree mortality during the past three decades caused by Dutch elm disease and ash dieback

Performance of Turbo Coded OFDM in Wireless Application

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular modulation method in high speed wireless communications. By partitioning a wideband fading channel into flat narrowband channels, OFDM is able to mitigate the detrimental effects of multi path fading using a simple one- tap equalizer. There is a growing need to quickly transmit information wirelessly and accurately. Engineers have already combine techniques such as OFDM suitable for high data rate transmission with forward error correction (FEC) methods over wireless channels. In this thesis, we enhance the system throughput of a working OFDM system by adding turbo coding. The smart use of coding and power allocation in OFDM will be useful to the desired performance at higher data rates. Error control codes have become a vital part of modern digital wireless systems, enabling reliable transmission to be achieved over noisy channels. Over the past decade, turbo codes have been widely considered to be the most powerful error control code of practical importance. In the same time-scale, mixed voice/data networks have advanced further and the concept of global wireless networks and terrestrial links has emerged. Such networks present the challenge of optimizing error control codes for different channel types, and for the different qualities of service demanded by voice and data

Performance analysis of turbo coded OFDM in wireless application

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular modulation method in high speed wireless communications. By partitioning a wideband fading channel into flat narrowband channels, OFDM is able to mitigate the detrimental effects of multi path fading using a simple one- tap equalizer. There is a growing need to quickly transmit information wirelessly and accurately.Engineers have already combine techniques such as OFDM suitable for high data rate transmission with forward error correction (FEC) methods over wireless channels. In this thesis, we enhance the system throughput of a working OFDM system by adding turbo coding. The smart use of coding and power allocation in OFDM will be useful to the desired performance at higher data rates.Error control codes have become a vital part of modern digital wireless systems,enabling reliable transmission to be achieved over noisy channels. Over the past decade,turbo codes have been widely considered to be the most powerful error control code of practical importance. In the same time-scale, mixed voice/data networks have advanced further and the concept of global wireless networks and terrestrial links has emerged. Such networks present the challenge of optimizing error control codes for different channel types,and for the different qualities of service demanded by voice and data

Anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity of ethanolic extract of Bauhinia purpurea bark

The aim of this study was to evaluate the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant efficacy of ethanolic extract of Bauhinia purpurea bark (EBP) in Sprague Dawley (SD) rats. Carrageenan induced paw edema and air pouch inflammation, arachidonic acid induced ear edema and complete freund’s adjuvant (CFA) induced hematological alterations were studied in control and experimental rats. Administration of EBP (200mg, 400mg, 600 mg/kg body weight) showed a significant and dose dependent inhibition of paw edema and ear edema and also reversed the hematological alterations near to normalcy. DPPH assay and measurement of MDA levels showed potent antioxidant activity of EBP. With increase in concentration of EBP, improvement in walking scores of motility test confirmed the anti-inflammatory activity of EBP. Acute toxicity studies demonstrated non toxic nature of EBP even at higher doses. Together, our results demonstrate that EBP has potent anti-inflammatory as well as potent antioxidant properties validating the folk medicinal use of this species

Performance evaluation of high capacity mechanised dehusking equipment for green arecanut (Areca catechu L.)

India is a major arecanut (Areca catechu L.) growing country. Of the many problems identified in arecanut processing, dehusking is found to be a major one, which is cumbersome and needs to be mechanised. Presently, there are a few types of equipments available, but these machines are basically of low capacity and cater to small arecanut growers. Performance evaluation of three high capacity green arecanut dehusking equipments was taken up, to work out its possible adoption for entrepreneurship development. Equipment under evaluation consisted of power mounted dehusker with hook tooth cutting blade fixed in a cutting wheel to dehusk the outer shell with a nut ejection system coupled with a vibrating deck of trays to grade and convey the dehusked nuts. The Blade-Knurl shaft speed ratio was optimised as 1:11. Whole nut recovery per cent ranged from 81.84 ± 1.87 to 82.52 ± 1.95 per cent. The unhusked per cent and partially husked percentage ranged from 7.60 ± 3.71 to 7.81 ± 4.68 and 8.29 ± 2.15 to 8.85 ± 2.82, respectively. The broken nut percentage ranged from 1.03 ± 1.36 to 2.06 ± 2.72 percentage. The total cost of operation for two-belt, four-belt and six-belt model was ` 162 h-1,` 237 h-1 and ` 262 h-1, respectively. Better dehusking efficiency with reduced damage to the nuts achieved in mechanical dehusking would enable the farmer to realise additional yield with saving in time and lower cost of operation

MYXEDEMA MADNESS: AN INTRIGUING CASE OF DEPRESSION IN HYPOTHYROIDISM

Hypothyroidism is a clinical syndrome due to deficiency of thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is responsible for maintaining the brain hemostasis and helps in central nervous system global development. There have been studies on the association of psychiatric illness with thyroid deficiency and strikingly found to be presenting feature of hypothyroidism in many patients. Literature evidence also says that underlying hypothyroidism may lead to failure of psychiatric treatment. Hence, we report a case of hypertensive patient on medications started with antidepressants and antipsychotics after being diagnosed of depression but was found to be resistant to psychiatric medications and later successfully treated with levothyroxine for underlying hypothyroidism with myxedema

How many people living with HIV will be additionally eligible for antiretroviral treatment in Karnataka State, India as per the World Health Organization 2013 guidelines?

BACKGROUND: The National AIDS control programme (NACP) in India is currently following the World Health Organization (WHO) 2010 antiretroviral therapy (ART) guidelines. In 2013, the WHO revised its recommendations for initiating ART among people living with HIV (PLHIV) by increasing the threshold for ART initiation to a CD4 count ≤500 cells/uL. For certain patient groups, ART is recommended irrespective of CD4 count (PLHIV with active tuberculosis, hepatitis B virus infection, pregnant and breast feeding women, children aged under five years and those living in a sero-discordant relationship). In this operational research, we assess the effect of applying this recommendation on the number of PLHIV additionally eligible for ART. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional analysis of routinely collected programme data from all PLHIV registered in Karnataka State (population 60 million), India in 2012. RESULTS: Of 37,044 PLHIV, 27,074 (73%) were eligible for initiating ART as per WHO-2010 criteria. As per the WHO-2013 criteria (CD4 count ≤500 and all pregnant women and under-five children irrespective of CD4 count), an additional 5104 (14%) HIV-infected people would be eligible for initiating ART. There were no data to inform the additional patient load due to sero-discordance. CONCLUSION: Adopting the WHO-2013 guidelines for India has important resource implications. However, given the significant patient and programmatic benefits of adopting the new guidelines, this has been considered favourably by the NACP in India and steps are being planned to integrate ART care into the general health system to cope with the increased numbers of patients

HIV-infected presumptive tuberculosis patients without tuberculosis: How many are eligible for antiretroviral therapy in Karnataka, India?

For certain subgroups within people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [active tuberculosis (TB), pregnant women, children <5years old, and serodiscordant couples], the World Health Organization recommends antiretroviral therapy (ART) irrespective of CD4 count. Another subgroup which has received increased attention is "HIV-infected presumptive TB patients without TB". In this study, we assess the proportion of HIV-infected presumptive TB patients eligible for ART in Karnataka State (population 60million), India. This was a cross-sectional analysis of data of HIV-infected presumptive TB patients diagnosed in May 2015 abstracted from national TB and HIV program records. Of 42,585 presumptive TB patients, 28,964 (68%) were tested for HIV and 2262 (8%) were HIV positive. Of the latter, 377 (17%) had active TB. Of 1885 "presumptive TB patients without active TB", 1100 (58%) were already receiving ART. Of the remaining 785 who were not receiving ART, 617 (79%) were assessed for ART eligibility and of those, 548 (89%) were eligible for ART. About 90% of "HIV-infected presumptive TB patients without TB" were eligible for ART. This evidence supports a public health approach of starting all "HIV-infected presumptive TB patients without TB" on ART irrespective of CD4 count in line with global thinking about 'test and treat'

StressNet: a spatial-spectral-temporal deformable attention-based framework for water stress classification in maize

In recent years, monitoring the health of crops has been greatly aided by deploying highthroughput crop monitoring techniques that integrate remotely captured imagery and deep learning techniques. Most methods rely mainly on the visible spectrum for analyzing the abiotic stress, such as water deficiency in crops. In this study, we carry out experiments on maize crop in a controlled environment of different water treatments. We make use of a multispectral camera mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for collecting the data from the tillering stage to the heading stage of the crop. A pre-processing pipeline, followed by the extraction of the Region of Interest from orthomosaic is explained. We propose a model based on a Convolution Neural Network, added with a deformable convolutional layer in order to learn and extract rich spatial and spectral features. These features are further fed to a weighted Attention-based Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory network to process the sequential dependency between temporal features. Finally, the water stress category is predicted using the aggregated Spatial-Spectral-Temporal Characteristics. The addition of multispectral, multi-temporal imagery significantly improved accuracy when compared with mono-temporal classification. By incorporating a deformable convolutional layer and Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory network with weighted attention, our proposed model achieved best accuracy of 91.30% with a precision of 0.8888 and a recall of 0.8857. The results indicate that multispectral, multi-temporal imagery is a valuable tool for extracting and aggregating discriminative spatial-spectral-temporal characteristics for water stress classification