The Consequences of Environmental Properties and Tree Spatial Neighborhood on Post-Fire Structure of Forest in Yosemite National Park

Separating the contribution of habitat filtering and dispersal mechanisms in forming species distribution remains a challenge in community ecology. Despite the effect of environmental variables in structuring communities, only restricted numbers of them were considered as a habitat dissimilarity. In Chapter 2, I used topography and soil properties to define habitats within the Yosemite Forest Dynamics Plot (YFDP). The soil enzymes were added in soil samples due to their important role in releasing nutrients into the soil environment. The preference of eleven species to a specific habitat were examined. Also, the relative importance of habitat filtering and dispersal limitation were examined. I found that more species associated with habitats defined by soil properties compare to those associated with topographically defined habitat. In addition, the contribution of dispersal process was greater in explaining change in species composition. In Chapter 3, I studied the underlying processes in shaping four abundant species spatial arrangement in YFDP. I examined the effect of habitat heterogeneity, dispersal process, fire event, interaction of adults on juveniles, and negative density dependence (as a result of increasing density) in shaping species spatial distribution. My results suggest that dominant species spatial patterns are partially explained by topographic variables, dispersal limitation, biotic interactions, and fire history

Survey on gregarine infection of marine broodstocks and cultured shrimp in the Choebdeh Area of Abadan, Iran

Gregarines are protozoa that occur within the digestive tract and tissues of various invertebrate animals such as shrimp. In this survey 15 marine broodstocks of Penaeus indicus from Jask area and 119 cultured shrimps from cultured farms were supplied and carried to laboratory. According to life cycle of gregarine, (Johnson, 1989) it is assumed that presence of protozoan gregarine among broodstock shrimps can be due to consumption of natural food and existance of intermediate hosts and as a result to be completion of life cycle of these protozoan in natural conditions. On the other hand absence of these parasites among cultured shrimp can be due to consumption of prepared (inert) food and lack of completion of alternate hosts and intermediate hosts and consequently lack of completion of life cycle of these parasites in the cultured condition

Clinical signs and histopathology of white spot syndrome disease (WSSD) in cultured Penaeus indicus in Khouzestan Province

Since 1992, white spot syndrom disease reported from China, has overshadow all other viral diseases. The WSSD was also reported from all countries in Asia and America. In July 2002, the high mortality in cultured shrimps of Penaeus indicus occurred in Khouzestan province, south of Iran. The clinical signs of affected shrimps were characterized by distinct white spots in the carapace with size of 0.5-2 mm. Moribund shrimp usually showed reddish coloration of the body, lethargic and reduced feed intake or stopped feeding, the stomach was empty and shrimp stayed at the side of pond edge. The high mortality rates occurred within a week after the emergence of gross signs. The moribund shrimp collected and fixed in Davidson fixative, then processed routinely. The section from all tissues except hepatopancreas showed intranunclear Cowdry type-A inclusion body. According to the clinical signs, histopathological fingings and high mortality, the disease occurred in Abadan area (Khouzestan province) identified as white spot syndrome disease (WSSD)

Survey of parasitic fauna of cultured shrimp in Ghofas area of Abadan

This survey was performed in order to investigation of parasites in different tissues of cultured shrimp and survey of intensity and incidence of these parasites in different tissues of shrimp. In this survey 145 shrimp belonged to Penaeus monodon and 97 shrimp belonged to P. indicus were reviewed. Epicommensal protozoa from gills and appendages by wet smear, stomach and hepatopancreas and intestine by stereomicroscope, crashed muscle and digested muscle and also, crashing of intestine for digestive protozoa were reviewed. The most intensity and incidence were belonged to Epistylis, Zoothamnium and Vorticella, respectively. In relation to metazoan parasites, there were no observation of worm parasites, such as trematodes, nematodes, cestodes and digestive protozoa such as gregarine among the cultured shrimp. All shrimp are susceptible to fouling by epicommensal protozoa. These organisms are naturally present on the bodies of cultured shrimp and their intensity and incidence can be related to the environmental condition. According to life cycle of metazoa and digestive protozoa (Johnson, 1989), absence of these parasites among cultured shrimp can be due to lack of intermediate hosts and consequently lack of completion of life cycle of these parasites in the cultured environments and consumption of prepared (inert) food

Money Laundering and International Commitment to Combat It

Abstract: Capitalist society has provided currently a broad space in the field of trade and investment. Especially with expanding banking operations we saw a huge shift of property and funds among legal and natural person. Meanwhile, some of the jobber with a double profit motive, by using various tricks, is trying to abuse these exchanges. committed operations of these people include acquisition of property and funds caused by illegal activities such as smuggling, theft, etc and to enter its property and funds into corrupt money of economic system and hide the illegal nature of the property, heavy consequences of economically to society. Sets of activities series that leads to the entry of illicit funds into the financial system, cause money laundering. Money laundering is criminal activity on a large scale, group, continuous and long-term, which can exceed range of politics and place in a country. This article attempts to investigate money laundering crime and combating it

Unifying Consensus and Covariance Intersection for Efficient Distributed State Estimation over Unreliable Networks

This thesis studies the problem of recursive distributed state estimation over unreliable networks. The main contribution is to fuse the independent and dependent information separately. Local estimators communicate directly only with their immediate neighbors and nothing is assumed about the structure of the communication network, specifically it need not be connected at all times. The proposed estimator is a Hybrid one that fuses independent and dependent (or correlated) information using a distributed averaging and iterative conservative fusion rule respectively. It will be discussed how the hybrid method can improve estimators's performance and make it robust to network failures. The content of the thesis is divided in two main parts. In the first part I study how this idea is applied to the case of dynamical systems with continuous state and Gaussian noise. I establish bounds for estimation performance and show that my method produces unbiased conservative estimates that are better than Iterative Covariance Intersection (ICI). I will test the proposed algorithm on an atmospheric dispersion problem, a random linear system estimation and finally a target tracking problem. In the second part, I will discuss how the hybrid method can be applied to distributed estimation on a Hidden Markov Model. I will discuss the notion of conservativeness for general probability distributions and use the appropriate cost function to achieve improvement similar to the first part. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in a multi-agent tracking problem and a high dimensional HMM and it is shown that its performance surpasses the competing algorithms