9,883 research outputs found
The role of land cover change in Arctic-Boreal greening and browning trends
Many studies have used time series of satellite-derived vegetation indices to identify so-called greening and browning trends across the northern high-latitudes and to suggest that the productivity of Arctic-Boreal ecosystems is changing in response to climate forcing at local and continental scales. However, disturbances that alter land cover are prevalent in Arctic-Boreal ecosystems, and changes in Arctic-Boreal land cover, which complicate interpretation of trends in vegetation indices, have mostly been ignored in previous studies. Here we use a new land cover change dataset derived from Landsat imagery to explore the extent to which land cover and land cover change influence trends in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) over a large (3.76 M km2) area of NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, which spans much of northwestern Canada and Alaska. Between 1984 and 2012, 21.2% of the study domain experienced land cover change and 42.7% had significant NDVI trends. Land cover change occurred in 27.6% of locations with significant NDVI trends during this period and resulted in greening and browning rates 48%–128% higher than in areas of stable land cover. While the majority of land cover change areas experienced significant NDVI trends, more than half of areas with stable land cover did not. Further, the extent and magnitude of browning and greening trends varied substantially as a function of land cover class and land cover change type. Forest disturbance from fire and timber harvest drove over one third of statistically significant NDVI trends and created complex mosaics of recent forest loss (as browning) and post-disturbance recovery (as greening) at both landscape and continental scale. Our results demonstrate the importance of land cover changes in highly disturbed high-latitude ecosystems for interpreting trends of NDVI and productivity across multiple spatial scales.Published versio
Filamentation Instability of Interacting Current Sheets in Striped Relativistic Winds: The Origin of Low Sigma?
I outline a mechanism, akin to Weibel instabilities of interpenetrating
beams, in which the neighboring current sheets in a striped wind from an
oblique rotator interact through a two stream-like mechanism (a Weibel
instability in flatland), to create an anomalous resistivity that heats the
sheets and causes the magnetic field to diffusively annihilate in the wind
upstream of the termination shock. The heating has consequences for observable
unpulsed emission from pulsars.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures. To be published in the proceedings of ``40 Years
of Pulsars'
Symmetry and designability for lattice protein models
Native protein folds often have a high degree of symmetry. We study the
relationship between the symmetries of native proteins, and their
designabilities -- how many different sequences encode a given native
structure. Using a two-dimensional lattice protein model based on
hydrophobicity, we find that those native structures that are encoded by the
largest number of different sequences have high symmetry. However only certain
symmetries are enhanced, e.g. x/y-mirror symmetry and rotation, while
others are suppressed. If it takes a large number of mutations to destabilize
the native state of a protein, then, by definition, the state is highly
designable. Hence, our findings imply that insensitivity to mutation implies
high symmetry. It appears that the relationship between designability and
symmetry results because protein substructures are also designable. Native
protein folds may therefore be symmetric because they are composed of repeated
designable substructures.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure
Ab initio calculation of the anomalous Hall conductivity by Wannier interpolation
The intrinsic anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnets depends on subtle
spin-orbit-induced effects in the electronic structure, and recent ab-initio
studies found that it was necessary to sample the Brillouin zone at millions of
k-points to converge the calculation. We present an efficient first-principles
approach for computing the anomalous Hall conductivity. We start out by
performing a conventional electronic-structure calculation including spin-orbit
coupling on a uniform and relatively coarse k-point mesh. From the resulting
Bloch states, maximally-localized Wannier functions are constructed which
reproduce the ab-initio states up to the Fermi level. The Hamiltonian and
position-operator matrix elements, needed to represent the energy bands and
Berry curvatures, are then set up between the Wannier orbitals. This completes
the first stage of the calculation, whereby the low-energy ab-initio problem is
transformed into an effective tight-binding form. The second stage only
involves Fourier transforms and unitary transformations of the small matrices
set up in the first stage. With these inexpensive operations, the quantities of
interest are interpolated onto a dense k-point mesh and used to evaluate the
anomalous Hall conductivity as a Brillouin zone integral. The present scheme,
which also avoids the cumbersome summation over all unoccupied states in the
Kubo formula, is applied to bcc Fe, giving excellent agreement with
conventional, less efficient first-principles calculations. Remarkably, we find
that more than 99% of the effect can be recovered by keeping a set of terms
depending only on the Hamiltonian matrix elements, not on matrix elements of
the position operator.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
The evolution of GX 339-4 in the low-hard state as seen by NuSTAR and Swift
We analyze eleven NuSTAR and Swift observations of the black hole X-ray
binary GX 339-4 in the hard state, six of which were taken during the end of
the 2015 outburst, five during a failed outburst in 2013. These observations
cover luminosities from 0.5%-5% of the Eddington luminosity. Implementing the
most recent version of the reflection model relxillCp, we perform simultaneous
spectral fits on both datasets to track the evolution of the properties in the
accretion disk including the inner edge radius, the ionization, and temperature
of the thermal emission. We also constrain the photon index and electron
temperature of the primary source (the "corona"). We find the disk becomes more
truncated when the luminosity decreases, and observe a maximum truncation
radius of . We also explore a self-consistent model under the framework
of coronal Comptonization, and find consistent results regarding the disk
truncation in the 2015 data, providing a more physical preferred fit for the
2013 observations.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in The
Astrophysical Journa
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What Drives Variation in Habitat Use by Anolis Lizards: Habitat Availability or Selectivity?
Geographic variation in habitat availability may drive geographic variation in a species' habitat use; alternatively, species adapted to particular habitat characteristics may use a habitat regardless of its availability within an environment. In this study, we investigated habitat use of two sympatric species of Anolis lizards that are morphologically specialized to use different microhabitats. We examined variation in microhabitat use and availability among four distinct forest types. In each forest type, we quantified available microhabitats (i.e., perch diameter, angle of inclination, and visibility), as well as microhabitats actually used by each species. We found that species consistently differed in microhabitat use, corresponding to each species' morphological specializations. However, microhabitat use of both species varied among sites. This variation in Anolis gundlachi Peters, 1876 reflected differences in microhabitat availability, while the variation in Anolis krugi Peters, 1876 resulted from differential microhabitat selectivity. These results indicate that both habitat availability and habitat preferences must be examined in multiple localities for a species to understand the causes of variation in its habitat use.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog
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