Search

The Balkan Peninsula is recognized as an important centre of native and endemic plant species diversity as well as an important wildlife refuge area. However, although Croatia hosts more than half of plant species found on the Balkan Peninsula, the endemic taxa have never been evaluated or used to define conservation priorities. We analyzed the qualitative composition of the endemic and range restricted species, their spatial distribution, centres of endemism, and conservation status (non-IUCN). We generated an updated and annotated checklist of 349 endemic or range-restricted plant taxa (6.9% of the entire native flora), subdivided in 231 species, 103 subspecies and 15 hybrids and belonging to 149 genera and 43 families. Among the 231 species, 69 are considered endemic to Croatia and confined to a small area (< 4,500 km2), while 162 are considered range restricted species, which have larger ranges and/or are shared with neighbouring countries. The genera Centaurea and Hieracium have the highest number of endemic and range restricted taxa. Spatial analyses indicated two notable centres of species richness—the mountainous Dinaric Alps and the SE Adriatic coast, including the islands. Regions with a high richness of range-restricted taxa did not coincide with areas of high richness of endemic species. Taxa exhibited modest bimodality with respect to altitudinal distribution. In addition, the greatest diversity of taxa is concentrated in northwest of Croatia and could be related to differences in mean annual air temperatures and the duration of insolation. As regards their conservation status, 13 of the 349 taxa are endangered, and 62 are near threatened or vulnerable. Despite relatively strong legal protection of endemic and range restricted species, 37 taxa remain unprotected. Changes in conservation practice are therefore proposed.

The paper describes the structure of an Azure Logic App and gives a brief overview of the most relevant Computer Vision API services. Several solutions had been tested on a sample set consisting of vehicles photos in various street environments to show which of information can be extracted, e.g. licence plates, class of car, etc. and to estimate feasibility of different development scenarios. As an example of integration of various cloud services, a workflow for image categorization using Microsoft Computer Vision API and Azure Logic Apps had been developed as described in this paper. The Logic Apps workflow is triggered by taking a photo on a mobile phone and uploading it to a cloud storage for which a Logic App connector exists. The paper describes the developed workflow and discusses possibilities of replacing any component with another one, i.e. replacing a workflow trigger or the cognitive computing service. An approximate maintenance price calculation is done by estimating number of executions for each Logic Apps function based on a sample set of photos. The paper concludes with solution drawbacks and future work possibilities.

More than a decade many scientific papers have been dealing with automatic categorization of documents. Until recently there were no wide spread tools or libraries that could be integrated in a custom application. Recent cloud solutions for cognitive computing eased such integration, but integration still requires a lot of work. An idea of extendible library for simplifying document parsing and categorization using IBM Watson API is developed and presented in this paper. As a proof of concept nearly one hundred of scientific papers in a scientific journal were parsed and analysed using Watson API to detect key topics and concepts of each paper which were then compared with keywords provided by the author.

During the analysis of alien and invasive flora of Europe, as a threat to biodiversity, data for Croatia were missing. The aim of our research was to analyse distributional patterns and range size of all invasive alien plants (64) for the state area (57,000 km 2 ). They were detected on 49% of the state territory, averaging five taxa per 35 km 2 . The greatest number of invasive plants (> 30 per grid cell) was recorded in the major urban centres, increasing in the south-east direction and reflecting positive correlation with temperature and negative with altitude. The most endangered areas are in the Mediterranean region, especially on islands. The number of invasive plants increased with habitat diversity and almost 75% of all sites with invasive plants are located within a few habitats with direct anthropogenic influence. The results should provide a reliable regional and global basis for strategic planning regarding invasive alien plants management.

Project managers and developers need methods which would help them to predict the size of the software to be developed, to plan the effort and resources required for development and to estimate a number of people to be employed for the task. Determining the functional size of software is one of the methods that can meet these requirements. The paper builds on the authors' previous work on estimating effort and software size based on the conceptual models in the earlier stage of software development (the requirements phase) based on mapping between the UWE conceptual models of web applications and the COSMIC functional size. In this paper, a tool for automated functional size estimation of web applications on the basis of UWE conceptual models is presented. A case study that was carried out was based on real applications and thus evaluates this tool in a realistic environment.

The Balkan Peninsula is recognized as an important center of plant diversity. Despite the fact that Croatia contains more than 50% of all Balkan species of vascular flora, the knowledge of the spatial distribution, α-diversity and relation to the conservation efforts have never been summarized and presented. A spatial analysis was performed on several data sets containing a number of records and a number of species per grid cell. The results show that the Croatian flora consists of 4507 species and 1159 subspecies. The residuals around the linear regression used as a measure of the species richness indicate that Croatia had the highest residual value among the 40 European countries sampled and highest stress on the biodiversity value of the Apennine, the Iberian and the Balkan peninsulas. Based on half a million findings and their spatial distributions, we observed that within one grid cell (35 km2) 542 species could be expected. A number of records based on the herbarium specimens, literature and field observation and related spatial distribution was discussed. The spatial distribution of α- diversity indicates that the national hot spots were more consistent with the Important Plant Areas network than with the network of officially protected areas.

Repozitorij prostornih podataka u sklopu Flora Croatica baze podataka

Some aspects regarding delivering of different programming courses in three institutions from three countries (Serbia, FYR Macedonia and Croatia) are observed in the paper. Courses' profiles and the application of technology enhanced learning are described and compared. An analysis of the approaches and usage of a set of suitable software tools to enhance everyday teaching practice was conducted. At the end of the last school year, students filled-in appropriate questionnaire to provide feedback and their opinion. Results of questionnaire are presented, discussed and a comparative analysis is given.

Implementation of a sophisticated ERP system into a heterogeneous academic environment like universities is far from being a trivial task. The question of integration as a serious risk factor should not be neglected. That is why strategic planning of the integrated business- information system (IBIS) have a crucial importance as a link between academic strategy and business strategy.

The article deals with the problem of assessing student knowledge in programming courses at the Department of Applied Computing of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. It discusses the evolution of an assessment system from a simple midterm and homework based model to a more complex and better organized model in order to eliminate a negative backwash effect and to stimulate an active approach to learning. Various types of employed assessments are presented, their theoretical background discussed and the success of their implementation evaluated.

This paper describes some of the most common problems that can occur while writing an engine for flow control in workflow management software. The emphasis is put on implementing workflow control patterns, particularly on splits and matching synchronization points, and on milestones and mutual exclusions. After brief introduction and description of a background of development of a proprietary workflow management system, typical problems are described and solutions are proposed. Finally, a proprietary workflow parsing algorithm is proposed and explained.

This paper describes the architecture of a system called wMail, intended for e-mail messaging using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled cell phone. The software integrates all of user&#8217 ; ; ; s Internet mailboxes with the user&#8217 ; ; ; s cell phone, turning them into instant messaging systems available at any time from anywhere. On the basis of a chosen time period and notification type, the user is provided either with an SMS message or with a PUSH request, which allows the user to connect easily to his integrated e-mail inbox through a unique link without an unnecessary login procedure. wMail implements various content filters so that the content from various file types is displayed on the cell phone display in a suitable way. Methods for displaying such messages are described in the article. wMail also provides various notification methods and anti-spam filters.

This paper describes the architecture of a system called Business Information System Feasibility. The purpose of the system is to establish a base for an impartial and computer-aided decision-making tool for choice of information system software and/or its provider, for evaluation of computerization projects and for validation of existing information systems. In the paper we present the system model, the implemented features and the algorithm used for calculation of product scores in a feasibility query.