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Climate change has been proven to be an indisputable fact and to be occurring at a faster rate (compared to the other regions at the same latitude of the world) in boreal forest areas. Climate change has been observed to have a strong influence on forests; however, until now, the amount of quantitative information on the climate drivers that are producing changes in boreal forest has been limited. The objectives of this work were to quantify the spatiotemporal characteristics of boreal forest and forest types and to find the significant climate drivers that are producing changes in boreal forest. The boreal forest in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, Russia, which lies within the latitude range 51–69∘ N, was selected as the study area. The distribution of the boreal forest and forest types in the years 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015 were derived from a series of Landsat data. The spatiotemporal changes in the boreal forest and forest types that occurred over each 10-year period within each 2∘ latitudinal zone between 51 and 69∘ N from 1985 to 2015 were then comprehensively analyzed. The results show that the total area of forest increased over the study period and that the increase was fastest in the high-latitude zone between 63 and 69∘ N. The increases in the areas of broad-leaved and coniferous forests were found to have different characteristics. In the medium-latitude zone between 57 and 63∘ N in particular, the area of broad-leaved forest grew faster than that of coniferous forest. Finally, the influence of the climate factors of temperature and precipitation on changes in the forests was analyzed. The results indicate that temperature rather than precipitation is the main climate factor that is driving change.

To tackle the increasing issue of heat risk in Australia and pressure of population growth, this project aimed to establish a first nationwide dynamic and interactive heat vulnerability assessment toolkit. The toolkit integrated multiple data sources, cloud computing, and Web GIS technologies to deliver cool intelligence for more heat resilient Australian cities and suburbs. A cloud-based open-source tool, iGEE, was first developed to derive land surface temperature (LST), NDBI (normalized difference built-up index) and NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) from multiple satellite imagery on Google Earth Engine (GEE), a no-code web application allowing users to retrieve satellite data for a large area at fine scales. Following that, a python-based desktop app was then developed to calculate an integrated Heat Vulnerability Index (iHVI) for any cities and area at a fine scale of Statistical Area 1 (SA1). The iHVI toolkit allows users to construct heat sensitivity, heat adaptive capability indicators, and composite heat vulnerability index, which enables modelling of the relationships between heat, environmental and socioeconomic factors.

Aqueous reactions may turn precursors into light-absorbing and toxic products, leading to air quality deterioration and adverse health effects. In this study, we comprehensively investigated eugenol photooxidation (a representative biomass-burning-emitted, highly substituted phenolic compound) in the bulk aqueous phase with direct photolysis, a hydroxyl radical (OH), and an organic triplet excited state (3C∗). Results show that the degradation rates of eugenol followed the order of 3C∗> OH > direct photolysis. During the 3C∗-initiated oxidation, different reactive oxygen species (ROS), including 3C∗, OH, 1O2, and O2⚫-, can participate in the oxidation of eugenol, quenching experiments verified 3C∗ was the most important one, while, during OH-initiated oxidation, O2⚫- was a more important ROS than OH for degrading eugenol. The rate constants under saturated O2, air, and N2 followed the order of kO2>kAir>kN2 for both direct photolysis and OH-initiated oxidation but changed to kAir>kN2>kO2 for 3C∗-mediated oxidation. pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) levels both decreased during oxidation, indicating the formation of acids and the participation of DO in oxidation. Ultraviolet and visible (UV-vis) light absorption spectra of the reaction products showed a clear absorbance enhancement in the 300–400 nm range for all three sets of experiments, and new fluorescence at excitation/emission =250/ (400–500) nm appeared, suggesting the formation of new chromophores and fluorophores (brown carbon species). These species were likely attributed to humic-like substances (HULIS), as shown by the increases in HULIS concentrations during oxidation. Large mass yields of products (140 %–197 %) after 23 h of illumination were obtained, and high oxidation degrees of these products were also observed. Correspondingly, a series of oxygenated compounds were identified, and a detailed reaction mechanism with functionalization as a dominant pathway was proposed. At last, the dithiothreitol (DTT) assay was applied to assess the oxidation potential of the reaction products, and the end products of all three sets of experiments showed higher DTT consumption rates than those of eugenol, indicating that more toxic species were produced upon aqueous oxidation. Overall, our results from using eugenol as a model compound, underscore the potential importance of the aqueous processing of biomass burning emissions in secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation.

The existing NDVI products have problems in terms of low spatial resolution and inconsistent values at a large geographical scale. Based on medium and high-resolution multi-source remote sensing data (GF-1 and GF-2 data), this paper normalized NDVI by combining absolute radiation normalization with relative radiation normalization. And the existing relative radiation normalization method, single-scene global linear normalization (SGloLM) method, is improved to adapt to the production of large-range high-resolution NDVI products. Aiming at the problem of obvious mosaic seams when the SGloLM method is applied to multi-scene images, it is mainly improved from two aspects. One is to improve the coefficient solution of the SGloLM algorithm and propose a new method considering the surrounding multi-scene data, the multi-scene global linear model (MGloLM). The other is to incorporate the Maximum Value Composite (MVC) method to synthesize the maximum value of NDVI at different times in a season, to represent the optimal situation of vegetation growth in the current season. In this study, combined experiments of different methods were performed, as well as qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The experimental results show that SGloLM+MVC and the MGloLM+MVC methods can better eliminate the mosaic seams, and their histogram is most similar to the histogram of standard data, and all quantitative evaluation indexes of SGloLM+MVC are optimal (CC=0.7804, MAD=0.0643, RMSE=0.1012).

Abstract We report a measurement of the electric dipole moment of the τ lepton (dτ) using an 833 fb −1 data sample collected near the Υ(4S) resonance, with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e + e − collider. Using an optimal observable method, we obtain the real and imaginary parts of d τ as Re(d τ ) = (−0.62 ± 0.63) × 10 −17 ecm and Im(d τ ) = (−0.40 ± 0.32) × 10 −17 ecm, respectively. These results are consistent with null electric dipole moment at the present level of experimental sensitivity and improve the sensitivity by about a factor of three.

Abstract Charged lepton flavor violation is forbidden in the Standard Model but possible in several new physics scenarios. In many of these models, the radiative decays τ ± → ℓ ± γ (ℓ = e, μ) are predicted to have a sizeable probability, making them particularly interesting channels to search at various experiments. An updated search via τ ± → ℓ ± γ using full data of the Belle experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 988 fb −1, is reported for charged lepton flavor violation. No significant excess over background predictions from the Standard Model is observed, and the upper limits on the branching fractions, B $$ \mathcal{B} $$ (τ ± → μ ± γ) ≤ 4.2 × 10 −8 and B $$ \mathcal{B} $$ (τ ± → e ± γ) ≤ 5.6 × 10 −8, are set at 90% confidence level.

Automated large-scale retrieval of stereo photogrammetric DTMs of Mars fall into three categories: use of COTS software such as BAE-SOCET®; private software such as the DLR-VICAR software suite and open source solutions such as the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP). We describe here a novel open source system developed on the back of ASP known as CASP-GO (Tao et al., 2018) which has automated and extended ASP to be able to be applied to all modern single-pass or repeat-pass stereo photogrammetric datasets from 21st century systems such as HRSC, CTX and HiRISE, CASP-GO also includes an automated co-registration system which employs HRSC (itself linked to MOLA) as the base-map upon which all other DTMs are co-registered. We show an example here of this automated co-registration system applied to multi-resolution stacks including CRISM images. Several thousand multi-resolution 3D products, Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and their corresponding orthorectified images (ORIs) have been generated and used in a wide variety of scientific studies, a few examples of which are shown here. Finally, a new method distributing these products providing long-term archiving and ease of access using DOIs is shown employing the ESA-PSA Guest Storage Facility and their corresponding display within the iMars webGIS system.

The scale of urban construction land is an important factor of the process of urbanization. This paper presented an urban construction land change detection method combining dense DSM difference and TDOM tree extraction of traditional aerial photos: the pixel-level DSM and TDOM for two period are obtained by Semi-Global Matching (SGM) and Multi View Stereo (MVS), respectively. After DSM pre-processing including noise filter and hole filling, the difference of DSM is calculated. The segmentation and tree extraction of TDOM are proposed to reduce the change errors caused by the crown influence of different seasons. Based on this method, 2 experiments were carried out. One was for the urban construction land located at 5th ring road south in Beijing with ADS80 aerial images obtained in 2016 and 2017, and the other was for the building demolition and construction of Dongcheng and Xicheng District of Beijing with UltraCam, the frame camera and RCD30 between 2015 and 2017. Through the experiments, it was concluded that the result of the method could identify all the changes both in the plane and in the elevation, and the edges of the change patches were clear and regular, which could assist checking the manual change extraction results. The minimum area of the change patches could be 5 m2 with the DSM resolution of 0.2 m, which was of great significance for the urban construction change detection including the factory, residential area and also the urban regional greening.

This paper describes scalings of the H-mode confinement database of neutral beam injection (NBI)-lower hybrid wave (LHW) and electron cyclotron resonant heating-LHW plasmas in the EAST tokamak. Fundamental information of the EAST H-mode database and the details of calculation of the thermal energy confinement time in EAST are presented. The result of the scaling model ${\tau _{{\text{E,EASTS,H,NBI - LHW}}}}$ of the thermal energy confinement time in NBI-LHW plasmas with root-mean-square-error ${\text{RMSE}} = 5.5\% $ , compared with the multi-machine scaling model ${\tau _{{\text{th,98}}y{\text{2}}}}$ derived from the multi-machine database (mainly NBI heating) with ${\text{RMSE}} = 12.9\% $ , is obtained. The scaling ${\tau _{{\text{E,EAST,H,NBI - LHW}}}}$ presents a similar dependency on plasma current and power loss and a lower dependency on plasma density and elongation, but stronger dependency on toroidal field than in ${\tau _{{\text{th,98}}y{\text{2}}}}$ . The scaling ${\tau _{{\text{E,EAST,H,ECRH - LHW}}}}$ demonstrates a similar dependency on plasma current and power loss and lower dependency on plasma density, but a negative dependency with large error bars on elongation compared with ${\tau _{{\text{E,EAST,H,NBI - LHW}}}}$ in NBI-LHW plasmas. The comparison of EAST models with the more recent multi-tokamak scaling ITPA20-IL shows a similar engineering dependency on plasma current, power loss and plasma density, but opposite dependency on toroidal field.

Aerosol pH is difficult to measure directly but can be calculated if the chemical composition is known with sufficient accuracy and precision to calculate the aerosol water content and the H+ concentration through the equilibrium among acids and their conjugate bases. In practical terms, simultaneous measurements of at least one semi-volatile constituent, e.g. NH3 or HNO3, are required to provide a constraint on the calculation of pH. Long-term records of aerosol pH are scarce due to the limited monitoring of NH3 in conjunction with PM2.5. In this study, 10-year (2007–2016) records of pH of PM2.5 at six eastern Canadian sites were calculated using the E-AIM II model with the input of gaseous NH3, gaseous HNO3 and major water-soluble inorganic ions in PM2.5 provided by Canada's National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) Program. Clear seasonal cycles of aerosol pH were found with lower pH (∼2) in summer and higher pH (∼3) in winter consistently across all six sites, while the day-to-day variations of aerosol pH were higher in winter compared to summer. Tests of the sensitivity of aerosol pH to meteorological parameters demonstrate that the changes in ambient temperature largely drive the seasonal cycle of aerosol pH. The sensitivity of pH to chemical composition shows that pH has different responses to the changes in chemical composition in different seasons. During summertime, aerosol pH was mainly determined by temperature with limited impact from changes in NHx or sulfate concentrations. However, in wintertime, both meteorological parameters and chemical composition contribute to the variations in aerosol pH, resulting in the larger variation during wintertime. This study reveals that the sensitivity of aerosol pH to chemical composition is distinctly different under different meteorological conditions and needs to be carefully examined for any particular region.

The black hole (BH) algorithm is a new type of natural heuristic algorithm inspired by the movement law of the “black hole” celestial body in the universe. BH algorithm has received extensive attention due to its advantages such as fewer parameters, simple algorithm structure and strong exploitation. For the shortcomings of poor exploaration and premature convergence of BH algorithm, the improved golden sine (G-S) operator is introduced into BH algorithm to greatly improve the exploaration. Then the Levy flight operator with controlled step size has become a better local search operator from the global search operator, so the improved Levy flight operator is introduced to further improve the exploitation of BH algorithm. Ultimately, the golden sine operator and Levy flight operator based black hole (GSLBH) algorithm is able to balance the exploaration with exploitation. GSLBH, BH, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WAO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), Golden Sine Algorithm (Gold-SA) were adopted to carry out the simulation experiments with 17 benchmark functions, respectively, and the statistical data results are analyzed and compared. Finally, it can be concluded that the proposed improved black hole algorithm has better exploaration, and the convergence speed and accuracy of the algorithm have been further improved.

In this paper, the Landsat imagery of 1995, 2006 and 2015 is used to monitor land cover change in Dongting Lake area. Our study mainly focuses on five types of land cover: water body, wetland, built-up area, cropland and forest. The land cover change in the Dongting Lake area is comprehensively evaluated by using land cover transfer matrix, land cover change amplitude, and landscape pattern indexes. Our study shows that: (1) the cropland area increased from 48.58 % in 1995 to 53.61 % in 2006, then decreased to 48.85 % in 2015; (2) different from the trend of cropland, the area of water body and wetland decreased in 2006; (3) the forest area steadily increased, to 2015, and there was an increase of 3.46 % during 1995–2015, due to artificial afforestation in the lake area. In terms of the landscape pattern, the landscape fragmentation decreased and the patch connectivity increased.

The crystal orientation of a magnetic nanowire can strongly influence its properties, yet nanowire growth with directional control remains challenging. Here, the authors use glancing angle deposition and angle switching to grow iron cobalt nanowires in seven different crystal directions.

We characterize a representative particulate matter (PM) episode that occurred in Shanghai during winter 2014. Particle size distribution, hygroscopicity, effective density, and single particle mass spectrometry were determined online, along with offline analysis of water-soluble inorganic ions. The mass ratio of SNA ∕ PM1. 0 (sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium) fluctuated slightly around 0.28, suggesting that both secondary inorganic compounds and carbonaceous aerosols contributed substantially to the haze formation, regardless of pollution level. Nitrate was the most abundant ionic species during hazy periods, indicating that NOx contributed more to haze formation in Shanghai than did SO2. During the representative PM episode, the calculated PM was always consistent with the measured PM1. 0, indicating that the enhanced pollution level was attributable to the elevated number of larger particles. The number fraction of the near-hydrophobic group increased as the PM episode developed, indicating the accumulation of local emissions. Three banana-shaped particle evolutions were consistent with the rapid increase of PM1. 0 mass loading, indicating that the rapid size growth by the condensation of condensable materials was responsible for the severe haze formation. Both hygroscopicity and effective density of the particles increased considerably with growing particle size during the banana-shaped evolutions, indicating that the secondary transformation of NOx and SO2 was one of the most important contributors to the particle growth. Our results suggest that the accumulation of gas-phase and particulate pollutants under stagnant meteorological conditions and subsequent rapid particle growth by secondary processes were primarily responsible for the haze pollution in Shanghai during wintertime.

Abstract Using 7.33 fb −1 of e + e − collision data samples collected with the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 4.128 and 4.226 GeV, we search for the radiative decay D s + → γρ 770 + $$ {D}_s^{+}\to \gamma \rho {(770)}^{+} $$ for the first time. A hint of D s + → γρ 770 + $$ {D}_s^{+}\to \gamma \rho {(770)}^{+} $$ is observed with a statistical significance of 2.5σ. The branching fraction of D s + → γρ 770 + $$ {D}_s^{+}\to \gamma \rho {(770)}^{+} $$ is measured to be (2.2 ± 0.9stat. ± 0.2syst. ) × 10 −4, corresponding to an upper limit of 6.1 × 10 −4 at the 90% confidence level.

The ability to detect weak magnetic moments is important for the study of nanomagnetism and spin-based quantum technologies. Here, the authors demonstrate nanoscale spin detection with high spin sensitivity using a commercial hard drive write head.

Understanding planetary atmosphere-surface exchange and extra-terrestrial-surface formation processes within our Solar System is one of the fundamental goals of planetary science research. There has been a revolution in planetary surface observations over the last 15 years, especially in 3D imaging of surface shape. This has led to the ability to overlay image data and derived information from different epochs, back in time to the mid 1970s, to examine changes through time, such as the recent discovery of mass movement, tracking inter-year seasonal changes and looking for occurrences of fresh craters. Within the EU FP-7 iMars project, we have developed a fully automated multi-resolution DTM processing chain, called the Coregistration ASP-Gotcha Optimised (CASP-GO), based on the open source NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) [Tao et al., this conference], which is being applied to the production of planetwide DTMs and ORIs (OrthoRectified Images) from CTX and HiRISE. Alongside the production of individual strip CTX & HiRISE DTMs & ORIs, DLR [Gwinner et al., 2015] have processed HRSC mosaics of ORIs and DTMs for complete areas in a consistent manner using photogrammetric bundle block adjustment techniques. A novel automated co-registration and orthorectification chain has been developed by [Sidiropoulos & Muller, this conference]. Using the HRSC map products (both mosaics and orbital strips) as a map-base it is being applied to many of the 400,000 level-1 EDR images taken by the 4 NASA orbital cameras. In particular, the NASA Viking Orbiter camera (VO), Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), Context Camera (CTX) as well as the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) back to 1976. A webGIS has been developed [van Gasselt et al., this conference] for displaying this time sequence of imagery and will be demonstrated showing an example from one of the HRSC quadrangle map-sheets. Automated quality control [Sidiropoulos & Muller, 2015] techniques are applied to screen for suitable images and these are extended to detect temporal changes in features on the surface such as mass movements, streaks, spiders, impact craters, CO2 geysers and Swiss Cheese terrain. For result verification these data mining techniques are then being employed within a citizen science project within the Zooniverse family. Examples of data mining and its verification will be presented.

Higher spatial resolution imaging data is always desirable to the international community of planetary scientists interested in improving understanding of surface formation processes. We have previously developed a novel Super-resolution restoration (SRR) technique (Tao & Muller, 2016) using Gotcha sub-pixel matching, orthorectification, and segmented 4th order PDE-TV, called GPT SRR, which is able to restore 5 cm-12.5 cm near rover scale images (equivalent to Navcam projected FoV at a range of ≥ 5 m) from multiple 25 cm resolution NASA MRO HiRISE images. The SRR technique has been successfully applied to the rover traverses for the MER and MSL missions within the EU FP-7 PRoViDE project. These SRR results have revealed new surface information including the imaging of individual rocks (diameter ≥ 25 cm) by comparison of the original HiRISE image and rover Navcam orthorectified image mosaics. In this work, we seek evidence from processing a very large number of stereo reconstruction results from all Navcam stereo images within PRoViDE, registration and comparison with the corresponding SRR image, in order to derive a quantitative assessment on key features including rocks (diameter

Within the EU FP-7 iMars project, a fully automated multi-resolution DTM processing chain, called Co-registration ASP-Gotcha Optimised (CASP-GO) has been developed, based on the open source NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP). CASP-GO includes tiepoint based multi-resolution image co-registration and an adaptive least squares correlation-based sub-pixel refinement method called Gotcha. The implemented system guarantees global geo-referencing compliance with respect to HRSC (and thence to MOLA), provides refined stereo matching completeness and accuracy based on the ASP normalised cross-correlation. We summarise issues discovered from experimenting with the use of the open-source ASP DTM processing chain and introduce our new working solutions. These issues include global co-registration accuracy, de-noising, dealing with failure in matching, matching confidence estimation, outlier definition and rejection scheme, various DTM artefacts, uncertainty estimation, and quality-efficiency trade-offs.

This study aimed to assess the efficacy of a rural community-based integrated intervention for early prevention and management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in China. This 18-year cluster-randomized controlled trial encompassing 15 villages included 1008 patients (454 men and 40 women in the intervention group [mean age, 54 ± 10 years]; 482 men and 32 women in the control group [mean age, 53 ± 10 years]) with confirmed COPD or at risk for COPD. Villages were randomly assigned to the intervention or the control group, and study participants residing within the villages received treatment accordingly. Intervention group patients took part in a program that included systematic health education, smoking cessation counseling, and education on management of COPD. Control group patients received usual care. The groups were compared after 18 years regarding the incidence of COPD, decline in lung function, and mortality of COPD. COPD incidence was lower in the intervention group than in the control group (10% vs 16%,

Rice production is increasingly limited by water scarcity. Covering paddy rice soils with films (so-called ground cover rice production system: GCRPS) can significantly reduce water demand as well as overcome temperature limitations at the beginning of the growing season, which results in greater grain yields in relatively cold regions and also in those suffering from seasonal water shortages. However, it has been speculated that both increased soil aeration and temperature under GCRPS result in lower soil organic carbon and nitrogen stocks. Here we report on a regional-scale experiment conducted in Shiyan, a typical rice-producing mountainous area of China. We sampled paired adjacent paddy and GCRPS fields at 49 representative sites. Measured parameters included soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) stocks (to 1 m depth), soil physical and chemical properties, δ15N composition of plants and soils, potential C mineralization rates, and soil organic carbon (SOC) fractions at all sampling sites. Root biomass was also quantified at one intensively monitored site. The study showed that: (1) GCRPS increased SOC and N stocks 5–20 years following conversion from traditional paddy systems; (2) there were no differences between GCRPS and paddy systems in soil physical and chemical properties for the various soil depths, with the exception of soil bulk density; (3) GCRPS increased above-ground and root biomass in all soil layers down to a 40 cm depth; (4) δ15N values were lower in soils and plant leaves indicating lower NH3 volatilization losses from GCRPS than in paddy systems; and (5) GCRPS had lower C mineralization potential than that observed in paddy systems over a 200-day incubation period. Our results suggest that GCRPS is an innovative production technique that not only increases rice yields using less irrigation water, but that it also increases SOC and N stocks.

In this presentation, machine vision-guided systems for food processing automations will be presented. The goals of these equipment designs were to improve the process efficiency and minimize labour intensities. A showcase of an automated vision-guided intelligent strawberry de-calyxing machine and an automated 3-D imaging system for seafood sorting lines are introduced and discussed in this paper. These automated system technologies have the capabilities of huge labour savings from 10 to 120 folds.

The 2003 Beagle 2 Mars lander has been identified in Isidis Planitia at 90.43° E, 11.53° N, close to the predicted target of 90.50° E, 11.53° N. Beagle 2 was an exobiology lander designed to look for isotopic and compositional signs of life on Mars, as part of the European Space Agency Mars Express (MEX) mission. The 2004 recalculation of the original landing ellipse from a 3-sigma major axis from 174 km to 57 km, and the acquisition of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) imagery at 30 cm per pixel across the target region, led to the initial identification of the lander in 2014. Following this, more HiRISE images, giving a total of 15, including red and blue-green colours, were obtained over the area of interest and searched, which allowed sub-pixel imaging using super high-resolution techniques. The size (approx. 1.5 m), distinctive multilobed shape, high reflectivity relative to the local terrain, specular reflections, and location close to the centre of the planned landing ellipse led to the identification of the Beagle 2 lander. The shape of the imaged lander, although to some extent masked by the specular reflections in the various images, is consistent with deployment of the lander lid and then some or all solar panels. Failure to fully deploy the panels—which may have been caused by damage during landing—would have prohibited communication between the lander and MEX and commencement of science operations. This implies that the main part of the entry, descent and landing sequence, the ejection from MEX, atmospheric entry and parachute deployment, and landing worked as planned with perhaps only the final full panel deployment failing.

To safeguard food security and preserve precious water resources, the technology of water-saving ground cover rice production system (GCRPS) is being increasingly adopted for rice cultivation. However, changes in soil water status and temperature under GCRPS may affect soil biogeochemical processes that control the biosphere–atmosphere exchanges of methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The overall goal of this study is to better understand how net ecosystem greenhouse gas exchanges (NEGE) and grain yields are affected by GCRPS in an annual rice-based cropping system. Our evaluation was based on measurements of the CH4 and N2O fluxes and soil heterotrophic respiration (CO2 emissions) over a complete year, and the estimated soil carbon sequestration intensity for six different fertilizer treatments for conventional paddy and GCRPS. The fertilizer treatments included urea application and no N fertilization for both conventional paddy (CUN and CNN) and GCRPS (GUN and GNN), and solely chicken manure (GCM) and combined urea and chicken manure applications (GUM) for GCRPS. Averaging across all the fertilizer treatments, GCRPS increased annual N2O emission and grain yield by 40 and 9%, respectively, and decreased annual CH4 emission by 69%, while GCRPS did not affect soil CO2 emissions relative to the conventional paddy. The annual direct emission factors of N2O were 4.01, 0.09 and 0.50% for GUN, GCM and GUM, respectively, and 1.52% for the conventional paddy (CUN). The annual soil carbon sequestration intensity under GCRPS was estimated to be an average of −1.33 Mg C ha−1 yr−1, which is approximately 44% higher than the conventional paddy. The annual NEGE were 10.80–11.02 Mg CO2-eq ha−1 yr−1 for the conventional paddy and 3.05–9.37 Mg CO2-eq ha−1 yr−1 for the GCRPS, suggesting the potential feasibility of GCRPS in reducing net greenhouse effects from rice cultivation. Using organic fertilizers for GCRPS considerably reduced annual emissions of CH4 and N2O and increased soil carbon sequestration, resulting in the lowest NEGE (3.05–5.00 Mg CO2-eq ha−1 yr−1). Accordingly, water-saving GCRPS with organic fertilizer amendments was considered the most promising management regime for simultaneously achieving relatively high grain yield and reduced net greenhouse gas emission.

This paper presents a wide range of research and processing results in the area of multi-resolution orbital data co-registration, multiresolution ground 3D reconstruction, and orbit-to-ground data fusion, achieved within the EU-FP7 PRoVisG and PRoViDE project. We focus on three NASA rover missions, MER-A, MER-B, and MSL, to provide examples of automated methods for producing coregistered, multi-resolution 3D products. We highlight the mis-registration discovered between current HiRISE to HRSC datasets, CTX to HRSC and HiRISE to CTX co- results, wide baseline stereo reconstruction results of rover imagery, ground-to-orbit coregistration, i.e. reconstructed wide baseline ground ORI and HiRISE ORI co-registration, and extensive exploitation of the coregistered datasets in visualisation and interactive web-GIS.

Abstract The processes h c → γP (P = η′, η, π 0) are studied with a sample of (27.12 ± 0.14) × 108 ψ(3686) events collected by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. The decay h c → γη is observed for the first time with the significance of 9.0 σ, and the branching fraction is determined to be (3.77 ± 0.55 ± 0.13 ± 0.26) × 10 −4, while B $$ \mathcal{B} $$ (h c → γη′) is measured to be (1.40 ± 0.11 ± 0.04 ± 0.10) × 10 −3, where the first uncertainties are statistical, the second systematic, and the third from the branching fraction of ψ(3686) → π 0 h c . The combination of these results allows for a precise determination of R h c = B h c → γη B h c → γ η ′ , $$ {R}_{h_c}=\frac{\mathcal{B}\left({h}_c\to {\pi}^0\gamma \eta \right)}{\mathcal{B}\left({h}_c\to {\pi}^0\gamma {\eta}^{\prime}\right)}, $$ which is calculated to be (27.0 ± 4.4 ± 1.0)%. The results are valuable for gaining a deeper understanding of η − η′ mixing, and its manifestation within quantum chromodynamics. No significant signal is found for the decay h c → γπ 0, and an upper limit is placed on its branching fraction of B $$ \mathcal{B} $$ (h c → γπ 0) < 5.0 × 10 −5, at the 90% confidence level.

The effects of land use practices on soil fauna, especially earthworms, are poorly known in coastal saline agricultural soils. Here we compare earthworm communities in six types of land use practice in the coastal region of China's Bohai Bay, namely uncultivated saline soil, two orchard (pear and winter jujube) lands, man-made forests (chinese ash), vegetable land and cropped land (maize). In addition, we recorded selected physicochemical properties of the soil. Soil organic matter content and total N were significantly higher under pear orchard and vegetable land than under the other land use practices, and their lowest values were observed from uncultivated saline soil. Vegetable land and pear orchard land showed a significantly higher abundance of earthworms than the other land use practices, whereas no earthworm was found in uncultivated saline soil. The sites under individual practices supported one to three earthworm species. Aporrectodea trapezoides species was present under four types of land use practice, and the biomass of this species accounted for more than 60% of the community. Vegetable land and pear orchard land supported richer earthworm community than the other land use practices, dominated by Aporrectodea trapezoides and Drawida japonica. These preliminary results indicated that land use practices have substantial effects on the abundance and composition of earthworm communities in saline soils.

To get insight into mechanism by which apple tree (Malus domestica Borkh.) regulates flowering, two apple flowering locus T (FT) homologues, MdFT1 and MdFT2, were isolated from the leaf cDNAs of cultivar Gala. The open reading frames (ORFs) of two MdFTs encoded 174 amino acids. The deduced amino acid sequence of MdFT1 and MdFT2 showed 94.3 % similarity to each other, while 72.6 and 76.0 % to AtFT protein, respectively. Semi-quantitative RT-PCR indicated their specific expression in leaves. Visualization of MdFT2-GFP fusion protein demonstrated its localization on membrane. Ectopic overexpression of either MdFT1 or MdFT2 in Arabidopsis significantly induced early flowering by activating the downstream flowering-related genes.

The present study reports a birth of goat clone produced by nuclear transfer of cultured and cryopreserved fibroblast cells into slaughterhouse-derived oocytes. The donors of somatic cells were fibroblasts derived from the ear skin of a Boer goat while the recipient ooplasm was in vitro matured oocytes of Huanghuai white goat, an Anhui native goat species. The reconstructed embryos were cultured in vitro and then the morphologically normal embryos were transferred to the surrogates. The reconstructed embryos were surgically transferred into 37 recipient surrogates, Huanghuai white goats with natural oestrus. Five of them were treated with hCG after transfer. Among them, one was pregnant and gave birth to a live kid. Due to the improper delivery aid, the cloned kid died accidentally after birth. The cloned kid was then anatomised to observe the viscera development, and the results showed that the organs were normal. Paraffin tissue slices were prepared and stained to ensure the viscera development further, and the results suggested that the organs also developed well in spite of incipient hydropericardium. The microsatellite analysis identified the cloning. It is suggested that the optimised nuclear transfer protocol and proper hCG treatment lead to the successful birth of a goat clone.

In this study, we have integrated an up-to-date physio-chemical transformation mechanism of Hg into the framework of US EPA's CMAQ model system. In addition, the model adapted detailed calculations of the air-surface exchange for Hg to properly describe Hg re-emissions and dry deposition from and to natural surfaces. The mechanism covers Hg in three categories, elemental Hg (Hg0), reactive gaseous Hg (RGM) and particulate Hg (HgP). With interfacing to MM5 (meteorology processor) and SMOKE (emission processor), we applied the model to a 4-week period in June/July 1995 on a domain covering most of eastern North America. Results indicate that the model simulates reasonably well the levels of total gaseous Hg (TGM) and the specific Hg wet deposition measurements made by the Hg deposition network (MDN). Moreover, results from various scenario runs reveal that the Hg system behaves in a closely linear way in terms of contributions from different source categories, i.e. anthropogenic emissions, natural re-emissions and background. Analyses of the scenario results suggest that 37% of anthropogenically emitted Hg was deposited back in the model domain with 5155 kg of anthropogenic Hg moving out of the domain during the simulation period. Overall, the domain served as a net source, which supplied ~a half ton of Hg to the global background pool over the period. Our model validation and a sensitivity test further rationalized the rate constant for gaseous oxidation of Hg0 by hydroxyl radical OH used in the global scale modelling study by Bergan and Rodhe (2001). A further laboratory determination of the reaction rate constant, including its temperature dependence, stands as one of the important issues critical to improving our knowledge on the budget and cycling of Hg.

A pair of ladder operators are introduced and are for solving the radial equation for the hydrogen atom. The energy eigenvalues as well explicit analytic expressions for the eigenfunctions of this particular Kepler problem are obtained after some algebraic manipulation of the operators.