Can limits of plant available water be inferred from soil moisture distributions?

Can the cause of aggregation be inferred from species distributions?

Species distributions often show an aggregated pattern, which can be due to a number of endoand exogenous factors. While autologistic models have been used for modelling such data with statistical rigour, little emphasis has been put on disentangling potential causes of aggregation. In this paper we ask whether it is possible to infer sources of aggregation in species distributions from a singl...

Measurement of Available Soil Moisture

Soil-moisture limits on plant uptake: An upscaled relationship for water-limited ecosystems

Transpiration in water-limited ecosystems is controlled by the availability of soil moisture. Rain events in these natural environments may only partially wet the root zone, leading to a heterogeneous distribution of available water. This spatial variability coupled with the non-linearity of the function relating local uptake to local saturation produces a non-unique relationship when these qua...

Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?

There is much interest currently in using functional neuroimaging techniques to understand better the nature of cognition. One particular practice that has become common is 'reverse inference', by which the engagement of a particular cognitive process is inferred from the activation of a particular brain region. Such inferences are not deductively valid, but can still provide some information. ...

What can Be inferred from surrogate data testing?

In a recent Letter Paluš and Novotná [1] reported statistical evidence based on surrogate data testing for linearity that a driven nonlinear oscillator is the mechanism underlying the sunspot cycle. While their result might be true, we doubt the formal correctness of their conclusion. Surrogate data testing for linearity [2] tests the null hypothesis that a linear, Gauss-ian, stationary, stocha...