This study evaluated the influence of the shoot density of the shoal grass Halodule wrightii on the composition of the associated algal community, in rocky and sandy habitats on the coast of Ceará in northeastern Brazil. The phycological community included 18 species in 10 families, members of Rodophyta (72.2%), Chlorophyta (22.2%) and Phaeophyceae (5.5%). The largest proportion were epilithic ...

Based on the laboratory study, the effects of sodium polyacrylate (SP) was investigated at 5 rates of 0, 0.08, 0.2, 0.5, and 1%, on water retention, saturated hydraulic conductivity(Ks), infiltration characteristic and water distribution profiles of a sandy soil. The results showed that water retention and available water capacity effectively increased with increasing SP rate. The Ks and the ra...

Superstorm Sandy ravaged the eastern seaboard of the United States, costing a great number of lives and billions of dollars in damage. Whether events like Sandy will become more frequent as anthropogenic greenhouse gases continue to increase remains an open and complex question. Here we consider whether the persistent large-scale atmospheric patterns that steered Sandy onto the coast will becom...

The growing use of social media has made it a critical component of disaster response and recovery efforts. Both in terms of preparedness and response, public health officials and first responders have turned to automated tools to assist with organizing and visualizing large streams of social media. In turn, this has spurred new research into algorithms for information extraction, event detecti...

The cordgrass Spartina alterniflora Loisel is a foundation species critical to the establishment and maintenance of western Atlantic salt marshes. Although the factors regulating cordgrass growth along sheltered, fine-sediment shorelines have been exhaustively studied, less is known about the mechanisms that maintain cordgrass production in high-energy marshes characterized by sandy substrates....

Assessing environmental effects of shelter forests is primarily necessary for realizing their greatest protective benefits. The Three-North Shelter Forest Program (TNSFP), the largest ecological afforestation program in the world, has been operated for three decades in China but so far lacks comprehensive assessment of its environmental impacts. Horqin Sandy Land (HSL) in Northeast China is one...

The shallow marine Late Holocene wedge of the northern Salerno Bay shelf (Southern Tyrrhenian Sea) discloses the presence of four decimetric shelf-tapering sand beds. Their internal features, depicted by cores analysis and their stratigraphic position, revealed by VHR seismic investigations, inferred sandy layers as being the result of flash deposition, storm controlled, thus episodic. Stratigr...

The interactive effects of soil texture and type of N fertility (i.e., manure vs. commercial N fertilizer) on N(2)O and CH(4) emissions have not been well established. This study was conducted to assess the impact of soil type and N fertility on greenhouse gas fluxes (N(2)O, CH(4), and CO(2)) from the soil surface. The soils used were a sandy loam (789 g kg(-1) sand and 138 g kg(-1) clay) and a...

The rate of relative sea-level (RSL) rise at Sandy Hook, NJ (4.0 ± 0.5 mm/yr) was higher than The Battery, NY (3.0 ± 0.3 mm/yr) from 1900 to 2012 despite being separated by just 26 km. The difference cannot be explained by differential glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA; 1.4 ± 0.4 and 1.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr RSL rise, respectively) alone. We estimate the contribution of sediment compaction to subsidence...

Little is known about the contribution made by the egg stage of African malaria vectors to the rapid rise in adult populations following the onset of seasonal rains. To examine this issue, we evaluated the viability of Anopheles gambiae eggs in drying soil in the laboratory. Survival data were collected from field-caught mosquitoes kept in sandy loam soil and laboratory-reared colonies kept in ...