With the availability of new techniques to close wine bottles avoiding the risk of “corky” taste the tradition of closing wine bottles with cork stoppers is on the retreat. As a consequence the Mediterranean cork oak forests with their rich biodiversity are endangered since their cultivation is not profitable anymore. This paper explores the viability of a market approach to the preservation of...

Habitat loss and fragmentation are the leading causes of species' declines and extinctions. A key component of studying population response to habitat alteration is to understand how fragmentation affects population connectivity in disturbed landscapes. We used landscape genetic analyses to determine how habitat fragmentation due to timber harvest affects genetic population connectivity of the ...

The correlation structure of fitness landscapes is a much used measure to characterize and classify various types of landscapes. However, analyzing the correlation structure of fitness landscapes has so far been restricted to static landscapes only. Here, we investigate the correlation structure of coupled, or dynamic, fitness landscapes. Using the NKC model of coevolution, we apply a correlati...

According to the "old view," proteins fold along well-defined sequential pathways, whereas the "new view" sees protein folding as a highly parallel stochastic process on funnel-shaped energy landscapes. We have analyzed parallel and sequential processes on a large number of molecular dynamics unfolding trajectories of the protein CI2 at high temperatures. Using rigorous statistical measures, we...

While comparing the progress of our two research projects of developing an information security management system (ISMS) for federated business process landscapes and the enhancement of security of social networks, we discovered a fundamental view congruency concerning the way information security can be handled. This paper deals with a conceptual framework which uses the ISO 27001 and the Germ...

For today's reader, it is striking that Kant’s discussion is not primarily concerned with works of art, but with natural phenomena -his paradigm examples evoke flowers, crystals, landscapes, stormy seas and starry skies. This is not a coincidence; it is connected with essential properties of Kant’s theory. In his view, the esthetic experience presupposes a disinterested attitude; it does not in...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Acer saccharum and Fagus grandifolia are among the most dominant late-successional tree species in North America. The influence of sapling growth responses to canopy gaps on the co-dominance of the two species in an old-growth forest in southern Quebec, Canada was examined. Two predictions were evaluated: (a) F. grandifolia is more shade tolerant than A. saccharum due to gre...

Local search algorithms exploit moves on an adjacency graph of the search space. An “elementary landscape” exists if the objective function f is an eigenfunction of the Laplacian of the graph induced by the neighborhood operator; this allows various statistics about the neighborhood to be computed in closed form. A new component based model makes it relatively simple to prove that certain types...

In Natural evolution, a mutation may be lethal, causing an abrupt end to an evolving lineage. This fact has a tendency to cause evolution to “prefer” mutationally robust solutions (which can in turn slow innovation), an effect that has been studied previously, especially in the context of evolution on neutral plateaux. Here, we tackle related issues but from the perspective of a practical optim...

The problem of finding an algebraic structure for stable open subsets of a suitable domain has been recently raised by several authors. Specifically, it could be useful to have, in the stable case, a notion similar to the one of “frame”, in order to develop something similar to pointless topology, that is an algebraic insight of spaces. In domain theory, an interesting application of frame theo...