We studied the aquatic mosquito habitats in and around enzootic foci of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis virus (VEE) in western Venezuela. Specimens were sampled for 5 mo in three types of vegetation: tall lowland tropical forests, short inundated/secondary growth forests, and pastures/herbaceous vegetation around forests. Ground pools, flooded pastures, swamps, ponds, and canals predominated. We...

We report above-ground biomass (AGB), basal area, stem density and wood mass density estimates from 260 sample plots (mean size: 1.2 ha) in intact closed-canopy tropical forests across 12 African countries. Mean AGB is 395.7 Mg dry mass ha⁻¹ (95% CI: 14.3), substantially higher than Amazonian values, with the Congo Basin and contiguous forest region attaining AGB values (429 Mg ha⁻¹) similar to...

Random forests are a type of ensemble method which makes predictions by combining the results of several independent trees. However, the theory of random forests has long been outpaced by their application. In this paper, we propose a novel random forests algorithm based on cooperative game theory. Banzhaf power index is employed to evaluate the power of each feature by traversing possible feat...

In Northern Europe the use of tree biomass for production of energy is mostly based on thinning of forests, harvest residues, stumps from final cutting, bark of commercial roundwood, and organic waste of pulp industry. Results based on field experiments allow estimations of 137Cs activity removed from forests in wood fuel, and also the activity returned in ash used as a fertiliser. After one fe...

Scene-context plays an important role in scene analysis and object recognition. Among various sources of scene-context, we focus on scene-context scale, which means the effective scale of local context to classify an image pixel in a scene. This paper presents random forests based image categorization using the scene-context scale. The proposed method uses random forests, which are ensembles of...

Tropical rain forests play a dominant role in global biosphere-atmosphere CO(2) exchange. Although climate and nutrient availability regulate net primary production (NPP) and decomposition in all terrestrial ecosystems, the nature and extent of such controls in tropical forests remain poorly resolved. We conducted a meta-analysis of carbon-nutrient-climate relationships in 113 sites across the ...

Random forests (RF) is a popular general purpose classifier that has been shown to outperform many other classifiers on a variety of datasets. The widespread use of random forests can be attributed to several factors, some of which include its excellent empirical performance, scale and unit invariance, robustness to outliers, time and space complexity, and interpretability. While RF has many de...

The biophysical effects of forests on climate have been extensively studied with climate models. However, models cannot accurately reproduce local climate effects due to their coarse spatial resolution and uncertainties, and field observations are valuable but often insufficient due to their limited coverage. Here we present new evidence acquired from global satellite data to analyse the biophy...

The intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) predicts local species diversity to be maximal at an intermediate level of disturbance. Developed to explain species maintenance and diversity patterns in species-rich ecosystems such as tropical forests, tests of IDH in tropical forest remain scarce, small-scale and contentious. We use an unprecedented large-scale dataset (2504 one-hectare plots an...