The wildland–urban interface represents landscape change—changes brought about by urbanization, by shifts in forest management, and altered disturbance regimes, each having ecological, social, and economic ramifications. In this chapter, I will focus on some of the ecological ramifications associated with landscape change, primarily forest fragmentation and deforestation, resulting from urbaniz...

The perturbative QCD fragmentation functions for a heavy quark to fragment into heavy-light mesons are studied in the heavy-quark limit. The fragmentation functions for S-wave pseudoscalar and vector mesons are calculated to next-to-leading order in the heavy-quark mass expansion using the methods of heavy-quark effective theory. The results agree with the mb → ∞ limit of the perturbative QCD f...

Habitat destruction, a key determinant of species loss, can be characterized by two components, patch loss and patch fragmentation, where the former refers to the reduction in patch availability, and the latter to the division of the remaining patches. Classical metacommunity models have recently explored how food web dynamics respond to patch loss, but the effects of patch fragmentation have l...

Stars are strongly clustered on both large (∼pc) and small (∼binary) scales, but there are few analytic or even semi-analytic theories for the correlation function and multiplicity of stars. In this paper, we present such a theory, based on our recently developed semi-analytic framework called MISFIT (Minimalistic Star Formation Including Turbulence), which models gravitoturbulent fragmentation...

Fragmentation of molecules under collision-induced dissociation (CID) conditions is not well-understood. This may make interpretation of MSMS spectra difficult and limit the effectiveness of software tools intended to aid mass spectral interpretation. Density Functional Theory (DFT) has been successfully applied to explain the thermodynamics of fragmentation in the gas phase by the modelling th...

The purpose of this work is to define and study homogeneous fragmentation processes in continuous time, which are meant to describe the evolution of an object that breaks down randomly into pieces as time passes. Roughly, we show that the dynamics of such a fragmentation process are determined by some exchangeable measure on the set of partitions of �, and result from the combination of two dif...

Background: Infertility is estimated to affect up to 15% of couples of reproductive age, and male factors contribute to 50% of these cases. Globozoospermia syndrome is a severe form of teratozoospermia, with an incidence of less than 0.1%. It is characterized by round sperm head. The most prominent feature of globozoospermia is the malformation of the acrosome, which is totally absent in the to...

BACKGROUND Urbanization is a major cause of habitat fragmentation worldwide. Ecological and conservation theory predicts many potential impacts of habitat fragmentation on natural populations, including genetic impacts. Habitat fragmentation by urbanization causes populations of animals and plants to be isolated in patches of suitable habitat that are surrounded by non-native vegetation or seve...

One of the key outcomes of blasting in mines is found to be rock fragmentation which profoundly affects downstream expenses. In fact, size prediction of rock fragmentation is the first leap towards the optimization of blasting design parameters. This paper makes an attempt to present a model to predict rock fragmentation using Mutual Information (MI) in Meydook copper mine. Ten parameters are c...