We analyzed population dynamics and changes in species diversity and composition of saplings (tree or shrub stems >50 cm in height and < 1 cm diameter at breast height) during an interval lasting from 5 years before the 1996 Hurricane Fran to 5 years post-hurricane through use of permanent transects where individual sapling stems were censused annually. The study site was the Duke Forest, locat...

One hundred and nine soil samples were collected in 69 different localities along two transects, one North– South, about 900 km in length, and the other East–West (750 km in length), across Senegal and Gambia. The first transect followed a rainfall gradient and the second a human density gradient. The relationship between carbon content, C/N ratio and soil type on the abundance and species dist...

Identifying factors that influence variation in light availability within forested ecosystems represents an important component in our understanding of the complex determinants of tree seedling regeneration. We assessed the influence of forest structure and canopy tree architecture on spatial heterogeneity of understory light availability in three old-growth and three second-growth forests in l...

Leaf Area Index (leaf area per unit ground area, LAI) is a key driver of forest productivity but has never previously been measured directly at the landscape scale in tropical rain forest (TRF). We used a modular tower and stratified random sampling to harvest all foliage from forest floor to canopy top in 55 vertical transects (4.6 m(2)) across 500 ha of old growth in Costa Rica. Landscape LAI...

OBJECTIVES We characterized two new CTX-M-type extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) variants in Escherichia coli isolates from stool samples of two elderly patients admitted at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel. Both patients underwent treatment with cephalosporins prior to isolation of the E. coli strains. METHODS ESBLs were detected by the double-disk synergy test and PCR-sequenc...

Local bathymetric, quasi-periodic patterns of oscillation are identified from 26 years of monthly profile surveys taken at two shore-perpendicular transects at Duck, North Carolina, USA. The data cover both the swash and surf zones. Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) and Multi-channel Singular Spectrum analysis (MSSA) methods are applied, on the shoreface, to three potential forcings: the monthly...

This paper reports on the use of linear spectral mixture analysis for the retrieval of canopy leaf area index (LAI) in three flux tower sites in the Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (BOREAS) southern study area: Old Black Spruce, Old Jack Pine, and Young Jack Pine (SOBS, SOJP, and SYJP). The data used were obtained by the Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) with a spatial resolution ...

species diversity is an index for sustainability of rangeland ecosystems. we studied the effect of environmental factors (soil properties and aspects) on plant species diversity in zagros mountainous rangelands (vegetation type: festuca ovina-astragalus parrowianus) in the west of hamadan in march–july 2009. for this purpose, four aspects were defined in the study area. vegetation types were st...