Digital surface models (DSMs) generated by image matching from aerial images obtained using UAV were evaluated against field reference data and compared to LiDAR data. The performance of DSMs was evaluated both visually and with quantitative tests. In quantitative tests, the ability of DSM to estimate 1) individual tree heights, 2) canopy height and 3) crown projection area were evaluated. The ...

—In tallgrass prairie, cicadas emerge annually, are abundant and their emergence can be an important flux of energy and nutrients. However, factors influencing die distribution and abundance of these cicadas are virtually unknown. We examined cicada emergence in plots from a long-term (13 y) experimental manipulation involving common tallgrass prairie management practices. The plots were arrang...

We study the problem of finding shortest tours/paths for “lawn mowing” and “milling” problems: Given a region in the plane, and given the shape of a “cutter” (typically, a circle or a square), find a shortest tour/path for the cutter such that every point within the region is covered by the cutter at some position along the tour/path. In the milling version of the problem, the cutter is constra...

Questions: Is seedling emergence limited by the set of viable seeds, by incompatibility between the phenology of seed shedding and timing of mowing, or by dry weather in germination periods? Does seedling mortality fluctuate with season and weather? Location: Negrentino, southern Alps, Switzerland. Methods: Fecundity estimates of the dominant grass Bromus erectus; highly frequent counts of spon...

In this paper, single, bi-layered and three-layered tube hydroforming processes were numerically simulated using the finite element method. It was found that the final bulges heights resulted from the models were in good agreement with the experimental results. Three types of modeling were kept with the same geometry, tube material and process parameters to be compared between the obtained hydr...

The primary goals of this project are to discover management processes which benefit a restored prairie and reduce the need for prescribed burning. Moreover, because of the interdependence of the plants and soil, there is a strong focus on the soil community as a driving force of the vegetation. Consequently, our objectives were to assess the effects of manipulation (burning, mowing) on: (1) th...

Notes for a talk in Stanford’s Arithmetic Dynamics Seminar, Apr. 29, 2014. This talk is an introduction to the theory of heights on projective varieties over local and global fields. I will also say something about canonical heights for a dynamical system, and a local-global formula for these. This material is from Chapters 1-2 of the book by Bombieri and Gubler on heights [BG]; also Silverman’...