Alpine and arctic lemming populations appear to be highly sensitive to climate change, and when faced with warmer and shorter winters, their well-known high-amplitude population cycles may collapse. Being keystone species in tundra ecosystems, changed lemming dynamics may convey significant knock-on effects on trophically linked species. Here, we analyse long-term (1988-2010), community-wide mo...

—Increased sociality in herons, family Ardeidae, is often considered to be associated with the occurrence of white plumage. If white plumage increases sociality, we hypothesized that white-plumaged birds should forage closer to one another and dark birds should remain more solitary. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the inter-individual spacing (nearest neighbor distance) in two pairs ...

BACKGROUND The Gulf coastal ecosystems in Florida are foci of the highest species richness of imperiled shoreline dependent birds in the USA. However environmental processes that affect their macroecological patterns, like occupancy and abundance, are not well unraveled. In Florida the Snowy Plover (Charadrius alexandrinus nivosus) is resident along northern and western white sandy estuarine/oc...

This paper focuses the quantitative evaluation of non point sources of pollution by graphical maps of watershed and estimating area based load of pollutants of various land uses with the use of Arc/View Geographic Information System. The representative study is carried out in the Xinshan sub-watershed of Taihu watershed. It involves the simulation of pollutants load by watershed; watershed area...

Dactylaria constricta var. gallopava (Cooke) Salkin et Dixon was found to cause fatal encephalitis in a 28-day-old, captivity-bred snowy owl chick (Nyctea scandiaca). The previously healthy bird suddenly developed ataxia, severe torticollis, and extensor rigidity of the legs. Since the animal did not improve with antibiotic or vitamin-mineral supplement therapy, the chick was euthanized 5 days ...

In this paper, we propose a technique for video segmentation using non-linear diffusion, incorporating watershed transform, colour similarity merging and motion estimation. The current frame t to be segmented is spatially partition into homogenous regions based on watershed transform with colour similarity merging in the CIELUV colour space. A future frame t + x, is then used as reference to es...

The morphological approach to image segmentation is based on the watershed transform. It is a very powerful tool which presents many advantages: it is not parametric, computationally efficient... However, in comparison with energy-based methods as active contours, it does not allow to control the smoothness of the result. In order to introduce geometrical regularization constraints in the morph...

BACKGROUND Tracking individual animals using satellite telemetry has improved our understanding of animal movements considerably. Nonetheless, thorough statistical treatment of Argos datasets is often jeopardized by their coarse temporal resolution. State-space modelling can circumvent some of the inherent limitations of Argos datasets, such as the limited temporal resolution of locations and t...