Banded vegetation is a characteristic feature of semiarid environments, comprising stripes of vegetation running parallel to the contours on hillsides, separated by stripes of bare ground. Mathematical modelling plays an important role in the study of this phenomenon, and the Klausmeier model is one of the oldest and most established, consisting of coupled reaction-diffusionadvection equations ...

The choice of sampling methods is a crucial step in every field survey in herpetology. In countries where time and financial support are limited, the choice of the methods is critical. The methods used to sample snakes often lack objective criteria, and the traditional methods have apparently been more important when making the choice. Consequently researches using not-standardized methods are ...

Banding and Implant Studies of Pygoscelis Penguins Susan G. Trivelpiece and Wayne Z. Trivelpiece Polar Oceans Research Group, Department of Biology, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana 59717, USA Although bands have been used on penguins since the early 1900s, it was not until demographic studies were undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s that the problems of band loss and mortality due to b...

The aim of this study was to determine how an additional load influences the force-vs-time relationship of the countermovement vertical jump (CMVJ). The participants that took part in the experiment were 18 male university students who played sport recreationally, including regular games of volleyball. They were asked to perform a CMVJ without involving the arms under four conditions: without a...

The concept of Banded pattern mining is concerned with the identification of “bandings” within zero-one data. A zero-one data set is said to be fully banded if all the “ones” can be arranged along the leading diagonal. The discovery of a banded pattern is of interest in its own right, at least in a data analysis context, because it tells us something about the data. Banding has also been shown ...

The contribution of understorey vegetation (UVEG) to forest ecosystem biomass and carbon (C) across diverse forest types has, to date, eluded quantification at regional and national scales. Efforts to quantify UVEG C have been limited to field-intensive studies or broad-scale modelling approaches lacking field measurements. Although large-scale inventories of UVEG C are not common, speciesand c...

Background. Revision of failed bariatric procedures is a significant challenge for bariatric surgeons, because of the increasing number of recurring morbid obesity or complications, especially in patients with a previous Vertical Banded Gastroplasty (VBG). Methods. Since November 1998, 109 patients with failed or complicated VBG were followed in a retrospective study. 49 patients underwent re-V...

BACKGROUND Bariatric surgery is the treatment of choice for patients with morbid obesity. In addition to surgery, postoperative dietary behavior is an important mediator of weight loss and, therefore, critical in influencing outcome. Surgical treatment of obesity is not an alternative to dieting but a method to enforce dieting. METHODS We evaluated early weight loss and postoperative eating b...