Blueberries are a type of vegetation with spectral signatures similar to that of forest and grass. Due to their size, they are difficult to distinguish when intermingled with tall grass. Blueberries are grown in the vicinity of evergreen forests to shield them from the wind and save them from freezing. It is also difficult to distinguish blueberries from forest by normal classification methods....

Trees used in agroforestry practices, such as windbreaks, provide a variety of ecosystem benefits and are recognized globally as an important land use. However, efforts to inventory and monitor agroforestry land use have been sporadic, short-lived, or focused on small spatial extents. There are a variety of satellite-derived datasets that provide information about tree cover over broad spatial ...

Forest disturbances—driven by pests, pathogens, and discrete events—have led to billions of dollars in lost ecosystem services management costs. To understand the patterns severity these stressors across complex landscapes, there must be an increase reliable data at scales compatible with actions. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS or UAV) offer a capable platform for collecting local scale (e.g., in...

BACKGROUND Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is caused by SMN1 dysfunction, and the copy number of SMN2 and NAIP can modify the phenotype of SMA. The aim of this study was to analyze the copy numbers and gene structures of SMA-related genes in Chinese SMA patients and unrelated healthy controls. METHODS Forty-two Chinese SMA patients and two hundred and twelve unrelated healthy Chinese individual...

Despite recent advances in diagnosis and management, prostrate cancer remains the second most common cause of death from cancer in American men, after lung cancer. Failure of chemotherapies and hormone-deprivation therapies is the major cause of death in patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Currently, the androgen inhibitors enzalutamide and abiraterone are approved for tr...

Greater sage-grouse populations have decreased steadily since European settlement in western North America. Reduced availability of brood-rearing habitat has been identified as a limiting factor for many populations. We used radio-telemetry to acquire locations of sage-grouse broods from 1998 to 2012 in Strawberry Valley, Utah. Using these locations and remotely-sensed NAIP (National Agricultur...

Femtosecond fluorescence up-conversion, UV-Vis and IR transient absorption spectroscopy are used to study the photo-isomerization dynamics of a new type of zwitterionic photoswitch based on a N-alkylated indanylidene pyrroline Schiff base framework (ZW-NAIP). The system is biomimetic, as it mimics the photophysics of retinal, in coupling excited state charge translocation and isomerization. Whi...