Wood-plastic composites (WPCs) are increasingly used in decking applications, where exterior exposure can lead to sufficient moisture for fungal deterioration. Standard tests recommended to assess fungal durability of WPC, but initially developed for wood or woodbased panels, are not applied in this study because the similarity in moisture behaviour for wood (-based panels) and WPC is questione...

abstract using mathematical models for irrigation management have great impacts to increase irrigation efficiency and product amount, in fields. in this study, simulation results by swap model for moisture, compared with soil profiles moisture values, measured in the field. moisture data, measured at three wheat farms in the neyshabur plain, were used to predict moisture. results show good agre...

[1] We compare European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 15-year reanalysis (ERA-15) moisture over the tropical oceans with satellite observations and the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) National Center for Atmospheric Research 40-year reanalysis. When systematic differences in moisture between the observational and reanalysis data sets are removed, the NCEP d...

Biophysical crop simulation models are normally forced with precipitation data recorded with either gauges or ground-based radar. However, ground-based recording networks are not available at spatial and temporal scales needed to drive the models at many critical places on earth. An alternative would be to employ satellite-based observations of either precipitation or soil moisture. Satellite o...

Based on the empirical or theoretical qualitative information about the relationship between response variable and covariates, we propose a new approach to model polynomial regression using a shape restricted regression after estimating the direction by sufficient dimension reduction. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that in the absence of prior information other than the shape constr...

Correlation structure contains important information about longitudinal data. Existing sufficient dimension reduction approaches assuming independence may lead to substantial loss of efficiency. We apply the quadratic inference function to incorporate the correlation information and apply the transformation method to recover the central subspace. The proposed estimators are shown to be consiste...

Light use efficiency (LUE) is a key biophysical parameter characterizing the ability of plants to convert absorbed light to carbohydrate. However, the environmental regulations on LUE, especially moisture stress, are poorly understood, leading to large uncertainties in primary productivity estimated by LUE models. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of moisture stress on L...

Overseas investigations have shown that many healthcare institutions are understocked of antidotes to treat these patients. 1–4 Despite a recent study to the contrary, 5 the paper by Fountain and colleagues, published in this issue of the New Zealand Medical Journal, suggests similar problems in New Zealand hospitals with shortcomings in hospital pharmacy stocks and resupply. 6 The paper raises...