Following the discovery of the 11-year solar cycle signal in earth rotation, linear techniques were employed to investigate the amplitude and phase of the difference between ephemeris time and universal time (DeltaT) as a function of time. The amplitude is nonstationary. This difference was related to Delta(LOD), the difference between the length of day and its nominal value. The 11-year term in Delta(LOD) was 0.8 millisecond at the close of the 18th century and decreased below noise level from 1840 to 1860. From 1875 to 1925, Delta(LOD) was about 0.16 millisecond, and it decreased to about 0.08 millisecond by the 1950's. Except for anomalous behavior from 1797 to 1838, DeltaT lags sunspot numbers by 3.0 +/- 0.4 years. Since DeltaT lags Delta(LOD) by 2.7 years, the result is that Delta(LOD) is approximately in phase with sunspot numbers. 相似文献
Human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP) is employed as a measure of human pressures on biodiversity, though largely at global and national scales rather than landscape to regional scales where many conservation decisions take place. Though gaining in familiarity, HANPP is not widely utilized by conservation professionals.
Objectives
This study, encompassing the US side of the Great Lakes basin, examines how regional distributions of HANPP relate to landscape-based biodiversity proxy metrics used by conservation professionals. Our objectives were (1) to quantify the HANPP of managed lands at the county scale; and (2) to assess spatial patterns of HANPP in comparison to landscape diversity and local habitat connectedness to determine if the metric can provide useful information to conservation professionals.
Methods
We aggregated forest and cropland NPP data between 2005 and 2015 and coupled it with previously published potential vegetation maps to quantify the HANPP of each county in the study region. We mapped the outputs at 500 m resolution to analyze spatial relationships between HANPP and landscape metrics of biodiversity potential.
Results
Area-weighted HANPP across our study region averaged 45% of NPP, down to 4.9% in forest-dominated counties. Greater HANPP correlated with reduced landscape diversity (p?<?0.001, r2?=?0.28) and reduced local habitat connectedness (p?<?0.001, r2?=?0.36).
Conclusion
HANPP could be used as an additional tool for conservation professionals during regional-scale land use planning or conservation decision-making, particularly in mixed-use landscapes that both support important biodiversity and have high levels of primary production harvest.
Wild bee populations are currently under threat, which has led to recent efforts to increase pollinator habitat in North America. Simultaneously, U.S. federal energy policies are beginning to encourage perennial bioenergy cropping (PBC) systems, which have the potential to support native bees.
Objectives
Our objective was to explore the potentially interactive effects of crop composition, total PBC area, and PBC patches in different landscape configurations.
Methods
Using a spatially-explicit modeling approach, the Lonsdorf model, we simulated the impacts of three perennial bioenergy crops (PBC: willow, switchgrass, and prairie), three scenarios with different total PBC area (11.7, 23.5 and 28.8% of agricultural land converted to PBC) and two types of landscape configurations (PBC in clustered landscape patterns that represent realistic future configurations or in dispersed neutral landscape models) on a nest abundance index in an Illinois landscape.
Results
Our modeling results suggest that crop composition and PBC area are particularly important for bee nest abundance, whereas landscape configuration is associated with bee nest abundance at the local scale but less so at the regional scale.
Conclusions
Strategies to enhance wild bee habitat should therefore emphasize the crop composition and amount of PBC.
The ocean crisis is urgent and central to human wellbeing and life on Earth; past and current activities are damaging the planet's main life support system for future generations. We are witnessing an increase in ocean heat, disturbance, acidification, bio‐invasions and nutrients, and reducing oxygen levels. Several of these act like ratchets: once detrimental or negative changes have occurred, they may lock in place and may not be reversible, especially at gross ecological and ocean process scales.
Each change may represent a loss to humanity of resources, ecosystem function, oxygen production and species. The longer we pursue unsuitable actions, the more we close the path to recovery and better ocean health and greater benefits for humanity in the future.
We stand at a critical juncture and have identified eight priority issues that need to be addressed in unison to help avert a potential ecological disaster in the global ocean. They form a purposely ambitious agenda for global governance and are aimed at informing decision‐makers at a high level. They should also be of interest to the general public.
Of all the themes, the highest priority is to rigorously address global warming and limit surface temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2100, as warming is the pre‐eminent factor driving change in the ocean. The other themes are establishing a robust and comprehensive High Seas Treaty, enforcing existing standards for Marine Protected Areas and expanding their coverage, especially in terms of high levels of protection, adopting a precautionary pause on deep‐sea mining, ending overfishing and destructive fishing practices, radically reducing marine pollution, putting in place a financing mechanism for ocean management and protection, and lastly, scaling up science/data gathering and facilitating data sharing.
By implementing all eight measures in unison, as a coordinated strategy, we can build resilience to climate change, help sustain fisheries productivity, particularly for low‐income countries dependent on fisheries, protect coasts (e.g. via soft‐engineering/habitat‐based approaches), promote mitigation (e.g. carbon storage) and enable improved adaptation to rapid global change.
It has been hypothesized that human mercury (Hg) exposure via fish consumption will increase with increasing acidic deposition. Specifically, acidic deposition leads to reduced lake pH and alkalinity, and increased sulphate ion concentration ([SO42?]), which in turn should cause increased Hg levels in fish, ultimately resulting in increased human Hg exposure via fish consumption. Our empirical test of this hypothesis found it to be false. We specifically examined Hg levels in the hair of Ontario Amerindians, who are known consumers of fish from lakes across the province, and observed a weak negative association with increasing sulphate deposition. An examination of Hg levels in lake trout, northern pike and walleye, three freshwater fish species commonly consumed by Ontario Amerindians, found a similar weak negative association with increasing sulphate deposition. Further analysis of these fish data found that fish [Hg] was most significantly (positively) associated with lake water concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), not pH, alkalinity or [SO42?]. Lake DOC levels are lower in regions of greater acidic deposition. We propose an alternate hypothesis whereby human Hg exposure declines with increasing acidic deposition. In particular, we propose that increasing sulphate deposition leads to reduced lake DOC levels, which in turn leads to lower Hg in fish, ultimately reducing human Hg exposure via fish consumption. 相似文献
The lunar ranging measurements now being made at the McDonald Observatory have an accuracy of 1 nsec in round-trip travel time. This corresponds to 15 cm in the one-way distance. The use of lasers with pulse-lengths of less than 1 nsec is expected to give an accuracy of 2 to 3 cm in the next few years. A new station is under construction in Hawaii, and additional stations in other countries are either in operation or under development. It is hoped that these stations will form the basis for a worldwide network to determine polar motion and earth rotation on a regular basis, and will assist in providing information about movement of the tectonic plates making up the earth's surface. Several mobile lunar ranging stations with telescopes having diameters of 1.0 m or less could, in the future, greatly extend the information obtainable about motions within and between the tectonic plates. The data obtained so far by the McDonald Observatory have been used to generate a new lunar ephemeris based on direct numerical integration of the equations of motion for the moon and planets. With this ephemeris, the range to the three Apollo retro-reflectors can be fit to an accuracy of 5 m by adjusting the differences in moments of inertia of the moon about its principal axes, the selenocentric coordinates of the reflectors, and the McDonald longitude. The accuracy of fitting the results is limited currently by errors of the order of an arc second in the angular orientation of the moon, as derived from the best available theory of how the moon rotates in response to the torques acting on it. Both a new calculation of the moon's orientation as a function of time based on direct numerical integration of the torque equations and a new analytic theory of the moon's orientation are expected to be available soon, and to improve considerably the accuracy of fitting the data. The accuracy already achieved routinely in lunar laser ranging represents a hundredfold improvement over any previously available knowledge of the distance to points on the lunar surface. Already, extremely complex structure has been observed in the lunar rotation and significant improvement has been achieved in our knowledge of lunar orbit. The selenocentric coordinates of the retroreflectors give improved reference points for use in lunar mapping, and new information on the lunar mass distribution has been obtained. Beyond the applications discussed in this article, however, the history of science shows many cases of previously unknown, phenomena discovered as a consequence of major improvements in the accuracy of measurements. It will be interesting to see whether this once again proves the case as we acquire an extended series of lunar distance observations with decimetric and then centimetric accuracy. 相似文献
This article examines the practical use of semiparametric models in the analysis of field trials—that is, models with parameterized treatment effects and additive terms derived by a data-driven approach using a locally weighted running line smoother (loess). We discuss graphical methods to identify spatial structure in the data and model selection procedures to choose the degree of smoothing. Once the spatial part of the model has been chosen, hypotheses about the treatment effects may be tested. Semiparametric models are used to analyze two barley field trials exhibiting spatial trends. The first has a single experimental treatment and a row-column design. The second has a split-plot design, and we use a semiparametric model which accounts for the randomization at the different strata of this design. We compare the semiparametric analyses with classical analyses of variance and with alternative spatial models. We find that semiparametric models give a good insight into spatial variation in the field and can improve the precision of parameter estimates. 相似文献
Basal concentration, production rate, metabolic clearance rate and for oxytocin were measured in Holstein cows at three lactational stages and during mammary involution. At each lactational stage, oxytocin was given intravenously at .5 IU/min or 1.0 IU/min for 60 min. Infusions were preceded by priming. During involution, the high dose was used. Mean basal concentrations of oxytocin ranged from 8.7 to 21.4 uU/ml. Mean basal values at early, middle, late lactation and involution were 17.57, 12.33, 15.15, 21.13 uU/ml, respectively and differed significantly. The mean “rapid” was 3.87 ± .1 min. Early, middle, late lactation and involution were 4.2, 3.7, 4.0 and 3.5 min, respectively. The rapid was not affected by lactational stage. The mean “slow” was 25.53 ± 1 min. Early lactation and dry period means differed significantly. The overall mean oxytocin clearance rate was 8.41 ± .1 ml/kg·min. Clearance rate declined through lactation and into the dry period. Mean values of 9.3, 8.8, 7.8 and 7.1 ml/kg·min were obtained at early, middle, late lactation and involution, respectively. Clearance rates at late lactation and involution differed significantly from one another and from the early and middle stages. Mean entry rates for oxytocin at early, middle, late lactation and involution were 168.79, 106.03, 111.1 and 146.8 uU/kg·min, respectively. Measurements at early lactation and involution were greater than values for middle and late lactation. To summarize, basal oxytocin concentrations can be measured in cows that are lactating or undergoing mammary involution and changes in concentrations during lactation are related to hormone production (entry rate) and metabolic clearance rates. 相似文献