Effects of Elodea nuttallii on temperate freshwater plants, microalgae and invertebrates: small differences between invaded and uninvaded areas

The invasive aquatic plant species Elodea nuttallii could pose a considerable risk to European freshwater ecosystems based on its current distribution, rate of spread and potential for high biomass. However, little research has been conducted on the impacts of this species on native biota. This study takes an ecosystem-wide approach and examines the impact of E. nuttallii on selected physicochemical parameters (dissolved oxygen and pH), algae, invertebrate and macrophyte communities. Elodea nuttallii had small but significant impacts on plant, invertebrate and algal species. The richness of algal periphyton was lower on E. nuttallii than on native macrophytes. The taxonomic composition of invertebrate communities associated with E. nuttallii differed from that associated with similar native plant species, but did not differ in terms of total biomass or species richness. Macrophyte species richness and total cover were positively correlated with percentage cover of E. nuttallii. Not all macrophyte species responded in the same way to E. nuttallii invasion; cover of the low-growing species, Elodea canadensis and charophytes were negatively correlated with E. nuttallii cover, whilst floating-rooted plants were positively correlated with E. nuttallii cover. All observed differences in the macrophyte community were small relative to other factors such as nutrient levels, inter-annual variation and differences between sites. Despite this, the observed negative association between E. nuttallii and charophytes is a key concern due to the rarity and endangered status of many charophyte species.

Negotiating spatiality: Potential of border areas for intergroup mixing in divided cities

This paper will discuss the issues of spatial segregation in the divided city context,focusing on Belfast as a case study it will discuss, issues that limit the inclusivity of shared space in the city, the challenge of insular spatial patterns created by division, and the micro politics of everyday contact. It will argue the significance of creating everyday space to enable practical socio-spatial interaction between divided groups and propose that areas on community borders can be developed as active spaces accommodating services that the communities need, use, and want on an everyday basis, by doing so it offers a potential form valuable contact. It will report on an ongoing study which examines such sites located on community border and assesses their capacity to act as beneficial ‘spaces of engagement’ for communities set within divided context.

Are Alaskan trees found in locally more favourable sites in marginal areas?

Aim Species generally become rarer and more patchily distributed as the margins of their ranges are approached. We predicted that in such marginal sites, tree species would tend to occur where some key environmental factors are at particularly favourable levels, compensating in part for the low overall suitability of marginal sites.

Location The article considers the spatial distributions of trees in Southeast Alaska (the Alaskan 'panhandle').

Methods We quantified range marginality using spatial distributions of eight tree species across more than one thousand surveyed sites in Southeast Alaska. For each species we derived a site core/margin index using a three-dimensional trend surface generated from logistic regression on site coordinates. For each species, the relationships between the environmental factors slope, aspect and site marginality were then compared for occupied and unoccupied sets of sites.

Results We found that site slope is important for more Alaskan tree species than aspect. Three out of eight had a significant core/margin by occupied/unoccupied interaction, tending to be present in significantly shallower-sloped (more favourable) sites in the marginal areas than the simple core/margin trend predicted. For site aspect, one species had a significant interaction, selecting potentially more favourable northerly aspects in marginal areas. A finer-scale analysis based on the same data came to the same overall conclusions.

Conclusions There is evidence that several tree species in Alaska tend to occur in especially favourable sites in marginal areas. In these marginal areas, these species amplify habitat preferences shown in core areas.

Cadmium and lead in vegetable and fruit produce selected from specific regional areas of the UK

Cadmium and lead were determined in fruit and vegetable produce (~1300 samples) collected from a field and market basket study of locally grown produce from the South-West of Britain (Devon and Cornwall). These were compared with similarly locally grown produce from the North-East of Britain (Aberdeenshire). The concentrations of cadmium and lead in the market basket produce were compared to the maximum levels (ML) set by the European Union (EU). For cadmium 0.2% of the samples exceeded the ML, and 0.6% of the samples exceeded the ML for lead. The location of cadmium and lead in potatoes was performed using laser ablation ICP-MS. All tested samples exhibited higher lead concentrations, and most exhibited increased concentrations of cadmium in the potato skin compared to the flesh. The concentrations of cadmium and lead found in fruits and vegetables sampled during this study do not increase concern about risk to human health.

Risk in Private Finance Initiative Projects::A Public Sector Perspective

The management of public sector risk is increasingly seen as a priority area of UK government policy. This has been highlighted recently by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown who stated that “the issue of public risk is one of the most challenging areas of policy-making for any government” (Strategic Risk, 2008). In response to these challenges, the UK Prime Minister has appointed a new body - the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council (RRAC) which is tasked with improving the way risk to the public is understood and managed. One area of particular concern with regard to the governance of public sector risks involves projects procured via the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). These projects involve long-term contracts, complex multi-party interactions and thus create various risks to public sector clients. Today, most PFI actors acknowledge the potentially adverse effects of these risks and make an effort to prevent or mitigate undesirable results. As a consequence, issues of risk allocation, risk transfer and risk management have become central to the PFI procurement process. This paper provides an overview of the risk categories and risk types which are relevant to the public sector in PFI projects. It analyses risk as a feature of uncertain future project-related events and examines potential pitfalls which can be associated with PFI risk management on the basis of a case study of a high-profile PFI hospital in Scotland. The paper concludes that, despite the trend towards diminished risk profiles during the operational phase, the public sector continues to be exposed to significant risks when engaging in PFI-based procurement.

What’s behind Russia’s military build-up in Syria?

It seems unlikely that Moscow can hope for an outright victory in Syria’s civil war, so some kind of political compromise with the moderate opposition is in the offing. This, however, is at best a long shot given the hostility to Assad in the West and the intensity of the conflict in Syria.

Instead, the immediate priority seems to be to ensure a survival of the Syrian state and military institutions in the areas it can control, what one Russian observer called an “Alawite Israel” – a strip of land from the Mediterranean coast to Damascus, able to at least contain IS with some external support.

The Kremlin has consistently prioritised stability over revolutionary change and sovereign rights over humanitarian intervention. In fact, from the Russian point of view, the Western interventionist agenda of democratisation, which ignored local conditions, has made the situation in the Middle East worse – from Iraq to Libya and Syria.

Mitigating the Impact of Faults in Unreliable Memories for Error-Resilient Applications

Inherently error-resilient applications in areas such as signal processing, machine learning and data analytics provide opportunities for relaxing reliability requirements, and thereby reducing the overhead incurred by conventional error correction schemes. In this paper, we exploit the tolerable imprecision of such applications by designing an energy-efficient fault-mitigation scheme for unreliable data memories to meet target yield. The proposed approach uses a bit-shuffling mechanism to isolate faults into bit locations with lower significance. This skews the bit-error distribution towards the low order bits, substantially limiting the output error magnitude. By controlling the granularity of the shuffling, the proposed technique enables trading-off quality for power, area, and timing overhead. Compared to error-correction codes, this can reduce the overhead by as much as 83% in read power, 77% in read access time, and 89% in area, when applied to various data mining applications in 28nm process technology.

Largest Matching Areas for Illumination and Occlusion Robust Face Recognition

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to face recognition which simultaneously tackles three combined challenges: 1) uneven illumination; 2) partial occlusion; and 3) limited training data. The new approach performs lighting normalization, occlusion de-emphasis and finally face recognition, based on finding the largest matching area (LMA) at each point on the face, as opposed to traditional fixed-size local area-based approaches. Robustness is achieved with novel approaches for feature extraction, LMA-based face image comparison and unseen data modeling. On the extended YaleB and AR face databases for face identification, our method using only a single training image per person, outperforms other methods using a single training image, and matches or exceeds methods which require multiple training images. On the labeled faces in the wild face verification database, our method outperforms comparable unsupervised methods. We also show that the new method performs competitively even when the training images are corrupted.