Most climate models predict a weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation for the 21st century when forced by increasing levels of greenhouse gas concentrations. The model spread, however, is rather large, even when the forcing scenario is identical, indicating a large uncertainty in the response to forcing. In order...
A remote sensing method to measure directional oceanic surface waves by three laser altimeters on the NOAA LongEZ aircraft is investigated. To examine feasibility and sensitivity of the wavelet analysis method to various waves, aircraft motions, and aircraft flight directions relative to wave propagation directions, idealized surface waves are simulated...
Direct numerical simulations are used to compare turbulent diffusivities of heat and salt during the growth and collapse of Kelvin–Helmholtz billows. The ratio of diffusivities is obtained as a function of buoyancy Reynolds number Re[subscript]b and of the density ratio R[subscript]ρ (the ratio of the contributions of heat and salt...
This article presents a semianalytic method to investigate the properties of energy transmission across bottom topography by barotropic Rossby waves. The method is first used to revisit the analytical estimates derived from wave-matching techniques and Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin (WKB) approximations. The comparison between the semianalytic method and WKB indicates that the results...
We examined variability in the natural fluorescence yield of a neritic diatom, Thalassiosira weissflogii, in continuous cultures. In this species, kinetics in natural fluorescence yield over time scales less than a photoperiod were characterized by sharp decreases, occurring at irradiance intensities that presumably coincide with the onset of nonphotochemical fluorescence...
The ability to ascertain gender and age of juvenile grouse is essential for determining gender-specific population age structure and studying timing of reproductive events, respectively. We examined outer rectrix feathers from juvenile Lesser Prairie-Chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) captured at 30–40 and 50–60 days post-hatching. Blood samples were collected from most chicks...
We used mark-recapture methods to estimate age-specific apparent survival rates for male Lesser Prairie-Chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a gamebird of conservation concern. A total of 311 male prairie-chickens (135 yearlings, 176 adults) were captured and banded during a 5-year study in southwest Kansas. Time-since-marking models were used to estimate apparent survival...
Invertebrates are an important food source for grouse chicks, especially within the first 2 weeks of life. Invertebrate abundance is highly patchy and dependent upon herbaceous cover and vegetation structure. We examined the relationship between invertebrate biomass (from sweepnet samples) and habitat structure at lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) brood-use and...
The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) (www.plantontology.org) is a collaborative
effort among several plant databases and experts in plant systematics, botany
and genomics. A primary goal of the POC is to develop simple yet robust
and extensible controlled vocabularies that accurately reflect the biology of plant
structures and developmental stages. These...
MOTIVATION: The automatic identification of over-represented motifs present in a collection of sequences continues to be a challenging problem in computational biology. Many existing approaches to motif identification do not always find the relevant biological motifs, or find only a subset of the occurrences of a motif. In this paper,...
The ratio of live crown length to tree height (crown ratio; CR) is often used as an important predictor variable for tree level growth equations, particularly for multi-species and multi-layered stands. Also, CR indicates tree vigour and can be an important habitat variable. Measurement of CR for each tree can...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var. lupulus) is grown worldwide for the production of the dried female inflorescence (strobulus), or cones, used principally for the bittering and flavoring of beer. Information is scant on the inheritance of traits of economic importance in hop, and present knowledge is based on historical data...