While the practice of polygyny is common in Ghana, little is known about its impact on the use of reproductive health services. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between polygynous marriage and the utilisation of skilled antenatal care (ANC), assisted skilled birth, and modern contraceptive services...
Adelges tsugae infested western hemlock trees were sampled periodically for 1 year at two locations in Oregon and Washington to compare the phenology and abundance of three associated predators (Leucopis argenticollis, Leucopis piniperda, and Laricobius nigrinus) and their host. On each sample date, two 3–10 cm long terminal twigs were...
The prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has increased in parallel with central obesity and is now the most common chronic liver disease in developed countries. NAFLD is defined as excessive accumulation of lipid in the liver, i.e., hepatosteatosis. The severity of NAFLD ranges from simple fatty liver (steatosis)...
Electromagnetic wave propagation in complex dispersive media is governed by the time dependent Maxwell’s equations coupled to equations that describe the evolution of the induced macroscopic polarization. We consider “polydispersive” materials represented by distributions of dielectric parameters in a polarization model. The work focuses on a novel computational framework for...
Given an affine variety X, a morphism ϕ:X→X, a point α∈X, and a Zariski-closed subset V of X, we show that the forward ϕ-orbit of α meets V in at most finitely many infinite arithmetic progressions, and the remaining points lie in a set of Banach density zero. This may...
Drosophila suzukii (Spotted Wing Drosophila) has recently become a serious invasive pest of fruit crops in the USA, Canada, and Europe, leading to substantial economic losses. D. suzukii is a direct pest, ovipositing directly into ripe or ripening fruits; in contrast, other Drosophilids utilize decaying or blemished fruits and are...
Land-use change around protected areas limits their ability to conserve biodiversity by altering ecological processes such as natural hydrologic and disturbance regimes, facilitating species invasions, and interfering with dispersal of organisms. This paper informs USA National Wildlife Refuge System conservation planning by predicting future land-use change on lands within 25...
Resilience is a key driver in the design of systems that must operate in an uncertain operating environment, and is a key metric to assess the capacity for systems to perform within the specified performance envelop despite disturbances to their operating environment. This paper describes a graph spectral approach to...
Condors and vultures comprise the only group of terrestrial vertebrates in the world that are
obligate scavengers, and these species move widely to locate ephemeral, unpredictable, and patchily-distributed
food resources. In this study, we used high-resolution GPS location data to quantify
monthly home range size of the critically endangered California...
This paper presents the use of data clustering methods applied to the analysis results of a design-stage, functional failure reasoning tool. A system simulation using qualitative descriptions of component behaviors and a functional reasoning tool are used to identify the functional impact of a large set of potential single and...