scholarly journals Forest inventory and monitoring information to support diverse management needs in the Lake Simcoe watershed

2012 ◽  
Vol 88 (02) ◽  
pp. 140-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron N. Day ◽  
Danijela Puric-Mladenovic

Analysis using the Vegetation Sampling Protocol (VSP) pilot data collected in the Lake Simcoe watershed (2011) was done to assess the protocol's effectiveness in supporting natural heritage monitoring for the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan (LSPP). The VSP data was analyzed and assessed in the context of information needs for forest management and conservation. Specific information needs to support forest management are used as a criterion for stand analysis. While a variety of inventory approaches and methods are used in the Lake Simcoe watershed, most are done for specific purposes or lack necessary stand-level, compositional and structural information to inform biodiversity reporting, monitoring, and other management objectives of the LSPP. The study has shown that VSP plot data can be used to meet the requirements of the LSPP and further support the requisite information for active forest management. Stand analyses provide insight into the varying conditions of the Lake Simcoe watershed forests and can steer future analysis and comparisons.

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaheh Kashani-Amin ◽  
Ozra Tabatabaei-Malazy ◽  
Amirhossein Sakhteman ◽  
Bagher Larijani ◽  
Azadeh Ebrahim-Habibi

Background: Prediction of proteins’ secondary structure is one of the major steps in the generation of homology models. These models provide structural information which is used to design suitable ligands for potential medicinal targets. However, selecting a proper tool between multiple Secondary Structure Prediction (SSP) options is challenging. The current study is an insight into currently favored methods and tools, within various contexts. Objective: A systematic review was performed for a comprehensive access to recent (2013-2016) studies which used or recommended protein SSP tools. Methods: Three databases, Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus were systematically searched and 99 out of the 209 studies were finally found eligible to extract data. Results: Four categories of applications for 59 retrieved SSP tools were: (I) prediction of structural features of a given sequence, (II) evaluation of a method, (III) providing input for a new SSP method and (IV) integrating an SSP tool as a component for a program. PSIPRED was found to be the most popular tool in all four categories. JPred and tools utilizing PHD (Profile network from HeiDelberg) method occupied second and third places of popularity in categories I and II. JPred was only found in the two first categories, while PHD was present in three fields. Conclusion: This study provides a comprehensive insight into the recent usage of SSP tools which could be helpful for selecting a proper tool.


Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Beth Skelton ◽  
Kathleen Knafl ◽  
Marcia Van Riper ◽  
Louise Fleming ◽  
Veronica Swallow

Care coordination is a critical component of health management aimed at linking care providers and health-information-involved care management. Our intent in this scoping review was to identify care coordination needs of families of children with Down syndrome (DS) and the strategies they used to meet those needs, with the goal of contributing to the evidence base for developing interventions by using an mHealth application (mHealth apps) for these families. Using established guidelines for scoping reviews, we searched five databases, yielding 2149 articles. Following abstract and full-text review, we identified 38 articles meeting our inclusion criteria. Studies incorporated varied in regard to research designs, samples, measures, and analytic approaches, with only one testing an intervention by using mHealth apps. Across studies, data came from 4882 families. Common aspects of families’ care coordination needs included communication and information needs and utilization of healthcare resources. Additional themes were identified related to individual, family, and healthcare contextual factors. Authors also reported families’ recommendations for desirable characteristics of an mHealth apps that addressed the design of a personal health record, meeting age-specific information needs, and ensuring access to up-to-date information. These results will further the development of mHealth apps that are tailored to the needs of families with a child with DS.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062098161
Author(s):  
Benedicta Boadi ◽  
George Tesilimi Banji ◽  
Patrick Adzobu ◽  
Stephen Okyere

Health information literacy plays a critical role in self-management practices among patients living with chronic health conditions. However, there are limited studies on information needs among breast cancer patients in Ghana. This paper therefore investigated the information needs of women living with breast cancer in Ghana and how educational status influenced their information needs. The study was conducted in two health facilities in Accra, Ghana (37 Military Hospital and Sweden Ghana Medical Centre). A total of 75 breast cancer patients were conveniently selected from the two health facilities for the study. The instrument used to elicit relevant data for this study was a questionnaire using the survey design. Data was analysed descriptively. The findings of the study revealed that the information needs of the breast cancer patients investigated were centred mainly around treatment and management information and less around preventive information. The patients also ranked diagnostic information as their highest need, followed by physical care information, treatment information, psychosocial information and disease-specific information in that order. Patients with higher education reported higher information need on all the five domains compared to those with lower education. The study therefore recommended that management of health facilities make health information literacy an integral component of their treatment and management of breast cancer.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 990
Author(s):  
Casey A. Lott ◽  
Michael E. Akresh ◽  
Bridgett E. Costanzo ◽  
Anthony W. D’Amato ◽  
Shengwu Duan ◽  
...  

Forest management planning requires the specification of measurable objectives as desired future conditions at spatial extents ranging from stands to landscapes and temporal extents ranging from a single growing season to several centuries. Effective implementation of forest management requires understanding current conditions and constraints well enough to apply the appropriate silvicultural strategies to produce desired future conditions, often for multiple objectives, at varying spatial and temporal extents. We administered an online survey to forest managers in the eastern US to better understand how wildlife scientists could best provide information to help meet wildlife-related habitat objectives. We then examined more than 1000 review papers on bird–vegetation relationships in the eastern US compiled during a systematic review of the primary literature to see how well this evidence-base meets the information needs of forest managers. We identified two main areas where wildlife scientists could increase the relevance and applicability of their research. First, forest managers want descriptions of wildlife species–vegetation relationships using the operational metrics of forest management (forest type, tree species composition, basal area, tree density, stocking rates, etc.) summarized at the operational spatial units of forest management (stands, compartments, and forests). Second, forest managers want information about how to provide wildlife habitats for many different species with varied habitat needs across temporal extents related to the ecological processes of succession after harvest or natural disturbance (1–2 decades) or even longer periods of stand development. We provide examples of review papers that meet these information needs of forest managers and topic-specific bibliographies of additional review papers that may contain actionable information for foresters who wish to meet wildlife management objectives. We suggest that wildlife scientists become more familiar with the extensive grey literature on forest bird–vegetation relationships and forest management that is available in natural resource management agency reports. We also suggest that wildlife scientists could reconsider everything from the questions they ask, the metrics they report on, and the way they allocate samples in time and space, to provide more relevant and actionable information to forest managers.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Farnoush Bayatmakou ◽  
Azadeh Mohebi ◽  
Abbas Ahmadi

Purpose Query-based summarization approaches might not be able to provide summaries compatible with the user’s information need, as they mostly rely on a limited source of information, usually represented as a single query by the user. This issue becomes even more challenging when dealing with scientific documents, as they contain more specific subject-related terms, while the user may not be able to express his/her specific information need in a query with limited terms. This study aims to propose an interactive multi-document text summarization approach that generates an eligible summary that is more compatible with the user’s information need. This approach allows the user to interactively specify the composition of a multi-document summary. Design/methodology/approach This approach exploits the user’s opinion in two stages. The initial query is refined by user-selected keywords/keyphrases and complete sentences extracted from the set of retrieved documents. It is followed by a novel method for sentence expansion using the genetic algorithm, and ranking the final set of sentences using the maximal marginal relevance method. Basically, for implementation, the Web of Science data set in the artificial intelligence (AI) category is considered. Findings The proposed approach receives feedback from the user in terms of favorable keywords and sentences. The feedback eventually improves the summary as the end. To assess the performance of the proposed system, this paper has asked 45 users who were graduate students in the field of AI to fill out a questionnaire. The quality of the final summary has been also evaluated from the user’s perspective and information redundancy. It has been investigated that the proposed approach leads to higher degrees of user satisfaction compared to the ones with no or only one step of the interaction. Originality/value The interactive summarization approach goes beyond the initial user’s query, while it includes the user’s preferred keywords/keyphrases and sentences through a systematic interaction. With respect to these interactions, the system gives the user a more clear idea of the information he/she is looking for and consequently adjusting the final result to the ultimate information need. Such interaction allows the summarization system to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the user’s information needs while expanding context-based knowledge and guiding the user toward his/her information journey.


Author(s):  
Mirza Mehmedović

In the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Bosnia and Herzegovina is at the crossroads of political, economic and cultural revitalization of the society as a country that declarative aims for application of European principles of political organization and the membership in the European Union. On this way there are many open issues that are the result of twenty years of political and economic stagnation or collapse of all elements that should be the foundation for the stabilization of a modern democratic society in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The internal reconstruction of the political system and the revitalisation of the institutions of the government or different holders of political reforms means at the same time the fulfilment of the conditions of accession to Euro-Atlantic integration. The development of a unified media policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the establishment of public media service in accordance with the requirements of the European Union and the interests of all citizens are the top issues among the many current challenges that we have to deal with in the future. But for Bosnia and Herzegovina it is not exclusively the interest of communicational research. It must be necessarily seen in the wider context as a political, cultural and economic issue, because the establishment of a single media/communication system is one of the key requirements for a political compromise, the integration of society and the harmonization of other common (primarily economic) interests for all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the key requirements for defining a unified media policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina is agreeing / reconciliation of all complex (heterogeneous) cultural characteristics, as well as the specific characteristics of modern communication situation in a model that would respond to the specific information needs of citizens and the standards applied by the European Union.


Author(s):  
S. Schulte ◽  
F. Hillen ◽  
T. Prinz

Collecting vast amount of data does not solely help to fulfil information needs related to crowd monitoring, it is rather important to collect data that is suitable to meet specific information requirements. In order to address this issue, a prototype is developed to facilitate the combination of UAV-based RGB and thermal remote sensing datasets. In an experimental approach, image sensors were mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft and captured two video datasets over a crowd. A group of volunteers performed diverse movements that depict real world scenarios. The prototype is deriving the movement on the ground and is programmed in MATLAB. This novel detection approach using combined data is afterwards evaluated against detection algorithms that only use a single data source. Our tests show that the combination of RGB and thermal remote sensing data is beneficial for the field of crowd monitoring regarding the detection of crowd movement.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norbert Fenzl

How order emerges from noise? How higher complexity arises from lower complexity? For what reason a certain number of open systems start interacting in a coherent way, producing new structures, building up cohesion and new structural boundaries? To answer these questions we need to precise the concepts we use to describe open and complex systems and the basic driving forces of self-organization.   We assume that self-organization processes are related to the flow and throughput of Energy and Matter and the production of system-specific Information. These two processes are intimately linked together: Energy and Material flows are the fundamental carriers of signs, which are processed by the internal structure of the system to produce system-specific structural Information (Is). So far, the present theoretical reflections are focused on the emergence of open systems and on the role of Energy Flows and Information in a self-organizing process. Based on the assumption that Energy, Mass and Information are intrinsically linked together and are fundamental aspects of the Universe, we discuss how they might be related to each other and how they are able to produce the emergence of new structures and systems. 


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