Polymetallic nodules are essential for food-web integrity of a prospective deep-seabed mining area in Pacific abyssal plains

Polymetallic nodule fields provide hard substrate for sessile organisms on the abyssal seafloor between 3000 and 6000 m water depth. Deep-seabed mining targets these mineral-rich nodules and will likely modify the consumer-resource (trophic) and substrate-providing (non-trophic) interactions within the abyssal food web. However, the importance of nodules and their associated sessile fauna in supporting food-web integrity remains unclear. Here, we use seafloor imagery and published literature to develop highly-resolved trophic and non-trophic interaction webs for the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ, central Pacific Ocean) and the Peru Basin (PB, South-East Pacific Ocean) and to assess how nodule removal may modify these networks. The CCZ interaction web included 1028 compartments connected with 59,793 links and the PB interaction web consisted of 342 compartments and 8044 links. We show that knock-down effects of nodule removal resulted in a 17.9% (CCZ) to 20.8% (PB) loss of all taxa and 22.8% (PB) to 30.6% (CCZ) loss of network links. Subsequent analysis identified stalked glass sponges living attached to the nodules as key structural species that supported a high diversity of associated fauna. We conclude that polymetallic nodules are critical for food-web integrity and that their absence will likely result in reduced local benthic biodiversity.

Polymetallic nodules are essential for food-web integrity of a prospective deep-seabed mining area in Pacific abyssal plains

Polymetallic nodule fields provide hard substrate for sessile organisms on the abyssal seafloor between 3,000 and 6,000 m water depth. Deep-seabed mining targets these mineral-rich nodules and will likely modify the consumer-resource (trophic) and substrate-providing (non-trophic) interactions within the abyssal food web. However, the importance of nodules and their associated sessile fauna in supporting food-web integrity remains unclear. Here, we use seafloor imagery and published literature to develop highly-resolved trophic and non-trophic interaction webs for the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ, central Pacific Ocean) and the Peru Basin (PB, south-east Pacific Ocean) and to assess how nodule removal will modify these networks. The CCZ interaction web included 1,028 compartments connected with 59,793 links and the PB interaction web consisted of 342 compartments and 8,044 links. We show that knock-down effects of nodule removal resulted in a 17.9% (CCZ) to 20.8% (PB) loss of all compartments and 22.8% (PB) to 30.6% (CCZ) loss of network links. Subsequent analysis identified stalked glass sponges living attached to the nodules as key structural species that supported a high diversity of associated fauna. We conclude that polymetallic nodules are critical for food-web integrity and that their absence will likely result in reduced local benthic biodiversity.

Modern Methods of Usability Engineering of User Interface for Weboriented Environment

The article discusses methods and tools applied for wireframing of web-environment usability engineering. Modern approaches used for wireframing via web service moqups.com. are considered. In today's world, people have to spend a lot of time at the computer therefore an important factor in the user's work with the software becomes human-machine interaction. Web-interface design taking into account all the ergonomic standards is able to reduce stress and fatigue of users as well as to improve the quality of work and satisfaction. Now, when designing user interfaces, insufficient attention is paid to ergonomics and convenience. In this paper, we use an expert approach. This method allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed product when used.

An Alternative Threat Model-Based Approach for Security Testing

In modern interaction, web applications has gained more and more popularity, which leads to a significate growth of exposure to malicious users and vulnerability attacks. This causes organizations and companies to lose valuable information and suffer from bad reputation. One of the effective mitigation practices is to perform security testing against the application before release it to the market. This solution won't protect web application 100% but it will test the application against malicious codes and reduce the high number of potential attacks on web application. One of known security testing approach is threat modeling, which provides an efficient technique to identify threats that can compromise system security. The authors proposed method, in this paper, focuses on improving the effectiveness of the categorization of threats by using Open 10 Web Application Security Project's (OWASP) that are the most critical web application security risks in generating threat trees in order to cover widely known security attacks.