Dynamic Landscape Connectivity Special Issue Editorial

Until fairly recently, the majority of landscape connectivity analyses have considered connectivity as a static landscape feature, despite the widespread recognition that landscapes and the abiotic and biotic processes that influence them are dynamic [...]

Singa Transitional: Rock-art Saywas Marking Boundaries of Identity and Socializing Landscape in Huánuco, Peru

This paper introduces a new art style, Singa Transitional, found painted onto a mountainside near the modern town of Singa in the north of Huánuco, Peru. This style was discovered during a recent regional survey of rock art in the Huánuco region that resulted in the documentation of paintings at more than 20 sites, the identification of their chronological contexts and an analysis of the resulting data for trends in changing social practices over nine millennia. I explore how the style emerged from both regional artistic trends in the medium and broader patterns evident in Andean material culture from multiple media at the time of its creation. I argue that the presence of Singa Transitional demonstrates that local peoples were engaged in broader social trends unfolding during the transition between the Early Horizon (800–200 bc) and the Early Intermediate Period (ad 0–800) in Peru. I propose that rock art placed in prominent places was considered saywa, a type of landscape feature that marked boundaries in and movement through landscapes. Singa Transitional saywas served to advertise the connection between local Andean people and their land and was a medium through which social changes were contested in the Andes.

Diagonal Acceleration for Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies

We introduce an acceleration for covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES) by means of adaptive diagonal decoding (dd-CMA). This diagonal acceleration endows the default CMA-ES with the advantages of separable CMA-ES without inheriting its drawbacks. Technically, we introduce a diagonal matrix [Formula: see text] that expresses coordinate-wise variances of the sampling distribution in DCD form. The diagonal matrix can learn a rescaling of the problem in the coordinates within a linear number of function evaluations. Diagonal decoding can also exploit separability of the problem, but, crucially, does not compromise the performance on nonseparable problems. The latter is accomplished by modulating the learning rate for the diagonal matrix based on the condition number of the underlying correlation matrix. dd-CMA-ES not only combines the advantages of default and separable CMA-ES, but may achieve overadditive speedup: it improves the performance, and even the scaling, of the better of default and separable CMA-ES on classes of nonseparable test functions that reflect, arguably, a landscape feature commonly observed in practice. The article makes two further secondary contributions: we introduce two different approaches to guarantee positive definiteness of the covariance matrix with active CMA, which is valuable in particular with large population size; we revise the default parameter setting in CMA-ES, proposing accelerated settings in particular for large dimension. All our contributions can be viewed as independent improvements of CMA-ES, yet they are also complementary and can be seamlessly combined. In numerical experiments with dd-CMA-ES up to dimension 5120, we observe remarkable improvements over the original covariance matrix adaptation on functions with coordinate-wise ill-conditioning. The improvement is observed also for large population sizes up to about dimension squared.

Impact of Vegetation on Perceived Safety and Preference in City Parks

The aim of this study was to determine the impact of safety-related environmental characteristics in a city park on users’ preferences and whether this impact can be explained by perceived safety. The factors examined were physical and visual accessibility as well as the effectiveness of concealment created by plants in various spatial systems. We used 112 photographs taken in city parks for the study. Studies have shown that visual and physical accessibility varies in terms of impact on preferences and safety—as a result, we tested only visual accessibility and effectiveness. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed that vegetation in a park that obstructs views and can offer concealment reduces our sense of safety. In addition, such vegetation has a negative effect on preference. However, mediation analysis showed that this sense of safety or danger means that dense vegetation (low visual accessibility yet highly effective in offering concealment) is less preferred as a landscape feature. After excluding the impact brought to bear by the sense of safety, the studied features of vegetation had no significant impact on preferences. This means that plants and vegetation layouts of varying densities can be used in completely safe parks and this will probably not adversely affect the feelings of the users.

Soils of Alpine, Subalpine Meadows and Meadow Steppes of Azerbaijan and the Peculiarities of Their Assimilation Potential in Relation to Organic Pollutants

Azerbaijan is a country with a huge range of different soil types, which is due to its geographical location. The country is located in two climatic thermal zones, subboreal and subtropical, characterized by a peculiar hydrothermal regime, diverse vegetation and soil fauna. For proper zoning of the soil cover of bioclimatic landscape zones and the development of effective organization of management systems, assessment of assimilation potential is of great importance, i.e. self-cleaning potential. The purpose of our research was to assess the actual assimilation capacity and self-cleaning ability of alpine and subalpine meadow soils and meadow steppes in case of their contamination with organic pollutants based on a comprehensive system analysis of biogenic and abiogenic factors. The collected material was comprehensively analyzed from the standpoint of the biogenicity and self-purification capacity of soils of various bioclimatic landscape zones from the standpoint of the danger of soil contamination with organic matter, based on the natural features of the soil and biogenic and abiogenic factors, and appropriately grouped according to the landscape feature. The analysis of the obtained data allows us to position the soils of the Alpine and subalpine meadows and meadow steppes on the growth of the assimilation potential in relation to organic pollutants in the following sequence:Mountain-meadow chernozem-like> Mountain-forest meadow> Mountain-meadow steppe> Mountain-meadow sod

The bridge as a symbolic detail in Crime and Punishment [Prestuplenie i nakazanie]

The article analyzes the significance of the ‘bridge’ detail in F. Dostoevsky’sCrime and Punishment[Prestuplenie i nakazanie]. The bridge is not a mere landscape feature, but a means of subtextual expression of the protagonist’s inner drama. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the detail’s artistic significance in the novel.Examination of the plot sequences and the context for the mention of a bridge helps to establish its compositional role as a connector between two existential dimensions: the true one, inspired by realization of God’s design, and the false one, generated by Raskolnikov’s theory. The symbolic meaning of a bridge in the aesthetic universe can explain the character’s internal struggles and acute spiritual controversy.The study of the functions of the ‘bridge’ detail in Dostoevsky’s novel clarifies the writer’s artistic intent and the book’s philosophical background.

Evidence for human-mediated range expansion and gene flow in an invasive grass

Cities and adjacent regions represent foci of intense human activity and provide unique opportunities for studying human-mediated dispersal and gene flow. We examined the effect of landscape features on gene flow in the invasive grass Brachypodium sylvaticum across an urban–rural interface at the edge of its expanding range. We used genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism surveys of individuals from 22 locations. Resistance surfaces were created for each landscape feature, using ResistanceGA to optimize resistance parameters. Our S tructure analysis identified three distinct clusters, and diversity analyses support the existence of at least three local introductions. Multiple regression on distance matrices showed no evidence that development, roads, canopy cover or agriculture had a significant influence on genetic distance in B. sylvaticum . Geographical distance was a mediocre predictor of genetic distance and reflected geographical clustering. The model of rivers acting as a conduit explained a large portion of variation in genetic distance, but the lack of evidence of directional gene flow eliminated hydrochory as a dispersal mechanism. These results and observations of the distribution of populations in disturbed sites indicate that the influence of rivers on patterns of dispersal of B. sylvaticum probably reflects seed dispersal due to human recreational activity.

Medium-term dynamics of a middle Adriatic barred beach

In recent years, attention has been paid to beach protection by means of soft and hard defenses. Along the Italian coast of the Adriatic Sea, sandy beaches are the most common landscape feature and around 70 % of the Marche region's coast (central Adriatic) is protected by defense structures. The longest free-from-obstacle nearshore area in the region includes the beach of Senigallia, frequently monitored in the last decades and characterized by a multiple bar system, which represents a natural beach defense. The bathymetries surveyed in 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 show long-term stability, confirmed by a good adaptation of an analyzed stretch of the beach to the Dean-type equilibrium profile, though a strong short- to medium-term variability of the wave climate has been observed during the monitored periods. The medium-term dynamics of the beach, which deal with the evolution of submerged bars and are of the order of years or seasons, have been related to the wave climate collected, during the analyzed temporal windows, by a wave buoy located about 40 km off Senigallia. An overall interpretation of the hydrodynamics, sediment characteristics and seabed morphology suggests that the wave climate is fundamental for the morphodynamic changes of the beach in the medium term. These medium-term time ranges during which waves mainly come from NNE/ESE are characterized by a larger/smaller steepness and by a larger/smaller relative wave height, and seem to induce seaward/shoreward bar migration as well as bar smoothing/steepening. Moving southeastward, the bar dimension increases, while the equilibrium profile shape suggests the adaptation to a decreasing sediment size in the submerged beach. This is probably due to the presence of both the harbor jetty and river mouth north of the investigated area.