Ontogenetic shifts and temporal changes in the trophic patterns of the deep‐sea red shrimp,Aristaeomorpha foliacea (Decapods: Aristeidae), in the Eastern Ionian Sea (Eastern Mediterranean)

The purpose of this paper is to provide the first detailed data concerning the diet and feeding activity of the giant red shrimp, Aristaeomorpha foliacea, in the Eastern Ionian Sea (Eastern Mediterranean), in relation to season, size class and sex. Feeding activity in A. foliacea was intense, based on its low vacuity index and high prey diversity, with a diet dominated by mesopelagic prey and less frequent occurrence of benthic taxa. Giant red shrimp displayed a highly diversified diet that exhibited slight seasonal fluctuations. The diets of both sexes consisted of 60 different prey categories belonging chiefly to three groups: crustaceans (e.g. decapods, such as Plesionika spp. and Pasiphaeidae, amphipods), cephalopods (mainly Enoploteuthidae) and fishes (Myctophidae, Macrouridae). These three prey categories accounted for 72–82% of the relative abundance and total occurrence for males and 70–88% for females, respectively. Variation in food availability, as well as increased energy demands related to gonad development and breeding activity, appear to be critical factors driving temporal changes in feeding strategy. Feeding activity increased during spring and summer, which coincides with reproductive activities (mating, gonad maturation, egg‐laying). Females seem to be more active predators than males, consuming prey with greater swimming ability. However, ontogenetic shifts in diet were also apparent, despite high dietary overlap among small, medium and large females. Large individuals, which are more efficient predators, selected highly mobile prey (e.g. fishes), whereas small individuals consumed low‐mobility prey (e.g. copepods, ostracods, tanaids and sipunculans).     

Porting of a wildfire risk and fire spread application into a cloud computing environment

Effective wildfire management is an essential part of forest firefighting strategies to minimize damage to land resources and loss of human lives. Wildfire management tools often require a large number of computing resources at a specific time. Such computing resources are not affordable to local fire agencies because of the extreme upfront costs on hardware and software. The emerging cloud computing technology can be a cost- and result-effective alternative. The purpose of this paper is to present the development and the implementation of a state-of-the-art application running in cloud computing, composed of a wildfire risk and a wildfire spread simulation service. The two above applications are delivered within a web-based interactive platform to the fire management agencies as Software as a Service (SaaS). The wildfire risk service calculates and provides daily to the end-user maps of the hourly forecasted fire risk for the next 112 hours in high spatiotemporal resolution, based on forecasted meteorological data. In addition, actual fire risk is calculated hourly, based on meteorological conditions provided by remote automatic weather stations. Regarding the wildfire behavior simulation service, end users can simulate the fire spread by simply providing the ignition point and the projected duration of the fire, based on the HFire algorithm. The efficiency of the proposed solution is based on the flexibility to scale up or down the number of computing nodes needed for the requested processing. In this context, end users will be charged only for their consumed processing time and only during the actual wildfire confrontation period. The system utilizes both commercial and open source cloud resources. The current prototype is applied in the study area of Lesvos Island, Greece, but its flexibility enables expansion in different geographical areas.     

Latent Exurban Development: City Expansion Along the Rural-To-Urban Gradient in Growing and Declining Regions of Southern Europe

This paper quantifies the extent of exurban development in Mediterranean Europe. The assessment was carried out by studying changes in the urban-to-rural population density gradient between the years 1950 and 2010. Three of the six urban regions in this study have experienced population growth and moderate urban concentration, while two regions appear to be shifting toward population decline and urban de-concentration after having experienced compact expansion. A phase of recent re-urbanization has been observed in one region. Altogether, these findings indicate a common path of urban expansion among representative Mediterranean regions between 1950 and 1980 while, in the following period, the cities experienced distinct development phases. From this study, we conclude that exurban development is mainly the product of a shift from compact and dense to semi-compact and intermediate-density settlements. [Key words: semi-dense urban growth, density-distance curve, Mediterranean Europe].     

The species of Silene compacta Fischer as indicator of zinc,iron and copper mineralization

The possibility of using the species Silene compacta Fischer (Caryophyllaceae) as a plant indicator for Zn, Fe and Cu is discussed in this paper. Rock and plant samples were collected from an area near Essimi, north-eastern Greece, which is known for its Cu–Pb–Zn mineralization and analyzed for their content in 14 elements (Fe, Mn, Ag, As, Cd, Co, Cu, Mo, Ni, Pb, Sb, Sn, Zn and V). The data illustrate positive linear correlation between the concentrations of Zn, Fe and Cu in plant ash and rock samples. In particular, these correlations are 0.99 for Zn, 0.97 for Fe and 0.97 for Cu and are significant at the 99.9% confidence level. Therefore, S. compacta could be used as a plant indicator for Zn, Fe and Cu mineralization.     

Microseismicity and focal mechanisms at the western termination of the North Anatolian Fault and their implications for continental tectonics

For seven weeks, a temporary network of 68 seismological stations was operated in Central Greece, in the region of Thessaly and Evia, located at the western termination of the North Anatolian Fault system. We recorded 510 earthquakes and computed 80 focal mechanisms. Seismic activity is associated with the NE–SW dextral North Aegean Fault, or with very young E–W-striking normal faults that are located around the Gulf of Volos and the Gulf of Lamia. The important NW–SE-striking faults bounding the Pilion, or the basins of Larissa and Karditsa, are not seismically active, suggesting that it is easier to break continental crust, creating new faults perpendicular to the principal stresses, than to reactivate faults that strike obliquely to the principal stress axes     

On the r-mode spectrum of relativistic stars in the low-frequency approximation

The axial modes for non-barotropic relativistic rotating neutron stars with uniform angular velocity are studied, using the slow-rotation formalism together with the low-frequency approximation, first investigated by Kojima. The time-independent form of the equations leads to a singular eigenvalue problem, which admits a continuous spectrum. We show that for     , it is nevertheless also possible to find discrete mode solutions (the r modes). However, under certain conditions related to the equation of state and the compactness of the stellar model, the eigenfrequency lies inside the continuous band and the associated velocity perturbation is divergent; hence these solutions have to be discarded as being unphysical. We corroborate our results by explicitly integrating the time-dependent equations. For stellar models admitting a physical r-mode solution, it can indeed be excited by arbitrary initial data. For models admitting only an unphysical mode solution, the evolutions do not show any tendency to oscillate with the respective frequency. For higher values of l it seems that in certain cases there are no mode solutions at all.     

Greek tectonics and seismicity

The validity of existing tectonic models for the area of Greece is examined in the light of the new recalculated parameters for earthquakes of the region (Makropoulos and Burton, 1981). Relocated hypocentral positions are extracted from the catalogue to form radial and vertical distance-depth cross-sections centred on a reference point near the mid-point of the Aegean Volcanic arc, and these are used to form a three dimensional topography of the base of earthquake occurrence below 60 km. Isodepth maps are extracted from this topography as both three and two dimensional map presentations. These maps reveal several significant features of deep-seated tectonic processes in the region. Isodepths exceeding 150 km are seen in the northwest Aegean, and these are more closely linked to the Sporadhes and Gulf of Thermaicos, rather than the North Aegean trough. The 150 km isodepths are also seen in the northeast Aegean straddling the Dardanelles; in the northeastern part of the Peloponnesus, Gulf of Saronikos and eastern Gulf of Corinth in the southern Peloponnesus towards Crete; and extending from north of Kos to south of Rodos. The largest extent of deepest activity is seen south of Rodos and this continues towards southwest of Turkey. The subduction zone of the Hellenic arc is clear, but smooth Benioff zones are not the norm, and these data show that structural complexity is more readily observed. It is concluded that none of the proposed tectonic models completely explain the observed activity over the whole area, and rather than propose yet another model places where further work is still particularly necessary are identified.     

Complex movement patterns by foraging loggerhead sea turtles outside the breeding season identified using Argos‐linked Fastloc‐Global Positioning System

We used Argos‐linked Fastloc‐Global Positioning System (Argos‐linked Fastloc‐GPS) satellite tags to investigate how loggerhead sea turtles use neritic foraging habitats at multiple scales. Out of 24 turtles, six individuals used more than one foraging site, with all sites being separated by >25 km. These six individuals used up to four sites, remaining at each site for a mean of 150 days and returning to the same site a minimum of 52 days later. The other 18 turtles remained in a single site. The area within sites was not used uniformly, with 15 out of 24 turtles exhibiting complex movement patterns within and amongst up to five focal patches, which were typically 0.1–5.0 km apart within a single site. Movements between sites and patches might sometimes have reflected overwintering behaviour; however, similar movement patterns occurred at multiple times of the year, suggesting other factors were also involved. Use of multiple sites and patches might be driven by differences in resource availability, such as food and/or night‐time refuges, competition, or exploratory movement to investigate or locate alternative patches. We confirmed competition via direct visual observations of aggressive interactions between individuals at one foraging patch. Our results illustrate the importance of standardizing data to the same number of locations per day and night to accurately delineate key areas used by turtles or for evidence‐based marine protected area planning.     

Forecasting Solar Flares Using Magnetogram-based Predictors and Machine Learning

We propose a forecasting approach for solar flares based on data from Solar Cycle 24, taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission. In particular, we use the Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP) product that facilitates cut-out magnetograms of solar active regions (AR) in the Sun in near-realtime (NRT), taken over a five-year interval (2012?–?2016). Our approach utilizes a set of thirteen predictors, which are not included in the SHARP metadata, extracted from line-of-sight and vector photospheric magnetograms. We exploit several machine learning (ML) and conventional statistics techniques to predict flares of peak magnitude \({>}\,\mbox{M1}\) and \({>}\,\mbox{C1}\) within a 24 h forecast window. The ML methods used are multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), support vector machines (SVM), and random forests (RF). We conclude that random forests could be the prediction technique of choice for our sample, with the second-best method being multi-layer perceptrons, subject to an entropy objective function. A Monte Carlo simulation showed that the best-performing method gives accuracy \(\mathrm{ACC}=0.93(0.00)\), true skill statistic \(\mathrm{TSS}=0.74(0.02)\), and Heidke skill score \(\mathrm{HSS}=0.49(0.01)\) for \({>}\,\mbox{M1}\) flare prediction with probability threshold 15% and \(\mathrm{ACC}=0.84(0.00)\), \(\mathrm{TSS}=0.60(0.01)\), and \(\mathrm{HSS}=0.59(0.01)\) for \({>}\,\mbox{C1}\) flare prediction with probability threshold 35%.     

Improved prediction of the threshold of surf-riding of a ship in steep following seas

An extended version of Melnikov's method is implemented in order to predict more accurately the threshold of global surf-riding for a ship operating in steep following seas. The key advantage of the proposed method is that it overcomes the limitation of small damping and/or small forcing that are intrinsic to the implementation of the standard Melnikov's method. A reference ITTC ship is used here by way of example and the result is compared to that obtained from standard analysis as well as numerical simulations. Because of the primary drawback of the extended Melnikov's method is the inability to arrive at a closed form equation, in this work the authors arrive at a “best fit” approximation to the extended Melnikov numerically predicted result.