Flora and fauna have both evolved under a natural cycle of light and dark. But especially in urban areas, the night is now
increasingly disturbed by artificial light. Many traits and behaviours in fish are triggered by a circadian clock, for example
hatching and swim bladder inflation, which predominantly take place at dusk or night. As lighting becomes brighter and extends
farther into rural areas, the distinction between day and night becomes increasingly blurred. Therefore, the loss of diurnal
trigger by artificial light at night was hypothesized having deleterious effects on these traits and impact fish reproduction.
To assess these effects, eggs of four native freshwater fishes, Eurasian perch Perca fluviatilis, roach Rutilus rutilus, bleak Alburnus alburnus and chub Leuciscus cephalus, were incubated under two different light conditions: a photoperiod of 14 h light:10 h darkness (LD) and continuous illumination
(LL). The time to hatch and swim bladder inflation was recorded. The species showed inconsistent reactions to the light treatments.
In roach and bleak, the time to 50% hatch was longer in LL, whereas continuous lighting had an accelerating effect in chub.
Incubation in LL elongated the hatching period in perch and roach and, in perch, the onset of darkness seemed to trigger hatching.
The swim bladder inflation was significantly promoted by continuous light in chub and bleak but was not affected in roach.
In conclusion, nocturnal artificial illumination could have an effect on hatching and initial swim bladder filling by masking
the day–night-change and thereby diminish the trigger effect. However, the reactions were species specific and the increase
in variation indicated a lack of diurnal triggering, whilst a general deleterious effect of artificial light at night has
not been identified on early life stages. 相似文献
The Upper Middle Rhine Valley, granted the status of a World Heritage site, is well known for its unique inner narrow valley
of Quaternary age with its historical legacy of numerous medieval castles and old towns. Less known is that this has always
been a risk area of floods and gravitative mass movements. Up to the recent past, mainly ice floods caused enormous damage.
The inhabitants of the valley were well aware that they lived in a risk area, but they had learned to handle the flood hazard.
With the demise of ice floods over the last 40 years, due to climate change and because of the additional heating of the river
water by power plants, the awareness of flood hazards has been much diminished, in contrast to that of potential damage by
rockfalls and landslides which were also much feared in the past, though at the local level only. Still in the people’s memory
is the Kaub catastrophe of March 10, 1876, when 28 persons were killed by a landslide. Nowadays, even minor rockfalls are
a major threat, as they will affect the much-used traffic lines on both banks of the river, in particular the railroads. Therefore,
since 2002, on behalf of German Rail (Deutsche Bahn, DB), all problematic slopes have been protected by costly steel-ring nets, although they are an aesthetic problem by UNESCO
standards. The feeling of absolute safety created among the public is only subjective, though, as planners are well aware
of. Moreover, the impact of modern climate change on slope stability is nearly unknown. Therefore, it is still necessary to
develop a risk map for the narrow valley, with emphasis on gravitational hazards. 相似文献
Power spectra of segmentation-cell length (a dominant length scale of EUV emission in the transition region) from full-disk He?ii extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images observed by the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) during periods of quiet-Sun conditions for a time interval from 1996 to 2015 were analyzed. The spatial power as a function of the spatial frequency from about 0.04 to 0.27 (EIT) or up to 0.48 (AIA) Mm?1 depends on the distribution of the observed segmentation-cell dimensions – a structure of the solar EUV network. The temporal variations of the spatial power reported by Didkovsky and Gurman (Solar Phys.289, 153, 2014) were suggested as decreases at the mid-spatial frequencies for the compared spectra when the power curves at the highest spatial frequencies of 0.5 pix?1 were adjusted to match each other. This approach has been extended in this work to compare spectral ratios at high spatial frequencies expressed in the solar spatial frequency units of Mm?1. A model of EIT and AIA spatial responses allowed us to directly compare spatial spectral ratios at high spatial frequencies for five years of joint operation of EIT and AIA, from 2010 to 2015. Based on this approach, we represent these ratio changes as a long-term network transformation that may be interpreted as a continuous dissipation of mid-size network structures to the smaller-size structures in the transition region. In contrast to expected cycling of the segmentation-cell dimension structures and associated spatial power in the spectra with the solar cycle, the spectra demonstrate a significant and steady change of the EUV network. The temporal trend across these structural spectra is not critically sensitive to any long-term instrumental changes, e.g. degradation of sensitivity, but to the change of the segmentation-cell dimensions of the EUV network structure. 相似文献
Ecosystem multifunctionality(EMF), the simultaneous provision of multiple ecosystem functions, is often affected by biodiversity and environmental factors. We know little about how the interactions between biodiversity and environmental factors affect EMF. In this case study, a structural equation model was used to clarify climatic and geographic pathways that affect EMF by varying biodiversity in the Tibetan alpine grasslands. In addition to services related to carbon, nitrogen, and water cycling, forage supply, which is related to plantproductivity and palatability, was included in the EMF index. The results showed that 72% of the variation in EMF could be explained by biodiversity and other environmental factors. The ratio of palatable richness to all species richness explained 8.3% of the EMF variation. We found that air temperature, elevation, and latitude all affected EMF, but in different ways. Air temperature and elevation impacted the aboveground parts of the ecosystem, which included plant height, aboveground biomass, richness of palatable species, and ratio of palatable richness to all species richness. Latitude affected EMF by varying both aboveground and belowground parts of the ecosystem, which included palatable speciesrichness and belowground biomass. Our results indicated that there are still uncertainties in the biodiversity–EMF relationships related to the variable components of EMF, and climatic and geographic factors. Clarification of pathways that affect EMF using structural equation modeling techniques could elucidate the mechanisms by which environmental changes affect EMF. 相似文献
A collection of brachiopods by the Institute of Oceanology, Academia Sinica (Qingdao), contains eight species from seven genera.
Six of the species have been recorded previously from China seas—Lingula adamsi, L. anatina, Discinisca stella, Pelagodiscus atlanticus, Campages mariae, Terebratalia coreanica. Two species (Terebratulina hataiana andFrenulina sanguinolenta) have been described from other parts of the Pacific area. The apparent absence of any endemic species is a noteworthy feature
of Chinese in comparison with Japanese faunas. 相似文献
Discrete element method has been widely adopted to simulate processes that are challenging to continuum-based approaches. However, its computational efficiency can be greatly compromised when large number of particles are required to model regions of less interest to researchers. Due to this, the application of DEM to boundary value problems has been limited. This paper introduces a three-dimensional discrete element–finite difference coupling method, in which the discrete–continuum interactions are modeled in local coordinate systems where the force and displacement compatibilities between the coupled subdomains are considered. The method is validated using a model dynamic compaction test on sand. The comparison between the numerical and physical test results shows that the coupling method can effectively simulate the dynamic compaction process. The responses of the DEM model show that dynamic stress propagation (compaction mechanism) and tamper penetration (bearing capacity mechanism) play very different roles in soil deformations. Under impact loading, the soil undergoes a transient weakening process induced by dynamic stress propagation, which makes the soil easier to densify under bearing capacity mechanism. The distribution of tamping energy between the two mechanisms can influence the compaction efficiency, and allocating higher compaction energy to bearing capacity mechanism could improve the efficiency of dynamic compaction.