Stable isotope mixing models (SIMMs) are an important tool used to study species’ trophic ecology. These models are dependent on, and sensitive to, the choice of trophic discrimination factors (TDF) representing the offset in stable isotope delta values between a consumer and their food source when they are at equilibrium. Ideally, controlled feeding trials should be conducted to determine the appropriate TDF for each consumer, tissue type, food source, and isotope combination used in a...

Conservation of biodiversity may in the future increasingly depend upon the availability of scientific information to set suitable restoration targets. In traditional paleoecology, sediment-based pollen provides a means to define preanthropogenic impact conditions, but problems in establishing the exact provenance and ecologically meaningful levels of taxonomic resolution of the evidence are limiting. We explored the extent to which the use of sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) may complement pollen data in reconstructing past alpine environments in...

Interactive palette based colour editing applications have grown in popularity in recent years, but while many methods propose fast palette extraction techniques, they typically rely on the user to define the number of colours needed. In this paper, we present an approach that extracts a small set of representative colours from an image automatically, determining the optimal palette size without user interaction. Our iterative technique assigns a vote to each pixel in the image based...

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have achieved great success for single-image superresolution (SISR). However, most models attempt to improve reconstruction accuracy while increasing the requirement of number of model parameters. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we study reducing the number of parameters and computational cost of CNN-based SISR methods while maintaining the accuracy of super-resolution reconstruction performance. To this end, we introduce a novel network architecture for SISR, which strikes a good trade-off...

The effective design of visual computing systems depends heavily on the anticipation of visual attention, or saliency. While visual attention is well investigated for conventional 2D images and video, it is nevertheless a very active research area for emerging immersive media. In particular, visual attention of light fields (light rays of a scene captured by a grid of cameras or micro lenses) has only recently become a focus of research. As they may be rendered...

In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic hit our shores, we were told to stay home. We listened to public health advice and to experts debating the measures required to protect us. Scientific terminology crept into our daily conversations. But in addition to the ongoing uncertainty about the long-term impacts of the virus on our health, many of us were struggling with the uncertainty that now emerged in our everyday lives. What did the...

African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are ecosystem engineers that browse and damage large quantities of vegetation during their foraging and movement. Though elephant trail networks and clearings are conspicuous features of many African forests, the consequences of elephant foraging for forest structure and diversity are poorly documented. In this study in northeastern Gabon, we compare stem size, stem density, proportional damage, species diversity, and species relative abundance of seedlings and saplings in the vicinity of...

Insect declines are a global issue with significant ecological and economic ramifications. Yet we have a poor understanding of the genomic impact these losses can have. Genome-wide data from historical specimens has the potential to provide baselines of population genetic measures to study population change, with natural history collections representing large repositories of such specimens. However, an initial challenge in conducting historical DNA data analyses, is to understand how molecular preservation varies between specimens. Here,...

The study of voice hearing has been traditionally kept within the limits of psychiatry field which, by reducing it to the pathological phenomenon of “auditory verbal hallucinations”, mainly focused on its neurobiological origins. However new approaches of voice hearing, coming from the field of psychology as well as of politics, have emerged recently. Simon McCarthy-Jones contributes to this effort of renewing and enlarging our understanding of voice hearing, by apprehending this phenomenon through its diversity,...

The Hybrid Placement model blends different contexts for practice-based learning: on-site, off-site, online and reflective practice. It has evolved in response to changed work practices in social work service delivery, necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to ensure quality learning opportunities, aligned with the CORU – Social Work Registration Board Domains of Proficiency, are maximised when it is not possible to attend the placement site full-time. This Practice Learning Resource has been developed by...

The aim of this study was to elucidate the interactive and temporal features of conversational turn-taking during father-child and mother-child play and investigate associations with children’s cognitive and language abilities. Eighty typically developing two-year-olds (M = 24.06 months, SD = 1.39) and their biological mothers and fathers took part in the current study which consisted of a single visit to an Infant and Child Lab. Parent-child conversational turn-taking was measured from dyadic structured play interactions...

Predicting the effects of seasonality and climate change on the emergence and spread of infectious disease remains difficult, in part because of poorly understood connections between warming and the mechanisms driving disease. Trait-based mechanistic models combined with thermal performance curves arising from the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) have been highlighted as a promising approach going forward; however, this framework has not been tested under controlled experimental conditions that isolate the role of gradual temporal...