Ambient Ecology Research Articles

Malaria ecology and climate change

Understanding the costs that climate change will exact on society is crucial to devising an appropriate policy response. One of the channels through while climate change will affect human society is through vector-borne diseases whose epidemiology is conditioned by ambient ecology. This paper introduces the literature on malaria, its cost on society, and the consequences of climate change to the physics community in hopes of inspiring synergistic research in the area of climate change and health. It then demonstrates the use of one ecological indicator of malaria suitability to provide an order-of-magnitude assessment of how climate change might affect the malaria burden. The average of Global Circulation Model end-of-century predictions implies a 47% average increase in the basic reproduction number of the disease in today’s malarious areas, significantly complicating malaria elimination efforts.

English

Solar saltpans are ponds of brine sun evaporated to crystallize salt (Halite). Once provide ambient ecology for several halophilic microalgae. Enumeration of microorganisms in Thoothukudi solar saltpans revealed the presence of 30 genera of microalgae belonging to the divisions of Cyanophyta, Bacillariophyta and Chlorophyta. Chlorophyta species is the dominant group of solar salterns of Thoothukudi. Key words: Solar saltpans, halophilic microalgae, diversity, salt production and Thoothukudi.

Developing Spectral Library of Major Plant Species of Western Himalayas Using Ground Observations

A spectral library of commonly occurring Himalayan plant species has been developed. The 512-channel ASD handheld Fieldspec®Pro, 2000 Spectroradiometer with 3 nm spectral resolution and spectral range of 325 to 1,075 nm has been used for recording the leaf, branch or canopy spectra of plant species. Simultaneous measurements of crop biochemical parameters were estimated following standard methods, and vegetation indices were calculated for all the observations. The photographs of the plant species as well as their general descriptions were also detailed in the library. The spectral library has been developed in .Net programming environment. The GUI of library aids in viewing of all the information related to plant species such as spectral details, spectral graphs, general information of species, observation details, plant photographs, species spectral narrowband indices, species biochemical parameters, export options and help through menus and sub menus. The spectra and other information can be exported for further use by the user. The spectral reflectance can be used during classification of Hyperspectral images. The information provided in the library may also be used to explore the application potential of Hyperspectral images in studying chemical constituents, growth behavior, and ambient ecology of plants on a regional scale in Himalayan region. The basic objective of the work was to standardize the technique for vegetation spectral library development and make the data available for comparison by the user.

A middleware to integrate robots, simple devices and everyday objects into an ambient ecology

The fields of ambient intelligence, distributed robotics and wireless sensor networks are converging toward a common vision, in which ubiquitous sensing and acting devices cooperate to provide useful services in the home. These devices can range from sophisticated mobile robots to simple sensor nodes and even simpler tagged everyday objects. In this vision, a milkbox left on the table after the user has left the home could ask the service of a mobile robot to be placed back in the refrigerator. A missing ingredient to realize this vision is a mechanism that enables the communication and interoperation among such highly heterogeneous entities. In this paper, we propose such a mechanism in the form of a middleware able to integrate robots, tiny devices and augmented everyday objects into one and the same system. The key moves to cope with heterogeneity are: the definition of a tiny, compatible version of the middleware, that can run on small devices; and the concept of object proxy, used to make everyday object accessible within the middleware. We describe the concepts and implementation of our middleware, and show a number of experiments that illustrate its performance.

Egocentric interaction as a tool for designing ambient ecologies—The case of the easy ADL ecology

The visions of ambient intelligence demand novel interaction paradigms that enable designers and system developers to frame and manage the dynamic and complex interaction between humans and environments populated with physical (real) and virtual (digital) objects of interest. So far, many proposed approaches have adhered to a device-centric stance when including virtual objects into the ambient ecology; a stance inherited from existing interaction paradigms for mobile and stationary interactive devices. In this article, we introduce egocentric interaction as an alternative approach, taking the human agent’s body and mind as the center of reference. We show how this interaction paradigm has influenced both the conception and implementation of the easy ADL ecology, comprising of smart objects, a personal activity-centric middleware attempting to simplify interaction given available resources, ambient intelligence applications aimed at everyday activity support, and a human agent literally in the middle of it all.

La ecología disciplinar y la intrusión de la problemática ambiental: hacia la "percepción de fenómenos globales"

In the context of the beginning of 60’s, series of discourses performed by different social groups agree with the global condition of the ambient crisis. In the same decade, two areas of knowledge born within ecology: landscape ecology and macroecology. The main question of this work is: what is the relationship between the ambient problem and disciplinary ecology? Our hypothesis is that ambient problem may modulate the development of ecology. In particular, one of the main conclusions is that since 80’s ambient discourse may affect ecological investigations increasing its scales of studies.

A Personal Smart Space approach to realising Ambient Ecologies

One of the main aims of research in the area of ubiquitous or pervasive computing is that of dealing with the rapidly growing number of sensors, devices and artefacts in the user’s environment, which have an increasing amount of intelligence built in and which can communicate via wireless technologies. To assist in this the concept of Ambient Ecologies has been proposed as a metaphor for modelling ubiquitous or pervasive applications based on fixed smart spaces, such as the Smart Home. This paper describes the notion of a Personal Smart Space (PSS) and how it can be used to realise Ambient Ecologies. It goes on to show how, using a PSS approach, one can handle more general situations in which an Ambient Ecology is formed dynamically when two or more PSSs come together wherever this may be. The idea of a PSS is fundamental to the prototype pervasive system that has been developed within the Persist project where it has been used to demonstrate a range of different pervasive applications. In particular this prototype has been used to demonstrate a futuristic situation in the smart home where the total environment is under user control. It is shown how the requisite Ambient Ecologies can be handled by PSSs. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the Persist prototype in which mobile PSSs are used to affect the behaviour of fixed PSSs in their environment.

Ubiquitous Agents for Ambient Ecologies

The cost of state-of-the-art devices and robots is critical for the uptake of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). One way to utilize low-cost hardware for both devices and robots is to run smart software remotely as agents deployed on computationally rich environments. In this context, the devices and the robots can be seen as the Avatars of agents, while the way devices and agents are related may be considered as an Ambient Ecology. We show how the application of a middleware platform called EVATAR realizes this vision by exemplifying the main issues with a multi-robot and a smart-home scenarios.

Ambient Ecologies in Smart Homes

An important characteristic of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) environments is the integration of information, communication and sensing technologies into our everyday objects, giving rise to a new proactive computing model in homes. A smart home uses networked sensors, devices and appliances to build an intelligent environment in which many activities in the home are automated and where devices and services seamlessly cooperate to support domestic tasks. Programming and maintaining such an infrastructure is challenging because suitable abstractions are currently missing. In this work we have attempted to define ambient ecologies as a metaphor for modeling UbiComp applications, specify design patterns and programming principles and develop infrastructure to provide a paradigm of application engineering and tools to support ambient ecology designers, developers and end-users. We describe our model and the middleware architecture and present the engineering of applications in a smart home environment.

Constraints of authigenic carbonates on trace elements (Sr, Mg) of lacustrine ostracod shells in paleoenvironment reconstruction and its mechanism

Molar ratios of Mg/Ca and Sr/Ca were measured in two species of ostracod shells preserved in the upper core (15–55 m) of the Hequing Basin in Yunnan Province, southwest China. By correlating the molar ratios between Mg/Ca and Sr/Ca and comparing them with Sr concentrations of the sediments, we suggested that: (1) the molar Mg/Ca and Sr/Ca ratio variations in respective ostracod primo reflected the changes in its ambient water composition and ecology; (2) the molar Sr/Ca ratios responded better to the salinity change linearly than Mg/Ca without aragonite precipitation in the system, and otherwise there was no linear relation between them; and (3) the molar Sr/Ca ratios were mainly controlled by salinity and authigenic carbonate precipitation, whereas the molar Mg/Ca ratios were related to both salinity and temperature. In fact, the rate of ostracod growth owing to temperature controls the fluctuation of Mg/Ca in shells. Here, more attentions should be paid to the constraint of authigenic mineral precipitation processes on the trace elements in ostracod shells and to the correlation between these trace elements in biogenic carbonates and compositions of the sediments in systems and in future in vitro experiments.

Bright ultraviolet colouration in the Asian whistling-thrushes (Myiophonus spp.)

The ability of birds to perceive ultraviolet light (300-400 nm), to which humans are blind, has been neglected in avian behavioural ecology, and the occurrence and significance of ultraviolet (UV) colouration in plumage signals are important to explore. The support for a role of UV in avian communication comes mainly from demonstrations of UV-components in avian plumage reflectance, but most of these might be nonadaptive secondary effects of colouring mechanisms operating in longer wavelengths. Only colouration principally in the UV strongly suggests signalling in this spectral region. Here is presented the first example of nearly pure UV colouration in passerines, the Asian whistling-thrushes (Myiophonus spp.). As in a previously investigated parrot species, the barb-born UV-structure seems to be a modification of the taxonomically widespread `spongy structure' producing blue and violet feather colours. Lacking an obvious morphological constraint, the rarity of pure UV-signals is more likely to be explained by ambient light conditions and ecology. In the whistling-thrushes, a combination of high altitude, skylight-dominated habitat, mammalian predators, and semi-aquatic lifestyle might explain the evolution of UV-communication in this genus.