Continuous Human Activity Research Articles

Water Quantity and Quality of Six Lakes in the Arid Xinjiang Region, NW China

Xinjiang arid region is situated in the hinterland of Asia, characterized by very low precipitation and high evaporation. Most lakes in the region have evolved naturally to salt lakes and lagoons over the long term. In recent decades, driven by continuous climate warming and human activities, the water quantity and quality of lakes have fluctuated frequently, which has had significant impacts on regional resources and the environment. In this article, the water quantity and quality of six lakes, from saline to fresh, were studied. They are located at different geomorphologic regions (e.g., mountains and plains) in Xinjiang, China. Mountain Lakes Kanasi and Sailimu have expanded slightly, but their water quantity and quality have not changed significantly over the past decade. Oasis lakes, such as Lake Bositeng and Lake Chaiwopu, and tail-end lakes, such as Lake Wulungu and Lake Ebinur, have reduced in area, and in general, the water has become saline. Lake changes were mainly responses to the regional climate change, although factors like human activities and basin morphological characteristics have led to individual differences in lake evolution. Changes in water quality and quantity are clearly linked. Where water quantity increased, water became less salty and vice versa. Over the past decade, water quality of the mountain lakes (Sailimu and Kanasi) were relatively stable, but oasis lakes (i.e., Bositeng and Chaiwopu) continue to deteriorate, whereas water quality of the tail-end lakes (Wulungu and Ebinur) display unstable hydrochemistry.

Ecological footprint as a tool for integrated coastal zone management

ABSTRACT The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a widely accepted tool for translating all human activities so as to assess their environmental impact and has been often used as an indicator for environmental sustainability, over the last few years, providing information on the impacts of human activities on environmentally valuable ecosystems. On the other hand, Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) sets the basic principles and methodologies for the sustainable development and management of coastal areas. ICZM is a dynamic, continuous and iterative process designed to promote sustainable management of coastal zones. The continuous human activities development without an effort of a minimization of their EF could jeopardize the future sustainability of the coast. Therefore, in this article, it is attempted to find the gaps in coastal management which the EF could fill in by acting as a planning and management tool. More specifically, this paper examines whether EF could be used in the case of a major trans...

Relationships between testate amoeba communities and water quality in Lake Donghu, a large alkaline lake in Wuhan, China

The middle Yangtze Reach is one of the most developed regions of China. As a result, most lakes in this area have suffered from eutrophication and serious environmental pollution during recent decades. The aquatic biodiversity in the lakes of the area is thus currently under significant threat from continuous human activities. Testate amoebae (TA) are benthic (rarely planktonic) microorganisms characterized by an agglutinated or autogenous shell. Owing to their high abundance, preservation potential in lacustrine sediments, and distinct response to environmental stress, they are increasingly used as indicators for monitoring water quality and reconstructing palaeoenvironmental changes. However this approach has not yet been developed in China. This study presents an initial assessment of benthic TA assemblages in eight lakes of Lake Donghu in the region of Wuhan, China. Testate amoeba community structure was most strongly correlated to water pH. In more alkaline conditions, communities were dominated by Centropyxis aculeata, Difflugia oblonga, Pontigulasia compressa, Pon. elisa and Lesquereusia modesta. These results are consistent with previous studies and show that TA could be useful for reconstructing past water pH fluctuations in China. To achieve this, the next step will be to expand the database and build transfer function models.

Continuous human action recognition in real time

This paper discusses the task of continuous human action recognition. By continuous, it refers to videos that contain multiple actions which are connected together. This task is important to applications like video surveillance and content based video retrieval. It aims to identify the action category and detect the start and end key frame of each action. It is a challenging task due to the frequent changes of human actions and the ambiguity of action boundaries. In this paper, a novel and efficient continuous action recognition framework is proposed. Our approach is based on the bag of words representation. A visual local pattern is regarded as a word and the action is modeled by the distribution of words. A generative translation and scale invariant probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis model is presented. The continuous action recognition result is obtained frame by frame and updated from time to time. Experimental results show that this approach is effective and efficient to recognize both isolated actions and continuous actions.

The Study on the Conservation Status and Problems of Aquatic Ecosystem in Songhua River Basin

Continuous and intense human activities have seriously affected the aquatic ecosystem health and security of the Songhua River Basin, which has led to the atrophy and degradation of wetlands, the pollution of water, the degradation of black soil, the descending of waters biological diversity and the draught-up of rivers, etc. At present, how to protect the basin aquatic ecosystem and maintain the positive cycle of aquatic ecosystem are becoming grossly hot and difficult issues that require immediate resolutions.

Site formation processes in caves: The Holocene sediments of the Haua Fteah, Cyrenaica, Libya

Caves have yielded some of the most globally important archaeological sequences, but often their interpretation has suffered from assumptions about cave sedimentary processes. Caves contain distinctive sedimentary environments: this has major implications for the understanding of contained archaeological materials. This paper describes and analyses the Holocene sediments in the Haua Fteah, a sequence regarded as essentially continuous by the original excavator. 50 years after it was first excavated, the Haua's Epipalaeolithic to post-Classical chronological range and rich finds make it still the key Holocene archaeological site in North Africa. The reassessment shows, however, that the sequence is strongly discontinuous and this has major implications for the reinterpretation of the site, as the highly-resolved archaeological record is thus likely to reflect a series of brief occupations, rather than continuous human activity. As with many caves, the sedimentary record in the Haua Fteah is an extremely sensitive indicator of environments and processes in the wider landscape. Secure understanding of sedimentary process, from analysis of the highly individual records found in caves, is essential for full understanding of their contained archaeology.

On the conservation biology of a Chinese population of the birdwing Troides aeacus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae)

This study deals with the habitat requirements and (meta)population ecology of the Birdwing Butterfly Troides aeacus in the Xiaolongshan forest area and the Baishuijiang Natural Reserve of Gansu Province, China. The more descriptive components mainly summarize the biology and habitat requirements of the species. A detailed account is given of 3-year presence/absence dynamics in a suspected metapopulation, which consists of ten habitat patches. By means of GLM a habitat model was developed which has shown that the abundance of Troides aeacus will increase with both the number of larval host plants and adult nectar plants, while it will decrease with denser forest canopy structure. The hierarchical partitioning of the explained variance indicated that the independent effects of the number of nectar plants and the forest canopy density are the most important factors, while the explanatory power of the number of host plants was minimal. Habitat loss and degradation are the most severe threats to Troides aeacus populations in the study area. These are mainly due to continuous human activities such as destruction of forest for reclamation, grazing, mine exploitation, and cutting of firewood, but also herbicide application and sometimes even certain types of afforestation. While the availability of host plants is a clear pre-requisite for the survival of the species, conservation should be most efficient through an increase in the abundance of nectar plants as well as through the avoidance of complete forest cover (through an appropriate cutting management which would also promote growth of the host plants). As environmental threats are quite similar in the entire Southern Gansu region, we expect that the implementation of such butterfly conservation measures should have positive impacts on many other components of biodiversity.

RECOGNIZING PERSONS CLIMBING FENCES

In this paper, we present two approaches to recognize a special type of human action, e.g. climbing a fence, from continuous monocular videos. Both approaches represent human activities as time series of discrete observations. In the first approach, we extract a feature vector from each frame, based on the relative configuration of human body parts against a fence. In the second approach, we propose a novel concept called "stable contact", to decompose the continuous human activities into adjacent but disjoint time intervals called primitive intervals. We then define a primitive motion unit (PMU) on each primitive interval with three attributes, thus converting each continuous activity into a sequence of PMUs. With the time series representations, we utilize Hidden Markov Model (HMM) techniques for recognition, including decoding in the first approach and searching in the second approach. Experimental results, on a set of image sequences with mixed human actions including walking and climbing a fence, show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We compare the two approaches and discuss their applicability in different scenarios.

Human action recognition using boosted EigenActions

This paper proposes a boosting EigenActions algorithm for human action recognition. A spatio-temporal Information Saliency Map (ISM) is calculated from a video sequence by estimating pixel density function. A continuous human action is segmented into a set of primitive periodic motion cycles from information saliency curve. Each cycle of motion is represented by a Salient Action Unit (SAU), which is used to determine the EigenAction using principle component analysis. A human action classifier is developed using multi-class Adaboost algorithm with Bayesian hypothesis as the weak classifier. Given a human action video sequence, the proposed method effectively locates the SAUs in the video, and recognizes the human actions by categorizing the SAUs. Two publicly available human action databases, namely KTH and Weizmann, are selected for evaluation. The average recognition accuracy are 81.5% and 98.3% for KTH and Weizmann databases, respectively. Comparative results with two recent methods and robustness test results are also reported.

The future of coastal ecosystems: learning from Venice

Venice and its lagoon have survived throughout the centuries due to continuous human actions aimed at maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between the two major opposing forces, land and water, threatening this delicate environment. Two coordinated symposia, organised by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1 and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 2 were a welcome opportunity for a general overview on the environmental and social problems of this unique town. Lectures pointed out how the recent history of Venice may be regarded as an example of a much broader problem: the future of coastal ecosystems on alluvial substrates directly exposed to the climatic change. As a consequence, the issue under discussion can be widened from a problem of local interest (although with major social, economic and cultural evidence) to a potential threat for many of the most densely populated areas of the Earth. During the long history of Venice, a number of soft or more substantial interventions became necessary. Most notably, amongst the latter, those pursued by the Venice Republic to preserve its ‘marine’ vocation, namely the diversion of entire major rivers debouching into the lagoon (XII–XIV century AD) and the construction of sea defences (the ‘murazzi’, in 1738). The industrial revolution in the XIX century, with the development of steam navigation, forced a number of further substantial interventions, like the narrowing of inlets with the construction of long jetties protruding into the sea. In the period 1920–1930, a new extended industrial pole was reclaimed at the boundary of the lagoon (Porto Marghera); after World War II the plants were reconstructed and the total area further

Distributed recognition of human actions using wearable motion sensor networks

We propose a distributed recognition framework to classify continuous human actions using a low-bandwidth wearable motion sensor network, called distributed sparsity classifier (DSC). The algorithm classifies human actions using a set of training motion sequences as prior examples. It is also capable of rejecting outlying actions that are not in the training categories. The classification is operated in a distributed fashion on individual sensor nodes and a base station computer. We model the distribution of multiple action classes as a mixture subspace model, one subspace for each action class. Given a new test sample, we seek the sparsest linear representation of the sample w.r.t. all training examples. We show that the dominant coefficients in the representation only correspond to the action class of the test sample, and hence its membership is encoded in the sparse representation. Fast linear solvers are provided to compute such representation via e 1-minimization. To validate the accuracy of the framework, a public wearable action recognition database is constructed, called wearable action recognition database (WARD). The database is comprised of 20 human subjects in 13 action categories. Using up to five motion sensors in the WARD database, DSC achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further show that the recognition precision only decreases gracefully using smaller subsets of active sensors. It validates the robustness of the distributed recognition framework on an unreliable wireless network. It also demonstrates the ability of DSC to conserve sensor energy for communication while preserve accurate global classification. (This work was partially supported by ARO MURI W911NF-06-1-0076, NSF TRUST Center, and the startup funding from the University of Texas and Texas Instruments.)

Paleoenvironmental evolution of Istron (N.E Crete), during the last 6000 years: depositional environment, climate and sea level changes

The Istron area is located in northeastern Crete, Gulf of Mirabello, on an alluvial fan of Holocene age. The archaeological importance of this area is suggested not only by its archaeological remains, but also by its significant location. Many important Minoan sites, like Gournia, Kavousi, Pseira, have been discovered near Istro. There are indications of human installations from the Neolithic to the Roman period, proving the continuous human activity in this area. The significant geological location- it represents an area with intense tectonic activity-, geomorphological regime and climatic changes, have influenced regional settlement and the overall cultural development of the area. The study of sea-land interactions during the last seven millennia in relation to the eustatic sea level oscillations and the regional neotectonic regime, as well as the geomorphologic observations and analyses on deposited sediments, aims to reveal the paleogeographic evolution of the landscape and its impact on prehistoric, classical and Roman establishments. A geomorphological mapping of the coastal area along with the drilling of five boreholes and the excavation of six trenches, have therefore been accomplished. Moreover, pollen and microfaunal (benthic foraminifera and ostracodes) analyses have been performed. Six samples were dated using AMS and Conventional radiocarbon techniques providing temporal control of the sediments. Sea level rise along with sea-land interactions to the landscape evolution and the transgression of sea in 5000BP have been verified. Additionally, several implications for the use of land and human impact civilization have been made.

ATOMIC HUMAN ACTION SEGMENTATION AND RECOGNITION USING A SPATIO-TEMPORAL PROBABILISTIC FRAMEWORK

In this paper, a framework of automatic human action segmentation and recognition in continuous action sequences is proposed. A star figure enclosed by a bounding convex polygon is used to effectively represent the extremities of the silhouette of a human body. The human action, thus, is recorded as a sequence of the star-figure's parameters, which is used for action modeling. To model human actions in a compact manner while characterizing their spatio-temporal distributions, the star-figure's parameters are represented by Gaussian mixture models (GMM). In addition, to address the intrinsic nature of temporal variations in a continuous action sequence, we transform the time sequence of star-like figure parameters into frequency domain by discrete cosine transform (DCT) and use only the first few coefficients to represent different temporal patterns with significant discriminating power. The performance shows that the proposed framework can recognize continuous human actions in an efficient way.

Γεωμορφολογική εξέλιξη της παράκτιας περιοχής του Ίστρου-Καλού Χωριού του νομού Λασιθίου Κρήτης από το Μέσο Ολόκαινο μέχρι σήμερα

The Istron area is located in northeastern Crete, Gulf of Mirabello, on an alluvial fan of Holocene age. The archaeological importance of this area is pointed out not only by its archaeological remains, but also by its significant location. Many important minoan sites, like Gournia, Kavousi, Pseira, have been discovered near Istro,. There are indications of human installations from the Neolithic to the Roman period, proving the continuous human activity in this area. The significant geological location, as it represents an area with intense tectonic activity, the geomorphological regime of the area and the climatic changes , influenced human installations as well as the evolution of the civilization . The study of sea-land interactions during the last seven millennia in relation to the eustatic sea level oscillations and the regional neotectonic regime, as well as the géomorphologie observations and analyses on deposited sediments, aims to reveal the paleogeographic evolution of the landscape and its impact on prehistoric, classical and Roman establishments. Therefore, a geomorphological mapping of the coastal area along with the drilling of five boreholes and the excavation of six trenches, have been accomplished. Moreover, pollen and microfaunal (benthic foraminifera and ostracodes) analyses have been performed. Six samples were dated using AMS and Conventional radiocarbon techniques providing temporal control of the sediments. Sea level rise along with sea-land interactions to the landscape evolution and the transgression of sea in 5000BP have been verified. Additionally, several implications for the use of land and human impact civilization have been concluded.

Holocene vegetation development in the catchment of Sagistalsee (1935 m asl), a small lake in the Swiss Alps

Pollen and plant macrofossils were analysed at Sagistalsee (1935 m asl), a small lake near timber-line in the Swiss Northern Alps. Open forests with Pinus cembra and Abies alba covered the catchment during the early Holocene (9000–6300 cal. BP), suggesting subcontinental climate conditions. After the expansion of Picea abies between 6300 and 6000 cal. BP the subalpine forest became denser and the tree-line reached its maximum elevation at around 2260 m asl. Charcoal fragments in the macrofossil record indicate the beginning of Late-Neolithic human impact at ca. 4400 cal. BP, followed by a extensive deforestation and lowering of the forest-limit in the catchment of Sagistalsee at 3700 cal. BP (Bronze Age). Continuous human activity, combined with a more oceanic climate during the later Holocene, led to the local extinction of Pinus cembra and Abies alba and favoured the mass expansion of Picea and Alnus viridis in the subalpine area of the Northern Alps. The periods before 6300 and after 3700 cal. BP are characterised by high erosion activity in the lake's catchment, whereas during the phase of dense Picea-Pinus cembra-Abies forests (6300–3700 cal. BP) soils were stable and sediment-accumulation rates in the lake were low. Due to decreasing land-use at higher altitudes during the Roman occupation and the Migration period, forests spread beween ca. 2000 and 1500 cal. BP, before human impact increased again in the early Middle Ages. Recent reforestation due to land-use changes in the 20th century is recorded in the top sediments. Pollen-inferred July temperature and annual precipitation suggest a trend to cooler and more oceanic climate starting at about 5500 cal. BP.

Development and Ecodisaster: A Lesson from Cochin Backwater System

Kerala, with a unique climate, has rich and varied ecosystems with luxuriant and diverse plant and animal communities. This has led to a high density of human population. The State has resorted to modern technological methods for its economic development which include industrialization and improvement of agricultural production. The establishment of a modern port at Cochin has transformed the region into the industrial capital of the State. Simultaneous with economic progress, the environmental conditions have become deranged due to large scale shipping operations. Of late the environmental problems are increasing in the highly productive backwater system, due to industrial effluents. How developmental programs can undermine the ecological balance and cause deleterious effects as well as unforseen consequences are well illustrated by the deltaic region of Kuttanad - “the rice bowl of Kerala”. Dams, at the upper reaches of the rivers, provide power for industry and water for irrigation. But inadvertent denudation of the forests due to continuous human settlement and related activities will not only damage the dams, the industry and agriculture but also the climate of the region. The high density of population exerts undue pressure on the ecosystem whether it be terrestrial, aerial or aquatic and causes serious imbalances.