OWL Individuals Research Articles

Investigation of roadkilled Western Barn Owls (Tyto alba) in Csanádi-hát region (SE Hungary)

Abstract The Western Barn Owl (Tyto alba) is a common breeder in Hungary. It is a resident bird of open areas, staying near nesting sites in winter. Its population is strongly influenced by food availability, weather conditions and several anthropogenic activities. One of the most important factors of these in recent decades has been road mortality. In this work, we processed data of roadkilled individuals and field observation records in the Csanádihát region in south-eastern Hungary from the period 1995–2022. In Battonya, we have been recording roadkill individuals since 1995, while observations of Barn Owl individuals from Kevermes have been available since 2005. The species is a regular, but scarce breeder in the area, so both the number of roadkilled individuals and the number of field observations were relatively low. Nevertheless, we had the opportunity to examine how the number of individuals of the species that were killed in the traffic varied over time and within years. According to our data, more birds collided during the winter, and also between July and November. This can be explained mostly by the seasonal lack of food and the fledging time of inexperienced juveniles. The temporal distribution of field observations were different from the dynamics of the roadkills, as the species was mainly observed during the breeding season. The exact population size of the area can be difficultly estimated, as it breeds mainly in attics of stable, granary and church buildings. The breeding population of Kevermes was estimated at 3–4 pairs and did not change significantly in the studied period. Over the same 28-year period, using the same methods to the two other most common nesting owl species of the region, we found that the within-year roadkill dynamics of the Little Owl (Athene noctua) and the Northern Long-eared Owl (Asio otus) differed from that of the Western Barn Owls, which may be due to the different feeding habits of the species. We can conclude that the number of roadkilled birds was proportional to the local population of the species.

Individual Identification of Male Ural Owls Based on Territorial Calls

Effective individual identification is important in many aspects of animal studies. Leg bands and wing tags are commonly used to mark individual birds in the field; however, for nocturnal or cryptic birds it is difficult to directly observe individual tags due to darkness or dense vegetation. Alternatively, some studies suggest that many birds have individually distinctive vocalizations, and these differences could be used to identify individuals. Here we assessed the possibility of identifying individual Ural Owls (Strix uralensis) based on their defensive territorial hooting calls. During breeding season, we recorded hooting calls of 15 males in 2018 and of 16 males in 2019 respectively at the Dagangzi national forest in northeastern China. We measured 19 variables for each call. Using forward stepwise discriminant function analysis, we correctly classified 92.8% of the calls of individuals in 2018 and 93.9% in 2019, based on leave-one-out cross validation. The most important discriminating variables included duration of the interval between the first and second notes, duration of the interval between the second and third notes, the third note duration, and the number of “humps” (upward projections in a note in the sound spectrogram) in the first note. The calls of individuals remained stable both within a breeding season and between years. Our results suggest that territorial calls are effective for identifying male Ural Owl individuals, and this technique could contribute to population surveys and long-term monitoring.

Road effects on species abundance and population trend: a case study on tawny owl

Urbanization and its inherent road network are one of the major movements that impulse landscape and biodiversity change, and its effects have yet to be fully understood. Few works focus on the effect of this urbanization on abundance and population trend of a certain species, as this study does, using the tawny owl (Strix aluco) as our case study. Although the tawny owl is not threatened at European or global scale, it is often found roadkilled. We studied the effects of different road types on tawny owl abundance in southern Portugal, from 2005 to 2016. In woodlands far from roads, we found high tawny owl abundance, a stable population trend, and low variation in site occupancy. On the contrary, main roads disrupted habitat quality for tawny owls—limiting their abundance and site occupancy and leading to a negative population trend due to disturbance and/or mortality. Secondary roads did not severely disrupt habitat quality, allowing initial occupation and relatively high densities, yet they may act as ecological traps, revealing instability in occupation along the breeding season and a negative population trend. Tawny owl individuals may settle near secondary roads while waiting for a vacant space in woodlands far from roads (the prime high-quality habitats). To avoid the negative effects of roads on tawny owl populations, mitigation efforts should be applied to both main and secondary roads.

Rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa) predation by Barred Owls (Strix varia)

ABSTRACT Barred Owls (Strix varia) are generalist predators that take a variety of birds, small mammals, herps, fish, crustaceans, insects, gastropods, and other invertebrates as prey. Here we document 2 different Barred Owl individuals that ingested rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) as prey in northern California. Few vertebrate predators are known to feed on newts of the genus Taricha because they carry a potent defensive neurotoxin (tetrodotoxin) lethal to most vertebrate predators. Our examples suggest that Barred Owls may prey on newts in some areas and that consuming newts is not always lethal to Barred Owls.

Demographic decline and detection of genetic bottleneck in a population of Barn Owl Tyto alba in Hungary

The effects of population bottlenecks, from both the population and conservation genetics point of view, have attracted great interest. Heterozygosity and allelic diversity are basic components of the evolutionary potential of populations. Many endangered species go through bottlenecks from time to time. The consequences are important because in the resulting small populations the stochastic processes are more pronounced and, by strengthening each other, they can lead to extinction. Within the framework of the global climate change the question emerges of how the different species, primarily susceptible ones and those depending on protection measures, react to the climate extremities. It is well known that a large proportion of Barn Owl Tyto alba populations die following an unfavourable period. In the study reported here we genotyped 24 microsatellite loci of 58 unrelated Barn Owl individuals originating from a continuous population of three neighbouring Hungarian counties. We then performed the Wilcoxon sign-rank test, the L test and Monte Carlo simulation of the loss of alleles and heterozygosity. We also attempted to infer past population dynamics using two likelihood-based Bayesian methods. Although a 74% reduction of this population is well documented following the harsh winter of 2002/2003 and the sampling and resolution of the methods used are standard and considered to be commonly satisfactory, none of the tests showed pronounced signs of a recent bottleneck. These results are discussed in terms of the imminent and apparent drawbacks of the models and methods used, the roles of absolute numbers of survivors versus genotype percentages and the conservation biological viewpoint.

Converting the PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS lexicon into RDF with lemon

This paper describes the publication and linking of (parts of) PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS (PSC), a large scale Italian lexicon, to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud using the lemon model. The main challenge of the conversion is discussed, namely the reconciliation between the PSC semantic structure which contains richly encoded semantic information, following the qualia structure of the Generative Lexicon theory and the lemon view of lexical sense as a reified pairing of a lexical item and a concept in an ontology. The result is two datasets: one consists of a list of lemon lexical entries with their lexical properties, relations and senses; the other consists of a list of OWL individuals representing the referents for the lexical senses. These OWL individuals are linked to each other by a set of semantic relations and mapped onto the SIMPLE OWL ontology of higher level semantic types.

Ontology-based feature modeling: An empirical study in changing scenarios

A software product line (SPL) is a set of software systems that have a particular set of common features and that satisfy the needs of a particular market segment or mission. Feature modeling is one of the key activities involved in the design of SPLs. The feature diagram produced in this activity captures the commonalities and variabilities of SPLs. In some complex domains (e.g., ubiquitous computing, autonomic systems and context-aware computing), it is difficult to foresee all functionalities and variabilities a specific SPL may require. Thus, Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) bind variation points at runtime to adapt to fluctuations in user needs as well as to adapt to changes in the environment. In this context, relying on formal representations of feature models is important to allow them to be automatically analyzed during system execution. Among the mechanisms used for representing and analyzing feature models, description logic (DL) based approaches demand to be better investigated in DSPLs since it provides capabilities, such as automated inconsistency detection, reasoning efficiency, scalability and expressivity. Ontology is the most common way to represent feature models knowledge based on DL reasoners. Previous works conceived ontologies for feature modeling either based on OWL classes and properties or based on OWL individuals. However, considering change or evolution scenarios of feature models, we need to compare whether a class-based or an individual-based feature modeling style is recommended to describe feature models to support SPLs, and especially its capabilities to deal with changes in feature models, as required by DSPLs. In this paper, we conduct a controlled experiment to empirically compare two approaches based on each one of these modeling styles in several changing scenarios (e.g., add/remove mandatory feature, add/remove optional feature and so on). We measure time to perform changes, structural impact of changes (flexibility) and correctness for performing changes in our experiment. Our results indicate that using OWL individuals requires less time to change and is more flexible than using OWL classes and properties. These results provide insightful assumptions towards the definition of an approach relying on reasoning capabilities of ontologies that can effectively support products reconfiguration in the context of DSPL.

Waveform reconstruction from ontological description

This article presents the details of a novel method for ontology-based waveform reconfigurability that allows radios of different hardware or software architectures, using different software APIs and even non-uniform waveform description schemas, to interoperate. In this method cognitive radios share the same base software defined radio ontology, which allows the radios to understand the concepts in a uniform way, thus enabling transfer of more complex concepts from one node to another. In the process of reconfiguration, nodes can receive specifications of waveforms expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and rules and then automatically configure their processing according to the specification. Such specifications contain both structural descriptions of software components and descriptions of finite state machines necessary to compose the waveform from simpler software modules. The waveform configuration process encompasses, first, generating state machines and building a model of the waveform by generating OWL individuals and relationships between them using the inference engine and the specified rules. The constructed model is then used to instantiate state machines and other software components and to connect them according to the model. The result of the overall process is such that a cognitive radio is able to receive a description of a waveform it did not know before (from another cognitive radio) and construct the waveform from the description. Then both radios can use the waveform for further communication. A proof-of-concept system has been built confirming the feasibility of the proposed method. In the process of this system's evaluation three different waveforms (BPSK31, QPSK31 and RTTY) have been described in OWL and rules, the descriptions were successfully transferred from one node to another and then used by the receiving node to construct fully functional software modules implementing the waveforms.

WebOWL: A Semantic Web search engine development experiment

This paper presents WebOWL, an experiment in using the latest technologies to develop a Semantic Web search engine. WebOWL consists of a community of intelligent agents, acting as crawlers, that are able to discover and learn the locations of Semantic Web neighborhoods on the Web, a semantic database to store data from different ontologies, a query mechanism that supports semantic queries in OWL, and a ranking algorithm that determines the order of the returned results based on the semantic relationships of classes and individuals. The system has been implemented using Jade, Jena and the db4o object database engine and has successfully stored over one million OWL classes, individuals and properties.

관계형 데이터베이스를 OWL 2 웹 온톨로지로 사용하기 위한 OWL/관계형 매핑 규칙

본 논문은 관계형 데이터베이스로부터 OWL 온톨로지를 자동으로 생성할 수 있는 규칙을 제안한다. 이 규칙의 목적은 기존 관계형 데이터베이스 데이터를 데이터베이스 스키마 변형과 데이터 마이그레이션과 같은 별도의 과정을 거치지 않고도 시맨틱 웹 환경에서 사용할 수 있도록 하는 것이다. 즉, 이 규칙은 RDBMS가 웹 온톨로지 저장소 역할을 동시에 수행하는 것을 돕는다. 그러나 기존의 관계형 데이터베이스와 OWL 사이의 매핑 규칙들을 본 연구의 목적을 위하여 사용하고자 할 경우 다음과 같은 문제가 발생한다. 첫째, 특정 구조의 테이블이 존재하는 데이터베이스로부터는 OWL 온톨로지를 생성할 수 없다. 둘째, 하나의 개체 추출을 위하여 높은 비용의 데이터베이스조인 연산 혹은 여러 개의 SQL 질의가 불필요하게 수반된다. 반면에 본 논문에서 제안하는 규칙은 이러한 문제들을 방지하도록 설계되었으며, 데이터베이스 스키마로부터 OWL 클래스와 프로퍼티를 생성하며, 데이터베이스 인스턴스로 부터 OWL 개체를 생성한다. 또한 이 규칙을 적용하여 생성한 OWL 온톨로지는 OWL 2 DL 사양을 만족시킨다. This paper proposes a set of rules to automatically generate OWL ontologies from relational databases. The purpose of the rules is to allow semantic access to existing RDB data without any database schema transformation and data migration process. In other words, the rules help a RDBMS play as a web ontology repository as well. However, the use of the mapping rules between RDB and OWL proposed by other studies for the objective causes troubles as follows. First, databases including the tables with a specific structure can't be translated into OWL. Second, the process for extracting an OWL individual unnecessarily lead to database join operations, or several SQL queries. On the other hand, our rules is designed to prevent these problems, can generate OWL classes and properties from database schemas and can generate OWL individuals from the database instances. In addition, an ontology generated by our rules is an OWL 2 DL ontology.

Owls and larks in hypnosis: individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility relating to biological rhythms.

In 1986 Coleman developed the Owl and Lark Questionnaire to differentiate morning people from evening people, with owl individuals being more alert during the evening phase and lark individuals being more alert during the morning phase. Rossi has hypothesized that the bimodal peaks of hypnotizability found by Aldrich and Bernstein in 1987 were caused by alterations in owl and lark circadian rhythms. In the current study I used the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A to test compliance with hypnotic suggestions among 42 graduate students at three times of the day: in the morning, in the evening, and, as a control, in the middle of the night. Owls were more hypnotizable than larks in the morning, and larks were also significantly more hypnotizable in the evening than owls. There was no difference between the two groups in the middle of the night. A possible implication of this study is that one fundamental mechanism of therapeutic hypnosis is the entrainment of psychobiological rhythms.