ALBERT

Description: Yield of rapeseed is determined by three components: silique number, seed number per silique and thousand seed weight. Seed number per silique and thousand seed weight are influenced by silique length, seed de...

Description: The classification of very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images is essential in many applications. However, high intraclass and low interclass variations in these kinds of images pose serious challenges. Fully convolutional network (FCN) models, which benefit from a powerful feature learning ability, have shown impressive performance and great potential. Nevertheless, only classification results with coarse resolution can be obtained from the original FCN method. Deep feature fusion is often employed to improve the resolution of outputs. Existing strategies for such fusion are not capable of properly utilizing the low-level features and considering the importance of features at different scales. This paper proposes a novel, end-to-end, fully convolutional network to integrate a multiconnection ResNet model and a class-specific attention model into a unified framework to overcome these problems. The former fuses multilevel deep features without introducing any redundant information from low-level features. The latter can learn the contributions from different features of each geo-object at each scale. Extensive experiments on two open datasets indicate that the proposed method can achieve class-specific scale-adaptive classification results and it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The results were submitted to the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) online contest for comparison with more than 50 other methods. The results indicate that the proposed method (ID: SWJ_2) ranks #1 in terms of overall accuracy, even though no additional digital surface model (DSM) data that were offered by ISPRS were used and no postprocessing was applied.

Description: Previous study has demonstrated that the riboflavin treatment promoted the early ripening of the ‘Kyoho’ grape berry. However, the molecular mechanism causing this was unclear. In order to reveal the regulation mechanism of riboflavin treatment on grape berry development and ripening, the different berry developmental stages of the ‘Kyoho’ berry treated with 0.5 mmol/L of riboflavin was sampled for transcriptome profiling. RNA-seq revealed that 1526 and 430 genes were up-regulated and down-regulated, respectively, for the comparisons of the treatment to the control. TCseq analysis showed that the expression patterns of most of the genes were similar between the treatment and the control, except for some genes that were related to the chlorophyll metabolism, photosynthesis–antenna proteins, and photosynthesis, which were revealed by the enrichment analysis of Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). The differentially expressed genes and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) analysis identified some significantly differentially expressed genes and some hub genes, including up-regulation of the photosynthesis-related ELIP1 and growth and development-related GDSL; and down-regulation of the oxidative stress-related ATHSP22 and berry softening-related XTH32 and GH9B15. The results suggested that the riboflavin treatment resulted in the variations of the expression levels of these genes, and then led to the early ripening of the ‘Kyoho’ berry.

Description: Brackish water used for irrigation can restrict crop growth and lead to environmental problems. The alternate irrigation with saline water at different growth stages is still not well understood. Therefore, field trials were conducted during 2015–2018 in the NCP to investigate whether alternate irrigation is practicable for winter wheat production. The treatments comprised rain-fed cultivation (NI), fresh and saline water irrigation (FS), saline and fresh water irrigation (SF), saline water irrigation (SS) and fresh water irrigation (FF). The results showed that the grain yield was increased by 20% under SF and FS treatments compared to NI, while a minor decrease of 2% in grain yield was observed compared with FF treatment. The increased soil salinity and risk of long-term salt accumulation in the soil due to alternate irrigation during peak dry periods was insignificant due to leaching of salts from crop root zone during monsoon season. Although Na+ concentration in the leaves increased with saline irrigation, resulting in significantly lower K+:Na+ ratio in the leaves, the Na+ and K+ concentrations in the roots and grains were not affected. In conclusion, the alternate irrigation for winter wheat is a most promising option to harvest more yield and save fresh water resources.

Description: As one of the most destructive and costly natural disasters, drought has far-reaching negative effects on agriculture, water resources, the environment, and human life. Scientific understanding of propagation from meteorological to hydrological drought is of great significance for accurate forecasting of hydrological drought and preventing and mitigating drought disasters. The objective of this study is to analyze the spatio-temporal variational characteristics of propagation from meteorological drought to hydrological drought and the associated driving mechanisms in the eastern Qilian Mountains using the standard precipitation index (SPI), standardized runoff index (SRI), and drought propagation intensity index (DPI). The results show that there has been meteorological humidification and hydrological aridification in the upper reaches of the Shiyang River Basin over the last 56 years; especially in the 2000s, the intensity of hydrological drought was the strongest and the intensity of meteorological drought was the weakest, indicating the propagation intensity of meteorological drought to hydrological drought was extremely strong during this period. The changes of meteorological and hydrological dry–wet are different, both on seasonal and monthly scales. The meteorological dry–wet is shown to have had a significant effect both on the current and month-ahead hydrological dry–wet, where the one-month lag effect was most obvious. The relationship between meteorological and hydrological droughts also vary in space: Hydrological aridification in the Huangyang River, and the rivers east of it, was greater than that in the western tributaries. The drought propagation intensities from west to east showed a decreasing trend, excluding the Huangyang River. Climate and land-use changes are the main factors affecting the propagation from meteorological drought to hydrological drought. When the natural vegetation area accounted for between 76.3–78%, the cultivated land area between 0.55–3.6% and the construction area between 0.08–0.22% were a peer-to-peer propagation process from meteorological drought to hydrological drought in the upper reaches of the Shiyang River.

Description: To study different lateral restraints, different constituents of expansion agents, the influence of different steel ratios, and concrete creep properties, we carried out experiments with lateral restraint and without lateral restraint conditions separately on 12 specimens with the expansion agent content accounting for 4%, 8%, and 12% respectively. In addition, the creep tests were performed on specimens with different steel ratios of 0.0%, 3.8%, 6.6%, and 9.2%. The test results show that the lateral restraint improves the strength of the system (concrete-filled steel tubes) which resists further load after the concrete ultimate strength is surpassed and reduces the creep. The creep degree of the concrete-filled steel tube with lateral restraint is about 0.09–0.30 times smaller than that of the tube without lateral restraints. The creep degree of the concrete-filled steel tube increases as the steel ratio decreases. Creep tests with different amounts of expansion agent indicate that the creep degree of the concrete structure increases as expansion agent content decreases. To study the internal mechanism of the creep of concrete-filled steel tubes with different lateral restraints and different expansion agent concentrations, a microscopic pore structure test on the steel core concrete was conducted using the RapidAir457 pore structure instrument. Microscopic studies show that the air content and the length of the bubble chord of the laterally restrained core concrete are lower than those without lateral restraint core concrete. The amount of air content and the length of the bubble chord of core concrete specimens increase as the expansion agent content in the core concrete specimens decreases from 12% to 4%. Under the same external loading conditions, as steel ratio increases, the lateral restraint causes a further reduction of creep. The results of this study suggest that the creep of concrete can be reduced by selecting appropriate lateral restraint conditions and an optimal amount of expansion agent in the mix design of concrete for concrete-filled steel tubes.

Description: This paper is concerned with the radial symmetry weak positive solutions for a class of singular fractional Laplacian. The main results in the paper demonstrate the existence and multiplicity of radial symmetry weak positive solutions by Schwarz spherical rearrangement, constrained minimization, and Ekeland’s variational principle. It is worth pointing out that our results extend the previous works of T. Mukherjee and K. Sreenadh to a setting in which the testing functions need not have a compact support. Moreover, we weakened one of the conditions used in their papers. Our results improve on existing studies on radial symmetry solutions of nonlocal boundary value problems.

Description: In today’s complex market competition environment, a high quality and high level of service plays a critical role in obtaining and maintaining long-term sustainable competitive advantage for enterprises and supply chains. Considering the service negative spillover effect, this paper investigates the horizontal Stackelberg competition and optimal service decision in two competing manufacturer-led supply chains. Four competitive structure models are constructed and the corresponding equilibrium solutions are obtained. By comparing the equilibrium results of four different structures, it is found that the service negative spillover effect and competition between supply chains have negative incentive effect on service providers and their supply chains. However, the chain-to-chain competition will benefit the supply chain that does not provide services from free-riding effect, which will be intensified with the intensification of competition. In addition, from the perspective of supply chain network and externality, we find that when the structure of one supply chain remains fixed and the other changes from centralized to decentralized, there will be a “double marginalization” effect. At the same time, the structural change from centralized to decentralized has certain “altruism”, that is, positive network externality, so as to improve the rival’s performance significantly.

Description: Apolipoprotein M (apoM) was the carrier of the biologically active lipid mediator sphingosine-1-phospate in high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and played a critical role in formation and maturation o...

Description: Background: The development of chronic periodontitis was due to not only periodontal pathogens, but also the interaction between periodontal pathogens and host. The aim of this study is to investigate the alterations in gene expression in Porphyromonas gingivalis (P.gingivalis) W83 after inoculation in rat oral cavity. Results: P.gingivalis W83 inoculation in rat oral cavity caused inflammatory responses in gingival tissues and destroyed host alveolar bone. Microarray analysis revealed that 42 genes were upregulated, and 22 genes were downregulated in the detected 1786 genes in the inoculated P.gingivalis W83. Real-time quantitative PCR detection confirmed the expression alterations in some selected genes. Products of these upregulated and downregulated genes are mainly related to transposon functions, cell transmembrane transportation, protein and nucleic acid metabolism, energy metabolism, cell division and bacterial pathogenicity. Conclusions: P.gingivalis W83 has a pathogenic effect on host oral cavity. Meanwhile, inflammatory oral environment alters P.gingivalis W83 gene expression profile. These changes in gene expression may limit the proliferation and weaken the pathogenicity of P.gingivalis W83, and favor themselves to adapt local environment for survival.