University of California, Merced

About: University of California, Merced is a education organization based out in Merced, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Computer science. The organization has 2682 authors who have published 8454 publications receiving 285556 citations. The organization is also known as: UC Merced.

Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2

Abstract: QIIME 2 development was primarily funded by NSF Awards 1565100 to J.G.C. and 1565057 to R.K. Partial support was also provided by the following: grants NIH U54CA143925 (J.G.C. and T.P.) and U54MD012388 (J.G.C. and T.P.); grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (J.G.C. and R.K.); ERCSTG project MetaPG (N.S.); the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences QYZDB-SSW-SMC021 (Y.B.); the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council APP1085372 (G.A.H., J.G.C., Von Bing Yap and R.K.); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to D.L.G.; and the State of Arizona Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF), administered by the Arizona Board of Regents, through Northern Arizona University. All NCI coauthors were supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Cancer Institute. S.M.G. and C. Diener were supported by the Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award.

Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity

Abstract: Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional changes in wildfire has been systematically documented. Much of the public and scientific discussion of changes in western United States wildfire has focused instead on the effects of 19th- and 20th-century land-use history. We compiled a comprehensive database of large wildfires in western United States forests since 1970 and compared it with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.

Online Object Tracking: A Benchmark

Abstract: Object tracking is one of the most important components in numerous applications of computer vision. While much progress has been made in recent years with efforts on sharing code and datasets, it is of great importance to develop a library and benchmark to gauge the state of the art. After briefly reviewing recent advances of online object tracking, we carry out large scale experiments with various evaluation criteria to understand how these algorithms perform. The test image sequences are annotated with different attributes for performance evaluation and analysis. By analyzing quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field.

Object Tracking Benchmark

Abstract: Object tracking has been one of the most important and active research areas in the field of computer vision. A large number of tracking algorithms have been proposed in recent years with demonstrated success. However, the set of sequences used for evaluation is often not sufficient or is sometimes biased for certain types of algorithms. Many datasets do not have common ground-truth object positions or extents, and this makes comparisons among the reported quantitative results difficult. In addition, the initial conditions or parameters of the evaluated tracking algorithms are not the same, and thus, the quantitative results reported in literature are incomparable or sometimes contradictory. To address these issues, we carry out an extensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art online object-tracking algorithms with various evaluation criteria to understand how these methods perform within the same framework. In this work, we first construct a large dataset with ground-truth object positions and extents for tracking and introduce the sequence attributes for the performance analysis. Second, we integrate most of the publicly available trackers into one code library with uniform input and output formats to facilitate large-scale performance evaluation. Third, we extensively evaluate the performance of 31 algorithms on 100 sequences with different initialization settings. By analyzing the quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field.

Microbial biogeography : putting microorganisms on the map

Abstract: We review the biogeography of microorganisms in light of the biogeography of macroorganisms A large body of research supports the idea that free-living microbial taxa exhibit biogeographic patterns Current evidence confirms that, as proposed by the Baas-Becking hypothesis, 'the environment selects' and is, in part, responsible for spatial variation in microbial diversity However, recent studies also dispute the idea that 'everything is everywhere' We also consider how the processes that generate and maintain biogeographic patterns in macroorganisms could operate in the microbial world