1,721,160 research outputs found
Biomass production, arbuscular mycorrhizae and soil plant-available P under water stress in native perennial grasses
No full textSeveral studies have demonstrated that mycorrhizal associations play vital role in plant nutrition. They greatly increase the efficiency of nutrient and water uptake, enhance resistance to pathogens, and buffer plant species against several environmental stresses and drought resistance. Mycorrhizae also improve plant growth and survival in soils contaminated by heavy metals. This book emphasizes the biotechnological application of mycorrhizae to promote the production of food while maintaining ecologically and economically sustainable production systems.Fil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Bolletta, Andrea Ivana. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro Regional Buenos Aires Sur. Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Bordenave; Argentin
Physiological traits on Osmorhiza depauperata, a biodiversity component in the Nothofagus forests of Southern Patagonia
No full textMost silvicultural prescriptions to stimulate tree natural regeneration mainly open the canopy to modify light availability and soil moisture at the understory level. Both are major factors affecting growth and survival for tree seedlings and understory species. The survival of understory species after wood harvesting depends on the acclimation to the new microclimatic conditions...Fil: Lencinas, María Vanessa. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Martínez Pastur, Guillermo José. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Arena, Miriam Elisabet. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentin
Improvement in conservation value of insect communities in South Patagonian forests managed with variable retention
No full textCompared with higher plants and mammals, conservation of insect diversity was rarely included in ecosystem management planning. This is usually because insects are considered unpleasant and dangerous for human beings. However, insects play unique ecological roles (e.g., pollinators, food chains lower levels, maintenance and improvement of soil quality, and plague control). In addition, loss of insects is rarely appreciated due to their small individual size and usually large populations.Fil: Lencinas, María Vanessa. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Martínez Pastur, Guillermo José. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Cellini, Juan Manuel. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentin
Legume Diversity in the Extra Andean Patagonia
No full textPatagonia is one of the few cold temperate semiarid regions of the world. This territory extends from latitude 40 to 55 ֯ and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Andean piedmont in the west, and occupies nearly 786.000 km2 in the southern portion of Argentina. This area can be divided into three main regions: (1) the Andean Region, wich is coincident with the Southern Andean region. This is characterized by forests, glacier lakes, high valleys, and prairies, where large sheep flocks gather in summer...Fil: Stronati, Monica Susana. Universidad Nacional del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Brevedan, Roberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentin
Plant traits contributing to the performance of native and introduced rangeland grasses in arid Argentina
No full textRangelands from central Argentina characterize by insufficient warm-season, palatable perennial grasses to domestic livestock. Two palatable and water-stress tolerant cultivars ("Magnar" and "Trailhead") of Leymus cinereus were introduced into Argentina with the purpose of increasing the warm-season forage offer. Some mechanisms involved in determining defoliation tolerance and competitive ability, and subsequent dry matter production, were investigated in the study genotypes. Studies were conducted within an exclosure to domestic livestock. Two severe defoliation treatments were applied in 2006/07 and 2007/08. Only Pappophorum vaginatum, the native genotype, produced and dispersed seeds. Natural water stress during the second study year advanced phenology of all three genotypes. This advancement, together with the high production of total, reproductive and daughter tillers in P. vaginatum, even under defoliation, might contribute to explain its greater abundance than the other native, warm-season perennial grasses in rangelands of central, arid Argentina. Although plant survival and forage production were lower (p0.05), but not lower, in the introduced than in the native genotype. Future research is needed to substantially improve plant establishment of L. cinereus, genotype which can be seeded by conventional drilling.Fil: Torres, Yanina Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía. Laboratorio de Ecología; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía. Laboratorio de Ecología; ArgentinaFil: Montenegro, Oscar Alberto. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Giorgetti, Hugo Dosindo. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Rodriguez, Gustavo Dionisio. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Ithurrart, Leticia Soledad. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentin
Speech-Driven Expressive Talking Lips with Conditional Sequential Generative Adversarial Networks
Full text linkArticulation, emotion, and personality play strong roles in the orofacial
movements. To improve the naturalness and expressiveness of virtual agents
(VAs), it is important that we carefully model the complex interplay between
these factors. This paper proposes a conditional generative adversarial
network, called conditional sequential GAN (CSG), which learns the relationship
between emotion and lexical content in a principled manner. This model uses a
set of articulatory and emotional features directly extracted from the speech
signal as conditioning inputs, generating realistic movements. A key feature of
the approach is that it is a speech-driven framework that does not require
transcripts. Our experiments show the superiority of this model over three
state-of-the-art baselines in terms of objective and subjective evaluations.
When the target emotion is known, we propose to create emotionally dependent
models by either adapting the base model with the target emotional data
(CSG-Emo-Adapted), or adding emotional conditions as the input of the model
(CSG-Emo-Aware). Objective evaluations of these models show improvements for
the CSG-Emo-Adapted compared with the CSG model, as the trajectory sequences
are closer to the original sequences. Subjective evaluations show significantly
better results for this model compared with the CSG model when the target
emotion is happiness
Speech-Driven Animation with Meaningful Behaviors
No full textDue to copyright restrictions and/or publisher's policy full text access from Treasures at UT Dallas is limited to current UTD affiliates (use the provided Link to Article).Supplementary material is available on publisher's website. Use the doi.org link below.Conversational agents (CAs) play an important role in human computer interaction (HCI). Creating believable movements for CAs is challenging, since the movements have to be meaningful and natural, reflecting the coupling between gestures and speech. Studies in the past have mainly relied on rule-based or data-driven approaches. Rule-based methods focus on creating meaningful behaviors conveying the underlying message, but the gestures cannot be easily synchronized with speech. Data-driven approaches, especially speech-driven models, can capture the relationship between speech and gestures. However, they create behaviors disregarding the meaning of the message. This study proposes to bridge the gap between these two approaches overcoming their limitations. The approach builds a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN), where a discrete variable is added to constrain the behaviors on the underlying constraint. The study implements and evaluates the approach with two constraints: discourse functions and prototypical behaviors. By constraining on the discourse functions (e.g., questions), the model learns the characteristic behaviors associated with a given discourse class learning the rules from the data. By constraining on prototypical behaviors (e.g., head nods), the approach can be embedded in a rule-based system as a behavior realizer creating trajectories that are timely synchronized with speech. The study proposes a DBN structure and a training approach that (1) models the cause-effect relationship between the constraint and the gestures, and (2) captures the differences in the behaviors across constraints by enforcing sparse transitions between shared and exclusive states per constraint. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach over an unconstrained baseline model. ©2019 Elsevier B.V.National Science Foundation grants IIS:1718944Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Scienc
Expressive Speech-Driven Lip Movements with Multitask Learning
No full textFull text access from Treasures at UT Dallas is restricted to current UTD affiliates (use the provided Link to Article).The orofacial area conveys a range of information, including speech articulation and emotions. These two factors add constraints to the facial movements, creating non-trivial integrations and interplays. To generate more expressive and naturalistic movements for conversational agents (CAs) the relationship between these factors should be carefully modeled. Data-driven models are more appropriate for this task than rule-based systems. This paper provides two deep learning speech-driven structures to integrate speech articulation and emotional cues. The proposed approaches rely on multitask learning (MTL) strategies, where related secondary tasks are jointly solved when synthesizing orofacial movements. In particular, we evaluate emotion recognition and viseme recognition as secondary tasks. The approach creates shared representations that generate behaviors that not only are closer to the original orofacial movements, but also are perceived more natural than the results from single task learning.US National Science Foundation grant IIS-1718944.Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Scienc
Competitive ability and defoliation tolerance in Stipa clarazii, Stipa tenuis y Stipa ambigua
Full text linkMayores valores de tasas de crecimiento, capacidad de proliferación radical, densidad de longitud de raíces y capacidad de absorción de nutrientes se han asociado con un aumento en la adquisición de nutrientes en las gramíneas perennes, y contribuirían por ello a su capacidad competitiva y tolerancia a la defoliación (Bedunah y Sosbee, 1995).Fil: Saint Pierre, Carolina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentin
Water stress and temperature effects on germination and early seedling growth of Digitaria eriantha
Full text linkThis study focused on the two major processes critical for plant establishment: Seed germination and seedling survival. We determined the effects of (1) water stress and temperature on the germination, and (2) water stress on early seedling growth of Digitaria eriantha cv ‘Irene’. Seeds harvested in 2007 were used for temperature studies, and those coming from 2006 and 2007 for water stress studies. In 2009, viability decreased by 65.4% from 2006 to 2007. During the first twenty-four hours, germination was more than 50% at constant (30 or 35°C) than alternating (10/30 or 10/35°C) temperatures, although total germination was about 80% for all temperature treatments. Polyethylene glycol 8000 was used to impose water stress conditions. Germination percentages and coefficients of velocity decreased with decreasing water potentials. Early seedling growth was smaller at lower water potentials. D. eriantha cv ‘Irene’ appeared to germinate within a wide range of temperatures, but it varied greatly in germination response to water potentials. Results suggest that this species could be planted in late spring-early summer, when seedbed temperatures are increasing and soil moisture might still be adequate.Fil: Brevedan, Roberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Busso, Carlos Alberto. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); ArgentinaFil: Fioretti, M. N.. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Toribio, M. B.. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Baioni, S. S.. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Torres, Yanina Alejandra. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); ArgentinaFil: Fernandez, Osvaldo Alberto. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); ArgentinaFil: Giorgetti, H. D.. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Bentivegna, Diego Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); ArgentinaFil: Entío, J.. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias y Forestales; ArgentinaFil: Ithurrart, Leticia Soledad. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Montenegro, O.. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Mujica, M. de las M.. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias y Forestales; ArgentinaFil: Rodríguez, G.. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Ministerio de Asuntos Agrarios. Chacra Experimental de Patagones; ArgentinaFil: Tucat, Guillermo. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Agronomía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida(i); Argentin
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