Thinning

Conventional and integrated fruit growers, but not organic producers, have the possibility to use thinning agents (e.g. benzyl adenine), which allow crop regulation at a relatively late stage (10-16 mm fruit size). A few surveys have shown that by reducing net photosynthesis after blossom, June fruit drop increases. This could be an interesting new approach for organic apple orchards. Since 2003, different trials have been carried out at the Laimburg Research Station on the variety Golden Delicious rootstock M9 to devise a method for practical use by fruit growers. Unfortunately, there are still several constraints to the practical application of the shading method, not least because it does not sufficiently reduce alternate fruit bearing in the following year.

Reforestation is an important tool for reducing or reversing biodiversity loss and mitigating climate change. However, there are many potential compromises between the structural (biodiversity) and functional (carbon sequestration and water yield) effects of reforestation, which can be affected by decisions on spatial design and establishment of plantings. We systematically review the environmental responses to reforestation and show that manipulating the configuration of plantings (location, size, species mix and tree density) increases a range of environmental benefits. More extensive tree plantings (> 10 ha) provide more habitat, and larger improvements to carbon and water cycling. Planting a mixture of native trees and shrubs is best for biodiversity while traditional plantation species, generally non-native species, sequester C faster. Tree density can be manipulated at planting or during early development to accelerate structural maturity and to manage water yields. A diversity of habitats will be created by planting in a variety of landscape positions and imitating the patchy distribution of forest types, which historically has characterized many regions. Areas with shallow aquifers can be planted to reduce water pollution or avoided to maintain water yields. Reforestation should be used to build forest networks that are surrounded by low-intensity land use and that provide links within regions and between biomes. While there are adequate models for C sequestration and changes in water yields after reforestation, the quantitative understanding of changes in habitat resources and species composition is more limited. Development of spatial and temporal modelling platforms based on empirical models of structural and functional outcomes of reforestation is essential for deciding on how to reconfigure agricultural regions. To build such platforms, we must quantify: (a) the influence of previous land uses, establishment methods, species mixes and interactions with adjacent land uses on environmental (particularly biodiversity) outcomes of reforestation; and (b) the ways in which responses measured at the level of individual plantings scale up to watersheds and regions. Models based on this information will help widespread reforestation for carbon sequestration improve native biodiversity, nutrient cycling and water balance at regional scales.

Reducing risk of loss due to wildfire is enhanced when forest fuels surrounding communities and individual structures are properly managed and are a part of the FireSmart concept. This report describes two test burns where a crown fire was burned into a fuel-managed plot following FireSmart guidelines (Partners in Protection 2003). In both cases the crown fire changed to a surface fire as the fire passed into the fuelmanaged plots.

Feature selection and extraction plays an important role in different classification based problems such as face recognition, signature verification, optical character recognition (OCR) etc. The performance of OCR highly depends on the proper selection and extraction of feature set. In this paper, we present novel features based on the topography of a character as visible from different viewing directions on a 2D plane. By topography of a character we mean the structural features of the strokes and their spatial relations. In this work we develop topographic features of strokes visible with respect to views from different directions (e.g. North, South, East, and West). We consider three types of topographic features: closed region, convexity of strokes, and straight line strokes. These features are represented as a shapebased graph which acts as an invariant feature set for discriminating very similar type characters efficiently. We have tested the proposed method on printed and handwritten Bengali and Hindi character images. Initial results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Wood is one of the important natural renewable raw material which is maintained its importance
thousands of years and will has similar importance in the future. Wood properties indicate their utilization.
Tree features’ determinants can be divided in two groups as inherited (genetic) and environmental (climate,
soil, tree position within the stand etc.).Therefore, the literature on the development of wood properties and
improvement of increment concentrated on two topics, tree breeding and silviculture. Although research on
silvicultural treatment effects on wood properties started in the 1960s, the original studies on this issue are
fairly new in our country. Because thinning is the most common silvicultural practice, this paper essentially
concentrated on the evaluation of thinning effects on wood properties depending on previous findings. The
important point is there were conflicting results in this topic. However recent increasing idea, depending on
the results of studies which used new techniques enable to analyze wood properties in annual ring basis, is
that silvicultural treatments in practice have no or slight effect on wood properties.
Keywords: Thinning, wood properties

Various techniques are implemented and used for the conversion of images into machine encoded format. But according to the expert’s opinion, universally best pattern recognition system has never existed. The reason for this opinion is that, none of the electronic translation procedure produces full accuracy and efficiency for numerous scripts. Some of the challenges in this field are due to poor or irregular writing, stray marks, background marks, letter style, font size, writing style, slanting, and similarity in letters. This less perfection in finalised result directed to further researches to reduce anomalies in the input images. Data mining approaches and Fuzzy logic are probably comfortable for theses type of uncertain resulted study.

Biometrics is the science and technology of measuring and analyzing biological data of human body, extracting a feature set from the acquired data, and comparing this set against to the template set in the database. Biometric techniques are gaining importance for personal authentication and identification as compared to the traditional authentication methods. Biometric templates are vulnerable to variety of attacks due to their inherent nature. When a person's biometric is compromised his identity is lost. In contrast to password, biometric is not revocable.

The thinning algorithm proposed in this paper, is an improved parallel thinning algorithm that aims in both, medial axis based thinning and contour extraction in a same process. In the process of thinning to obtain the medial axis of the character the points are deleted from outer boundary first and then proceeded inside till a single pixel wide skeleton is produced. In this process the outermost boundary line alone is preserved which is then produced as the contour of the image. So within one algorithm we get the two major categories of skeletonization, Medial axis Transform and contour extraction. Experiments are done on printed English characters and the results show that this algorithm is very effective.

In the modern world of technology, Digital signature processing is most popular in the field of image forgery. We are using online signature recognition and verification technique of image forgery detection in which the signature is acquired from Digital signature pad or similar devices, and the image is compared to the signature which is already saved in the database, using various techniques. Signatures are of two types: Online and Offline. Now a day online signature is most frequently used technique in any era of signature recognition and verification, where image forgery is reduced and chances of malfunctions are less. We are preprocessing the signatures so it becomes easy to verify signature accurately at the end, in the same process it does the feature extraction by which signature is extracted in such a way that input signature will be in the easier form to be recognize. This paper verifies signature using pixel based approach in which the stored image and entered image are matched and if the matching factor is high enough or nearer to threshold value then the signature is accepted otherwise rejected.

This paper proposes two topics for a high performance fingerprint sensor. A modified capacitive detection circuit of charge sharing scheme is proposed, which shows 40% reduction of power consumption and 90% improvement of difference between a ridge and valley sensing voltage than typical scheme. This paper also proposes an effective fingerprint identification system with hardware unit (thinning processor) for thinning stage processing of a verification algorithm based on minutiae. Each step of a fingerprint algorithm is analyzed on FPGA and ARMulator. The proposed scheme just needs 56,000 cycles for a thinning processing in 160x192 pixel array and the layout area is 0.541 mm 2 at 0.35µm CMOS process.

Recent technology advancements on X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT) offer a nondestructive approach to extract complex three-dimensional geometries with details as small as a few microns in size. This new technology opens the door to study the interplay between microscopic properties (e.g., porosity) and macroscopic fluid transport properties (e.g., permeability). To take full advantage of X-ray CT, we introduce a multiscale framework that relates macroscopic fluid transport behavior not only to porosity but also to other important microstructural attributes, such as occluded/connected porosity and geometrical tortuosity, which are extracted using new computational techniques from digital images of porous materials. In particular, we introduce level set methods, and concepts from graph theory, to determine the geometrical tortuosity and connected porosity, while using a Lattice Boltzmann/Finite Element scheme to obtain homogenized effective permeability at specimen-scale. We showcase the applicability and efficiency of this multiscale framework by two examples, one using a synthetic array and another using a sample of natural sandstone with complex pore structure.

The wide range of shape variations for handwritten digits requires an adequate representation of thediscriminating features for classification. For the recognition of characters or numerals requires pixel valuesof a normalized raster image and proper features to reach very good classification rate. This paper primarily concerns the problem of isolated handwritten numeral recognition of English scripts.Multilayer Perceptron(MLP) classifier is used for classification. The principalcontributions presented here are preprocessing, feature extraction and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers.The strength of our approach is efficient feature extraction and the comprehensive classification scheme due to which, we have been able to achieve a recognition rate of 95.6, better than the previous approaches.

A B S T R A C T Epixylic (log-dwelling) flora contribute much to forest biodiversity, but have been shown to decline with intensive management, perhaps through the reduced supply of coarse woody debris, their preferred substrate, and the altered mesoclimate of the understory. Such declines might be ameliorated through modifying the plantation management practices. This study examined the response of epixylic flora to commercial thinning treatments in 6 mid-rotation conifer plantations of northwestern New Brunswick, Canada. Treatments included an unthinned control, and thinning with: moderate debris, moderate debris with added snags, or no-debris. Epixylic flora were surveyed in the first and third year after thinning, on 30 logs in each of the 4 treatments, using both 10 × 20 cm quadrats (%-cover) and a presence-absence census of whole-logs. Treatments were evaluated at log and stand scales, based on the putative disturbance-sensitivity of different epixylic functional groups. Analyses included indicator species analysis, ANOVA of functional group richness and cover, NMS ordination, and PERMANOVA. Thinning with no-debris or moderate-debris reduced species richness at the stand scale, and increased cover at the log-scale. Composition shifted towards chlorolichens, vascular plants, and forest floor or asexually-reproducing bryophytes in thinned treatments, whereas liverworts and bryophytes with desiccation-sensitivity or those lacking asexual reproduction showed slight declines; most bryophyte groups showed no change. Moderate debris with snags and unthinned treatments showed the fewest compositional differences, and maintained many of the same sensitive groups, but all thinned treatments showed similar trajectories of compositional change. Additional monitoring is required to determine whether thinning with moderate debris and snags offers effective conservation of epixylic species, but debris removal (e.g., for biomass harvest) should be discouraged.

Carbohydrate availability is a key factor determining fruit growth in apple (Malus ·domestica) and other fruits. However, the molecular mechanisms regulating fleshy fruit growth in response to changes in carbohydrate availability are not well understood. In this study, carbohydrate availability was manipulated by reducing fruit load, and its effects on apple fruit growth, cell production and expansion, and the expression of genes associated with these processes was investigated. Reduction of fruit load during early fruit development led to a rapid increase in early fruit growth. The increase in fruit growth was associated with a transient increase in sorbitol and fructose concentrations and altered expression of sorbitol dehydrogenase and sucrose synthase genes.

Stylistic text can be found on sign boards, street and organizations boards and logos, bulletin boards, announcements, advertisements, dangerous goods plates, warning notices, etc. In stylistic text images, text-lines within an image may have different orientations such as curved in shape or not be parallel to each other. As a result, extraction and subsequent recognition of individual text-lines and words in such images is a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for straightening of curved text-lines using the concept of dilation, flood-fill, robust thinning, and B-spline curve-based fitting. In the proposed scheme, at first, dilation is applied on individual text-lines to cover the area within a certain boundary. Next, thinning is applied to get the path of the text, approximate the path using the B-spline, find the angle between the normal at a point on the curve and the vertical line, and finally visit each point on the text and rotate by their corresponding angles. The proposed methodology is tested on variety of text images containing text-lines in Devanagari, English, and Chinese scripts which is evaluated on the basis of visual perception and the mean square error (MSE) calculation. MSE is calculated by line fitting applied on input and output images. On the basis of evaluation results obtained in our experiments, the proposed method is promising.

Design of thinned elliptical antenna array using Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization is presented in this paper. The antennas are assumed to be isotropic and are uniformly excited. Thinned arrays produces narrow directive beam without causing major degradation of fully populated antenna arrays. Thinning of elliptical antenna arrays using GA are optimized with different values of eccentricity and the variation of side-lobe level (SLL) with eccentricity is reported. Using GA optimization, reduction of SLL can be obtained by varying the value of eccentricity of elliptic arrays arrangement.

Peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch) trees need to be thinned in order to guarantee yield of fruits of marketable size and a sufficient return to bloom in the following season. In this fruit crop, however, thinning is often complicated by several endogenous as well as exogenous factors, such as genotype, orchard structure, environmental conditions and agronomic management, and the current thinning methods (manual, mechanical or chemical), taken singularly, present more disadvantages than advantages. Therefore, the only possible option is currently represented by the adoption of a "thinning strategy", consisting in subsequent interventions at different phenological stages, to finely tune the final fruit load along its physiological evolution. Such strategies must also consider the ongoing climate changes, which further complicates the thinning interventions also due to the lack of Decision Support Systems (DSSs), and the current trends of the global market. The present review takes a picture of the current situation of peach thinning, with a particular focus on the current development of new chemical thinners, and its future perspectives. Some general remarks are made considering the evolution of the global market and the obstacles found in peach research in some of the most traditional peach areas of the world.

U radu su prikazani rezultati istraživanja strojne sjece i izradbe harvesterom Timberjack 1270B u 23-godisnjoj vrbovoj kulturi. Obujam srednjeg sjecnog stabla iznosio je 0, 5 m3, a prsni promjer 25 cm. Sjecna gustoca iznosila je 633 stabala po ha. Gusti sloj grmlja cine sremza, bazga, svib i trusljika. Pracenje je rada harvestera trajalo ukupno 6 radnih dana (54, 11 h), za koje je vrijeme posjeceno 1825 stabala, odnosno izrađeno 949, 1 m3 oblovine. Srednji je promjer tehnicke oblovine 29 cm, duljina 4, 5 m i obujam 0, 30 m3. Srednji je promjer celuloznog drva 17 cm, srednja duljina 4 m te srednji obujam 0, 11 m3. Racunalni sustav Timberjack 3000 je prije pocetka rada umjeren. U njega su unesene zadane minimalne dimenzije (promjer na tanjem kraju s korom i duljina) pilanske oblovine I klase (27 cm, 2, 5 m), pilanske oblovine II klase (22 cm, 2, 5 m) te celuloznoga drva (7 cm, 4 m). Rezultati su potvrdili da dimenzije izrađenih sortimenata ne odstupaju od zadanih vrijednosti. Studijem...

Automatic and reliable extraction of the minutiae from fingerprint images is a critical process in fingerprint matching and a main preprocess for this stage is Thinning. There are a lot of algorithms for fingerprint thinning procedure. All of the previously proposed thinning methods try to thin every ridge due to the content of its central pixel and then extracting minutiae based on some other algorithms for denoising and preventing false minutiae detections at islands or spurities. If an algorithm could thin fingerprint ridges except unrecoverable corrupted regions and also could eliminate noise, it will be considered as a good thinning one and no additional processes are needed before minutiae extraction. The proposed method of this paper has such abilities. The proposed algorithm is implemented by applying four boxes of matrices; each of them thins ridges due to a specific direction; i.e., diagonal, horizontal and vertical directions. The proposed algorithm also is able to thin discrete Latin Characters or symbols. For evaluating the proposed method, several robust and reliable experiments have been employed and the results confirm the higher ability of the proposed method in comparison with the other competing one.

Black pine is very widely distributed in Turkey, with most stands managed by periodic harvesting to meet domestic wood demand. However, scientific knowledge about the spatial structure of stands after thinning is lacking. To correct this deficiency, 12 pure black pine stands in the Alaçam Mountains between 61 and 95 years of age were investigated. The stands were mapped according to spatial tree distribution and thinning grades were determined by both number of trees per hectare and basal area. The numbers of trees in the stands were between 590 and 2163 (before thinning) and between 269 and 1422 (after thinning). Spatial-structure analyses were carried out before and after thinning using a pair correlation function. Graphical illustrations were extracted and visually assessed. In addition, the total areas below and above the theoretical line (g=1) of the pair correlation functions were calculated, and the effects of thinning on these were determined. No change was observed in the slightly thinned sample stands (17, 35, 38, and 56) and only slight changes in the moderately thinned stands (18, 21, 49. and 53). The most striking differences were detected in the intensively thinned stands (59, 68, 76, and 78). Regular areas have increased in parallel with increased thinning applications. In other respects; clustered areas did not decrease along with the increased thinning. The pair correlation function provides a comprehensive explanation of the effects of thinning on stand spatial structure.

Forest thinning to protect the soil and improve hydrologic function is used to alter stand structure and increase residual tree growth. However, little is known about how surface and belowground wood decomposition (i.e., soil process changes) respond to aboveground vegetation manipulation. We determined mass loss of three species of wood stakes (loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.), trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.), and Chinese pine (Pinus tabuliformis Carriére)) placed horizontally on the soil surface and vertically in the mineral soil after thinning a Chinese pine plantation in northern China. Restoration thinning treatments consisted of three levels of overstory removal (30%, 41% and 53% of the standing biomass) plus an unthinned control. Stakes were extracted every 12 months for 2years, and then at 6 month intervals until the end of the study (3.5 years). Surface stake mass loss was significantly greater (9.0%) in the 30% overstory removal treatment than the control, but overall mass loss at the soil surface was very low (< 10%) after 3.5 years. In the mineral soil, aspen stake mass loss was greater than either Chinese or loblolly pine stakes, which had similar mass loss. In addition, mass loss was greatest in the 41% overstory removal plots. Stakes of all species decomposed faster deeper in the mineral soil than near the soil surface, but they were not affected by changes in soil N, OM, and pH after thinning. Overall, thinning this Chinese pine stand had little impact on surface and belowground wood stake decomposition.

Challenges to the mid-term timber supply in interior British Columbia resulting from losses to insect outbreaks and wild-fires have prompted interest in silvicultural interventions to hasten growth of regenerating forests, including high-density(overstocked), height-repressed stands of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud. var. latifolia Engelm.). A trialwas established in a dense (4000 to 30 000 trees ha-1) 36-year-old wildfire-origin pine stand in the Cariboo-Chilcotinregion of interior BC to assess the efficacy of thinning, fertilization and a combination of the two treatments for improv-ing tree growth and stand development. Height and diameter of the 36 crop trees in each plot was greater in fertilizedplots then control plots for six years following fertilization, while the height and diameter responses to thinning and thin-ning + fertilization were sustained throughout the 18-year measurement period. Cumulative basal area and volumegrowth of crop trees and all stand t...

Wideband phased arrays are complex electromagnetic systems. Whether it is electronic warfare, communications, or spectrum sensing, the ability to have ultrawideband (UWB) electronically steerable beams is exceedingly useful [1] . A class of wideband phased array, the tightly coupled array, leverages high levels of coupling between elements and careful trading of reactances to realize wide impedance bandwidth. Most of the unit cell elements in the open literature are based on the dipole, slot, bowtie, Vivaldi [2] , or sliced notch antenna. While extremely versatile, phased arrays sometimes burdened by the T/R modules required to operate over that same UWB; they are often expensive, power hungry, and introduce additional complexities in the integration process. A standard mitigation strategy for some of these in conventional arrays is aperture thinning: de-activation of selected elements in the array. The array methodologies have been extensively studied in the open literature for conventional arrays [3] . However, thinning under the tightly coupled regime lacks the same breadth and depth of study. This work considers the impact that the percentage of elements removed (thinning factor (TF)) has on the performance of a small, all-metal Vivaldi array ( Fig. 1a ), intended for the use as a subarray of a larger array.

The independent analysis of flow measurements is frequently hampered by incomplete characterisation of the working fluid. This problem is particularly acute in situations which require working fluids with identical properties, such as the development of scaling laws for the turbulent flow of drag-reducing liquids. In this paper, we demonstrate that the viscometric viscosity, loss and storage moduli for two of the most common polymers used for flow experiments, carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and xanthan gum (XG), are practically insensitive to the chemistry of the tap water used as a solvent, to the method of mixing, and to the biocide added. However, the properties of CMC from two different manufacturers were found to be significantly different, whereas there was no difference between XG solutions prepared from different batches from the same manufacturer. Our conclusion is that for a given concentration in water, the properties of certain non-Newtonian liquids, such as CMC and XG, are essentially fixed and reproducible. Although the situation is less than ideal, comparisons of fluid-flow data from entirely independent laboratories can thus be made even in the absence of direct rheological measurements.

In this work a new method of skeletonization is presented. The results of applying the developed algorithm showed its universality. A detailed comparison with other very good and almost ideal algorithms of thinning [1,2,3,4,5] is given. Both texts and pictures are tested to prove the essential difference between the presented in this paper algorithm and the other known ones, including the author's last criterion . The algorithm is extended to cover the thinning of images like pictures or photos. Color images were also tested with satisfying results. Some advanced experiments were made to apply our approach on human organs for the purpose of compression and data saving. The results were encouraging, indeed. However, this work is limited to script and text thinning while leaving pictures and medical organs images to next work .

Nothofagus antarctica (G. Forst.) Oerst. stands of northern Patagonia (Argentina) have great potential to provide multiple ecosystem services. Nonetheless, the lack of basic information limits the application of silvicultural treatments to this forest type. This study reports the early response to three systematic strip thinning treatments (30%, 50%, and 70%) carried out during 2013 in a 30-year-old N. antarctica stand, where control plots (i.e., no thinning) were also established. Subplots were located within each plot. Basal diameters (BD) of all retained stems were measured in the non-vegetative season (winter) of 2016, 2017, and 2018 to calculate basal diameter annual increment (BDI) and stand volume growth. BDI ranged from 1.9 mm·year À1 in the control plots to 2.7 mm·year À1 at 70% thinning. Relative BDI also responded positively to thinning intensity. Stand volume growth decreased non-linearly with thinning intensity from 3.36 m 3 ·ha À1 ·year À1 in the control plots to 0.71 m 3 ·ha À1 ·year À1 when thinning was 70%. Smaller differences were observed between control plots, 30% thinning, and 50% thinning. Our results show that N. antarctica forests, in the stem exclusion stage, respond to strip thinning. Thus, silviculture based on this management system could favor the development of retained trees without losing productivity if it remains under 50% intensity. This outcome represents an important incremental contribution to the design of silvicultural interventions in northern Patagonia.

Forest dieback is a worldwide problem that is likely to increase with climate change and increasing human demands for resources.  Eucalyptus camaldulensis forests are an acute example of forest dieback, with 70% of the Victorian Murray River floodplain in some state of dieback.  If we are to halt dieback in these floodplain forests, we need to understand what makes stands susceptible to dieback.  Forest diebacks are often related to stand structure, with dieback more severe in senescent or high-density stands.  We determined whether certain stand structures make these forests more susceptible to dieback.  We undertook an extensive survey of 176 stands across 100 000 ha of forest, covering the range of stand condition on this floodplain.  Large and small trees (20, 40, 80 and 120 cm diameter) showed a similar reduction in the probability of being alive with decreasing stand condition.  A slight improvement in stand condition was found at higher densities and basal areas, which may reflect the higher productivity or younger age of these stands.  Stand condition was moderately, positively correlated with longitude, with stand condition being higher in the east of the Murray River floodplain where flooding frequencies are currently higher.  This suggests that dieback of these floodplain forests would be more effectively mitigated by increased water availability through flooding than by altering stand structure.

Self-thinning dynamics are often considered when managing stand density in forests and are used to constrain forest growth models. However, self-thinning relationships are often quantified using only data at a conceptualised self-thinning line, even though self-thinning can begin before the stand actually reaches a selfthinning line. Also, few self-thinning relationships account for the effects of species composition in mixedspecies forests, and stand structure such as relative height of species (in mixtures), and/or size or age cohorts in uneven-aged forests. Such considerations may be important given the effects of global climate change and interest in mixed-species and uneven-aged forests. The objective of this study was to develop self-thinning relationships based on changes in the tree density relative to mean tree diameter, instead of focusing only on data for state variables (e.g. tree density) at the selfthinning line. This was done while also considering how the change in tree density is influenced by site quality and stand structure (species composition and relative height). The relationships were modelled using data from temperate Australian Eucalyptus plantations (436 plots), subtropical forests in China (88 plots), and temperate forests in Switzerland (1055 plots). Zero-inflated and hurdle generalized linear models with Poisson and negative binomial distributions were fit for several species, as well as for all-species equations. The intercepts and slopes of the self-thinning lines were higher than many published studies which may have resulted from both the less restrictive equation form and data selection. The rates of self-thinning often decreased as the proportion of the object species increased, as relative height increased (species or size cohort became more dominant), and as site (quality) index increased. The effects of aridity varied between species, with self-thinning increasing with aridity index for Abies alba, Pinus sylvestris, Quercus petraea and Quercus robur, but decreasing with aridity index for Eucalyptus nitens, Fagus sylvatica and Picea abies as sites became wetter and cooler. Selfthinning model parameters were not correlated with species traits, including specific leaf area, wood basic density or crown diameterstem diameter allometry. All-species self-thinning relationships based on all data could be adjusted using a correction factor for rarer species where there were insufficient data to develop speciesspecific equations. The approach and equations developed could be used in forest growth models to calculate how the tree density declines as mean tree size increases, as height changes relative to other cohorts or species, as species proportions change, and as climatic and edaphic conditions change.

A cut-to-length (CTL) harvest system using a harvester and forwarder has been recently introduced in northern California (USA) for thinning young (<25 years old) redwood forests (Sequoia sempervirens (Lamb. ex D. Don) Endl.). However, the severity of CTL damage to residual trees in this forest type are unknown. The goals of this study were to (1) determine the location, size, and number of scars resulting from CTL harvesting and (2) compare scar size differences between redwood clumps and individual trees in two units. Most scars occurred on trees located near the forwarding trails. Wider and longer scars were associated with clumped trees (9.1-12.2 cm wide and 28.1-46.2 cm long) as compared to scars on individual trees (8.1-9.5 cm wide and 16.7-31.3 cm long), and 16-32% of the residual trees were scarred. Determining a minimum scar size will define the severity of stand damage; larger scars result in a longer time until closure. However, counting all the smaller scars that result from CTL harvesting will result in a large number of counted damaged trees. Therefore, we suggest that scars smaller than 5-10 cm width are acceptable on coastal redwood after CTL thinning.

ABSTRACT The effect of thinning on fruit weight, color, biochemical composition, and on leaf insect occurrence was studied in an over 80-year-old orchard on two apple tree (Malus domestica Borkh.) old cultivars: Liivi Sibulõun and Paide Taliõun. The study was conducted to restore an old orchard for quality apple juice production. Pruning led to a significant increase in pests, but the number of natural enemies of pests and of neutral insects did not increase. The total number of arthropods was significantly higher on ‘Paide Taliõun’ in the second year after pruning. Consequently, more pests were found in both experimental years on this cultivar. Pruning significantly increased leaf SPAD value leading to a decrease in the total phenolics content of the fruit. The effect of thinning on ascorbic acid content was cultivar dependent. Fruit skin was greener, apple flesh color was yellower, and fruit weight increased by up to 60% after pruning. Among apple taste parameters, the sugar acidity ratio was not influenced by pruning but was positively correlated with skin color, especially in ‘Liivi Sibulõun’. Thinning of old apple trees does not affect the taste of apples but could reduce the impact on the healthy parameters, such as phenolic compounds.

We introduce a novel approach to reconstructing 3D objects from cross sections of point clouds acquired by laser scanning. Cross sections are almost planar clusters of 3D points. We first thin each cluster to obtain an ordered one dimensional set of points. We then partition the point set to subsets that can be approximated adequately by piecewise quadratic or cubic rational Bezier curves using an optimal fitting method. For each curve we select a number of representative points that lie on the fitting curves which are then used for reconstructing the object surface. Inter-cross section and intra-cross section constraints are imposed to support parameterization and editing of the derived model. Shape and topological differences between adjacent object contours cause severe difficulties in the 3D reconstruction process. By using the contour skeleton information we create intermediate slices representing places where ramifications occur to achieve robust covering (meshing) of adjacent...

Feature selection and extraction plays an important role in different classification based problems such as face recognition, signature verification, optical character recognition (OCR) etc. The performance of OCR highly depends on the proper selection and extraction of feature set. In this paper, we present novel features based on the topography of a character as visible from different viewing directions on a 2D plane. By topography of a character we mean the structural features of the strokes and their spatial relations. In this work we develop topographic features of strokes visible with respect to views from different directions (e.g. North, South, East, and West). We consider three types of topographic features: closed region, convexity of strokes, and straight line strokes. These features are represented as a shapebased graph which acts as an invariant feature set for discriminating very similar type characters efficiently. We have tested the proposed method on printed and handwritten Bengali and Hindi character images. Initial results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Aims Oak decline is a complex phenomenon, characterized by symptoms of canopy transparency, bark cracks and root biomass reduction. Root health status is one of the first stress indicators, and root turnover is a key process in plant adaptation to unfavourable conditions. In this study, the combined effects of decline and thinning were evaluated on fine root dynamics in an oak forest adjoining the Italian Pre-Alps by comparison of acute declining trees with non-declining trees, both with and without thinning treatment of surrounding trees. Methods Dynamics of volumetric root length density (RLD V) and tip density (RTD V), root tip density per unit length of root (RTD L), diameter, branching index (BI) and mycorrhizal colonization were monitored by soil coring over 2 years as possible descriptors of decline. Key Results At the beginning of the experiment, the relationship between canopy transparency and root status was weak, declining trees having slightly lower RLD V (-20 %) and RTD V (-11 %). After a 1 year lag, during which the parameters were almost unaffected, BI and RLD V , together with tip density, tip vitality and mycorrhizal colonization, became the descriptors most representative of both decline class and thinning. Thinning of declining trees increased RLD V (þ12 %) and RTD V (þ32 %), but reduced tip mycorrhizal colonization and vitality over time compared with non-thinned trees, whereas the opposite occurred in healthy trees, together with a marked decrease in branching. After thinning, there was an initial reduction in the structure of the ectomycorrhizal community, although recovery occurred about 10 months later, regardless of decline severity. Conclusions Decline causes losses of fine root length, and a moderate recovery can be achieved by thinning, allowing better soil exploration by oak roots. The close correlation between root vitality and mycorrhizal colonization and their deterioration after thinning indicates that decline does not benefit from reduced root competition, excluding the hypothesis of limited water and nutrient availability as a possible cause of the syndrome in this forest.

Automatic and reliable extraction of the minutiae from fingerprint images is a critical process in fingerprint matching and a main preprocess for this stage is Thinning. There are a lot of algorithms for fingerprint thinning procedure. All of the previously proposed thinning methods try to thin every ridge due to the content of its central pixel and then extracting minutiae based on some other algorithms for denoising and preventing false minutiae detections at islands or spurities. If an algorithm could thin fingerprint ridges except unrecoverable corrupted regions and also could eliminate noise, it will be considered as a good thinning one and no additional processes are needed before minutiae extraction. The proposed method of this paper has such abilities. The proposed algorithm is implemented by applying four boxes of matrices; each of them thins ridges due to a specific direction; i.e., diagonal, horizontal and vertical directions. The proposed algorithm also is able to thin discrete Latin Characters or symbols. For evaluating the proposed method, several robust and reliable experiments have been employed and the results confirm the higher ability of the proposed method in comparison with the other competing one.

In 1992, the following treatments were applied to olive trees, cv. Maurino, which had average flowering: removal of 50% and 100% of the flowers in mid-June, leaf treatment with gibberellic acid (GA3) at 60 ppm in mid-July, at the end of August, in mid-October and in July, August and October, leaf treatment with paclobutrazol (PP333) at 1000 ppm at the end of October, treatment of the soil with asparagine (10-5M) and glutamine (10-5M) at the end of December. Thinning and complete removal of the blossoms stimulated vegetative activity. Treatments with GA3 in July slightly increased vegetative growth in both the treatment year and the following year, while the later treatments and those with asparagine and glutamine stimulated growth only in the following year. PP333 reduced plant growth in the year following treatment. The complete or partial removal of the olive blossoms strongly increased flowering and fruit production in the year following treatment. Treatment with GA3 and PP333 did not significantly influence flowering or fruit production in the following year. Application of asparagine and glutamine positively influenced the induction process without affecting production per tree. Therefore, GA3 and other hormonal substances seem not to have a direct influence on flower bud induction but rather, induction is mediated by their effects on the availability and distribution of the assimilates. Asparagine and glutamine may be involved in the inductive process as messengers in relation to the food reserves in the plant.