The aim of this resurvey study is to check if herbaceous vegetation on the forest floor exhibits overall stability at the stand-scale in spite of intensive dynamics at the scale of individual plots ...and stand dynamic events (driven by natural fine scale canopy gap dynamics). In 1996, we sampled a 1.5 ha patch using 0.25 m² plots placed along a 5 m × 5 m grid in the best remnant of central European montane beech woods in Hungary. All species in the herbaceous layer and their cover estimates were recorded. Five patches representing different stand developmental situations (SDS) were selected for resurvey. In 2013, 306 plots were resurveyed by using blocks of four 0.25 m² plots to test the effects of imperfect relocation. We found very intensive fine-scale dynamics in the herbaceous layer with high species turnover and sharp changes in ground layer cover at the local-scale (< 1 msup.2). A decrease in species richness and herbaceous layer cover, as well as high species turnover, characterized the closing gaps. Colonization events and increasing species richness and herbaceous layer cover prevailed in the two newly created gaps. A pronounced decrease in the total cover, but low species turnover and survival of the majority of the closed forest specialists was detected by the resurvey at the stand-scale. The test aiming at assessing the effect of relocation showed a higher time effect than the effect of imprecise relocation. The very intensive fine-scale dynamics of the studied beech forest are profoundly determined by natural stand dynamics. Extinction and colonisation episodes even out at the stand-scale, implying an overall compositional stability of the herbaceous vegetation at the given spatial and temporal scale. We argue that fine-scale gap dynamics, driven by natural processes or applied as a management method, can warrant the survival of many closed forest specialist species in the long-run. Nomenclature : Flora Europaea (Tutin et al. 2010) for vascular plants; Soó 1968-1980 for syntaxa Keywords: Deciduous forest, temperate forest, resurvey, forest reserve, forest developmental stage, Fagus sylvatica , ancient forest herbs
Aim: Revisits of non-permanent, relocatable plots first surveyed several decades ago offer a direct way to observe vegetation change and form a unique and increasingly used source of information for ...global change research. Despite the important insights that can be obtained from resurveying these quasi-permanent vegetation plots, their use is prone to both observer and relocation errors. Studying the combined effects of both error types is important since they will play out together in practice and it is yet unknown to what extent observed vegetation changes are influenced by these errors. Methods: We designed a study that mimicked all steps in a resurvey study and that allowed determination of the magnitude of observer errors only vs the joint observer and relocation errors. Communities of vascular plants growing in the understorey of temperate forests were selected as study system. Ten regions in Europe were covered to explore generality across contexts and 50 observers were involved, which deliberately differed in their experience in making vegetation records. Results: The mean geographic distance between plots in the observer+relocation error data set was 24 m. The mean relative difference in species richness in the observer error and the observer+relocation data set was 15% and 21%, respectively. The mean "pseudo-turnover" between the five records at a quasi-permanent plot location was on average 0.21 and 0.35 for the observer error and observer+relocation error data sets, respectively. More detailed analyses of the compositional variation showed that the nestedness and turnover components were of equal importance in the observer data set, whereas turnover was much more important than nestedness in the observer+relocation data set. Interestingly, the differences between the observer and the observer+relocation data sets largely disappeared when looking at temporal change: both the changes in species richness and species composition over time were very similar in these data sets. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that observer and relocation errors are nonnegligible when resurveying quasi-permanent plots. A careful interpretation of the results of resurvey studies is warranted, especially when changes are assessed based on a low number of plots. We conclude by listing measures that should be taken to maximally increase the precision and the strength of the inferences drawn from vegetation resurveys.
Jelen közleményünk annak a sorozatnak a hatodik része, melynek célja a Magyarország edényes növényfajainak elterjedési atlasza térképeinek kiegészítése, főként aktuális előfordulási ...adatokkal. Ezúttal 389 edényes taxon előfordulási adatait közöljük az ország szinte egész területéről (mintegy 117 flóratérképezési kvadrátból), de legnagyobb számban az Északi-középhegységből, Szolnok környékéről és Nyugat-Magyarországról. Az adatok között ritkább őshonos taxonok (pl. Equisetum fluviatile, Galium rivale, Gladiolus imbricatus, Hypericum maculatum, Persicaria bistorta, Potentilla inclinata, Ranunculus lingua, Rhinanthus rumelicus, Trifolium fragiferum subsp. bonannii, Viola pumila), ritka, vagy legalábbis adathiányos idegenhonos fajok (pl. Amaranthus blitum subsp. blitum, Cymbalaria muralis, Elymus elongatus, Euphorbia peplus, Heracleum sosnowskyi, Impatiens balfourii, Lepidium densiflorum, Rhus typhina, Telekia speciosa) mellett országosan elterjedt, de többé-kevésbé alulreprezentált fajok (pl. Carex otrubae, Chenopodium polyspermum, Crepis tectorum, Filipendula vulgaris, Petrorhagia prolifera, Poa palustris) esetében is közöljük az Atlasz térképeihez képest újnak bizonyuló lelőhelyeket. A legközönségesebb fajok esetében a lelőhelyek részletezése nélkül csupán KEF-kódokat adunk meg.
Due to the similarity between the pathomechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infections and hereditary angioedema due to C1-inhibitor deficiency (C1-INH-HAE), a possibility emerged that C1-INH-HAE may worsen the ...course of the infection, or that the infection may influence the severity of angioedema (HAE) attacks in C1-INH-HAE patients. Our study aimed to evaluate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the quality of life (QoL) of Hungarian C1-INH-HAE patients, and to survey the acute course of the infection, post COVID symptoms (PCS), vaccination coverage and the side effects of vaccines in this patient population. 93 patients completed our questionnaire between 1st July 2021 and 31st October 2021. In this same period and between March 2019 and March 2020, 63 patients completed the angioedema quality of life questionnaire (AE-QoL). Out of those patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the examined period (18/93 patients; 19%), 5% required hospitalization, 28% experienced HAE attacks in the acute phase of the infection, and 44% experienced PCS. A total number of 142 doses of vaccines were administered to the patients. Serious vaccine reactions did not occur in any case, 4 (5%) out of the 73 vaccinated patients experienced HAE attacks. No significant difference (p = 0.59) was found in the median of the AE-QoL total score, or in the number of HAE attacks prior and during the pandemic. Based on our study, HAE patients did not experience more serious SARS-CoV-2 infection, and it did not aggravate the course of HAE either. Changes in the QoL were not significant, and vaccines were safe in HAE patients.
IMPORTANCE: Cryptogenic strokes constitute approximately 40% of ischemic strokes in young adults, and most meet criteria for the embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS). Two randomized clinical ...trials, NAVIGATE ESUS and RESPECT ESUS, showed a high rate of stroke recurrence in older adults with ESUS but the prognosis and prognostic factors among younger individuals with ESUS is uncertain. OBJECTIVE: To determine rates of and factors associated with recurrent ischemic stroke and death and new-onset atrial fibrillation (AF) among young adults. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This multicenter longitudinal cohort study with enrollment from October 2017 to October 2019 and a mean follow-up period of 12 months ending in October 2020 included 41 stroke research centers in 13 countries. Consecutive patients 50 years and younger with a diagnosis of ESUS were included. Of 576 screened, 535 participants were enrolled after 1 withdrew consent, 41 were found to be ineligible, and 2 were excluded for other reasons. The final follow-up visit was completed by 520 patients. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Recurrent ischemic stroke and/or death, recurrent ischemic stroke, and prevalence of patent foramen ovale (PFO). RESULTS: The mean (SD) age of participants was 40.4 (7.3) years, and 297 (56%) participants were male. The most frequent vascular risk factors were tobacco use (240 patients 45%), hypertension (118 patients 22%), and dyslipidemia (109 patients 20%). PFO was detected in 177 participants (50%) who had transthoracic echocardiograms with bubble studies. Following initial ESUS, 468 participants (88%) were receiving antiplatelet therapy, and 52 (10%) received anticoagulation. The recurrent ischemic stroke and death rate was 2.19 per 100 patient-years, and the ischemic stroke recurrence rate was 1.9 per 100 patient-years. Of the recurrent strokes, 9 (64%) were ESUS, 2 (14%) were cardioembolic, and 3 (21%) were of other determined cause. AF was detected in 15 participants (2.8%; 95% CI, 1.6-4.6). In multivariate analysis, the following were associated with recurrent ischemic stroke: history of stroke or transient ischemic attack (hazard ratio, 5.3; 95% CI, 1.8-15), presence of diabetes (hazard ratio, 4.4; 95% CI, 1.5-13), and history of coronary artery disease (hazard ratio, 10; 95% CI, 4.8-22). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this large cohort of young adult patients with ESUS, there was a relatively low rate of subsequent ischemic stroke and a low frequency of new-onset AF. Most recurrent strokes also met the criteria for ESUS, suggesting the need for future studies to improve our understanding of the underlying stroke mechanism in this population.
The pooling operation is a cornerstone element of convolutional neural networks. These elements generate receptive fields for neurons, in which local perturbations should have minimal effect on the ...output activations, increasing robustness and invariance of the network. In this paper we present an altered version of the most commonly applied method, maximum pooling, where pooling in theory is substituted by a continuous time differential equation, which generates a location sensitive pooling operation, more similar to biological receptive fields. We present how this continuous method can be approximated numerically using discrete operations which fit ideally on a GPU. In our approach the kerned size is substituted by diffusion strength which is a continuous valued parameter, this way it can be optimized, by gradient descent algorithms. We evaluate the effect of continuous pooling on accuracy and computational need using commonly applied network architectures and datasets.
Deep neural networks were applied with success in a myriad of applications, but in safety critical use cases adversarial attacks still pose a significant threat. These attacks were demonstrated on ...various classification and detection tasks and are usually considered general in a sense that arbitrary network outputs can be generated by them. In this paper we will demonstrate through simple case studies both in simulation and in real-life, that patch based attacks can be utilised to alter the output of segmentation networks. Through a few examples and the investigation of network complexity, we will also demonstrate that the number of possible output maps which can be generated via patch-based attacks of a given size is typically smaller than the area they effect or areas which should be attacked in case of practical applications. We will prove that based on these results most patch-based attacks cannot be general in practice, namely they can not generate arbitrary output maps or if they could, they are spatially limited and this limit is significantly smaller than the receptive field of the patches.
The pooling operation is a cornerstone element of convolutional neural networks. These elements generate receptive fields for neurons, in which local perturbations should have minimal effect on the ...output activations, increasing robustness and invariance of the network. In this paper we will present an altered version of the most commonly applied method, maximum pooling, where pooling in theory is substituted by a continuous time differential equation, which generates a location sensitive pooling operation, more similar to biological receptive fields. We will present how this continuous method can be approximated numerically using discrete operations which fit ideally on a GPU. In our approach the kernel size is substituted by diffusion strength which is a continuous valued parameter, this way it can be optimized by gradient descent algorithms. We will evaluate the effect of continuous pooling on accuracy and computational need using commonly applied network architectures and datasets.
Most pituitary tumours are non-invasive, benign adenomas that remain confined to the sella turcica. Some of them recur, have a rapid growth rate, and invade surrounding tissues. These adenomas, ...considered aggressive pituitary tumours, are difficult to manage and present problems due to incomplete resection. A pituitary carcinoma is diagnosed when craniospinal and/or systemic metastases are documented. Treatment options for pituitary adenomas are surgery, radiation and drugs. Recent publications report the efficacy of temozolomide in the treatment of aggressive pituitary adenomas and carcinomas. Indications for, results with, and side effects of temozolomide therapy in aggressive pituitary tumours and pituitary carcinomas are reviewed here. Alternative treatment options for resistant or recurrent pituitary tumours are also discussed.
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