Search

This paper presents a species distribution model (SDM) to quantify relationships between environmental variables and habitat suitability using unbalanced presence-absence data common in ecology. The proposed model applies a stratified sample balancing scheme for the random forest classifier where every classification tree receives a balanced sample of presence and absence. The model is applied to the Australian coast's seagrass habitats, where seagrass populations have been on the decline. Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (ACEAS) seagrass presence-absence data is used to train the model. Seagrasses are observed at 97.6% of the survey locations, and seagrass absence is recorded at only 2.4% of the survey locations. The proposed model's accuracy is validated with an independent dataset on seagrass presence from the Coastal and Marine Resources Information System (CAMRIS). The environmental variables used in the analysis are obtained from the Ecological Marine Units (EMU) dataset. The variables on human-driven stressors to seagrass habitats due to ship traffic are obtained from World Port Index. The proposed model predicts seagrass absence at a recall rate of 80%, whereas the random forest recall rate is 24%. The model's variable importance profile aligns with the main drivers behind seagrass habitats reported in the literature. A case study is conducted for quantifying the impacts of two proposed ports in the Gulf of Carpenteria on the local seagrass habitats. Results show that balancing improves the explanatory and predictive capabilities of an SDM to define conditions resulting in a species' absence, aiding conservation planning with realistic species distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Close human-wildlife interactions are rapidly growing, particularly due to wildlife tourism popularity. Using both laboratory and ecological observation studies we explored potential interspecies communication signalling mechanisms underpinning human-animal approach behaviour, which to date have been unclear. First impression ratings (n = 227) of Barbary macaques' social and health traits were related to the macaques' facial morphology and their observed behaviour supporting a shared facial signalling system in primates. These ratings significantly predicted intended approach to the macaques during hypothetical interactions. Finally, real-world interspecies proximity was observed and found to be best predicted by the interaction between human first impression perception and animal behaviour. Specifically, perceived macaque health in interaction with actual macaque dominance drives close interactions despite human proclivity to avoid dominant animals, raising safety concerns in interspecies interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtualization is the cornerstone of the developing third-party compute industry, allowing cloud providers to instantiate multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single set of physical resources. Customers utilize cloud resources alongside unknown and untrusted parties, creating the co-resident threat-unless perfect isolation is provided by the virtual hypervisor, there exists the possibility for unauthorized access to sensitive customer information through the exploitation of covert side channels. This paper presents co-resident watermarking, a traffic analysis attack that allows a malicious co-resident VM to inject a watermark signature into the network flow of a target instance. This watermark can be used to exfiltrate and broadcast co-residency data from the physical machine, compromising isolation without reliance on internal side channels. As a result, our approach is difficult to defend against without costly underutilization of the physical machine. We evaluate co-resident watermarkingunder a large variety of conditions, system loads and hardware configurations, from a local laboratory environment to production cloud environments (Futuregrid and the University of Oregon's ACISS). We demonstrate the ability to initiate a covert channel of 4 bits per second, and we can confirm co-residency with a target VM instance in $$<$$ 10 s. We also show that passive load measurement of the target and subsequent behavior profiling is possible with this attack. We go on to consider the detectability of co-resident watermarking, extending our scheme to create a subtler watermarking attack by imitating legitimate cloud customer behavior. Our investigation demonstrates the need for the careful design of hardware to be used in the cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the importance of succession planning in an organization. Definition of succession planning; Full value of human capital being leverage by a corporation; Training of leaders.