A method is presented to simulate the propagation of elastic waves in a 2-D piecewise homogeneous domain composed of several regions of arbitrary shapes. The regions can be isolated within an elastic background or also embedded among themselves. The method is based on the indirect boundary element method (IBEM) in which the diffracted field is obtained as the contributions of distributed source…

Crowding conditions of larvae may have a significant impact on commercial production efficiency of some insects, such as Tenebrio molitor L. (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). Although larval densities are known to affect developmental time and growth in T. molitor, no reports were found on the effects of crowding on food utilization. The effect of larval density on food utilization efficiency of T. …

The Lower Danube Basin is one of the most important loess regions from Europe, which have provided excellent archives for long-term high-resolution palaeoclimate studies. The aim of this paper is to derive new information on the Middle–Late Pleistocene palaeoenvironment from a high resolution multiproxy assessment of the iron mineralogical composition at the Costines¸ti loess-palaeosol sequ…

Motivated by the need to derive and characterize increasingly sophisticated seismic data analysis and inversion methods incorporating wave dissipation, we consider the problem of scattering of homogeneous and inhomogeneous waves from perturbations in five viscoelastic parameters (density, P- and S-wave velocities, and P- and S-wave quality factors), as formulated in the context of the Born appr…

Regional body-wave tomography, also called ACH tomography, is the inversion of relative traveltime residuals of teleseismic body waves measured at regional networks. We analyse the characteristics of the finite-frequency Fr´echet kernels for P and S waves for this kind of tomography. Using a simplified geometry enables us to use the complete Green’s function in the expression of the Fr´ech…

The climate warming trend appears to be evident with an increasing frequency of drought events in Shaanxi Province of China, which may have contributed to an increase in outbreaks of the English grain aphid, Sitobion avenae (Fabricius). To explore the potential effects of water-deficit stress on aphid outbreak risks, clones of S. avenae were collected from semi-arid and moist areas of Shaanxi. …

Spodoptera litura (F.), an important polyphagous insect pest, attacks ca. 300 economic crops in dozens of countries. Investigations into its growth and development performance on different host plants can provide an understanding of the potential for increase of S. litura population in the field. We measured the development time, body weight, and head capsule width of S. litura larvae reared on…

Knowledge on movement and spatial patterns of insect pest populations among preferred hosts aids in the development of effective pest management strategies. In this study, we quantified the spatiotemporal dynamics of the invasive brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys (Sta� l 1855), in relation to field corn, Zea mays L., and soybean, Glycine max (L.), crop phenology.We also examine…

It remains enigmatic how slow slip events (SSEs) interact with other slow seismic events and large distant earthquakes at many subduction zones. Here we model the spatio temporal slip evolution of the most recent long-term SSE in 2009–2011 in the Bungo Channel region, southwest Japan using GEONET GPS position time-series and a Kalman filter-based, time-dependent slip inversion method. We exam…

The psyllid species Cacopsylla melanoneura (Fo� rster) and Cacopsylla picta (Fo� rster) are vectors of �Candidatus Phytoplasma mali�, the causal agent of apple proliferation, one of the economically most important apple diseases in Europe. Both vectors are present in apple orchards of South Tyrol and Trentino provinces in Northern Italy. As no direct treatment of the disease…