Riparian ecosystems are of great importance in the landscape, connecting landscape elements longitudinally and laterally and often encompassing sharp environmental gradients in ecological processes and communities. They are influenced by fluvial disturbances such as flooding, erosion and sediment deposition, which create dynamic and spatially heterogeneous habitats that support a high diversity of species. Riverine ecosystems belong among the world’s most threatened systems. In rivers throughout the world, human alterations to fluvial disturbance regimes have resulted in degraded ecosystems and species loss. For example, in Sweden, watercourses of all sizes have been channelized to facilitate timber floating, but in the last 10–20 years the impacts in some of the affected rivers have been reduced by restoration actions. The objectives of this thesis are to evaluate how riverine ecosystems in general, with specific focus on riparian communities, are affected by (1) restoration of channelized reaches by boulder replacement, (2) ice formation, and (3) restoration of in-stream wood abundance in the stream channel. Objective (1) was assessed by quantifying the retention of plant propagules in channelized and restored stream reaches and by evaluating effects on riparian plant and bryophyte communities in disconnected and re-opened side channels. Retention of plant propagule mimics was highest at low flows and in sites where boulders and large wood had been replaced into the channel. Propagules are however unlikely to establish unless they can be further dispersed during subsequent spring high flows to higher riparian elevations suitable for establishment. Thus, immigration to new suitable sites may occur stepwise. Our study demonstrates that restoration of channel complexity through replacement of boulders and wood can enhance retention of plant propagules, but also highlights the importance of understanding how restoration effects vary with flow. We detected no differences in riparian diversity between re-opened and disconnected side channels, but we did observe significant differences in species composition of both vascular plant and bryophyte communities. Disconnected sites had more floodplain species, whereas restored sites had more species characteristic of upland forest. This suggests that the reopening of side channels resulted in increased water levels, resulting in new riparian zones developing in former upland areas, but that the characteristic floodplain communities have not had time to develop in response to the restored fluvial regime. Objective (2) was approached by evaluating the effect of both natural anchor ice formation and experimentally created ice in the riparian zone. Riparian plant species richness and evenness proved to be higher in plots affected by anchor ice. Plants with their over-wintering organs above the ice sheet suffered from the treatment but the overall species richness increased in ice-treated plots. Objective (3) was evaluated by studying wood recruitment and movement, channel hydraulics, propagule retention and fish abundance in streams restored with large wood. Only one stream experienced reduced velocities after large wood addition. The large size and reduced velocity were probably also the reasons why this stream proved to be the best one in trapping natural, drifting wood. Increased retention and decreased mechanical fragmentation in large wood sites will lead to decreased loss of detritus from the site and therefore higher availability of coarse particulate organic matter which can result in more species rich shredder communities. Our study did not show that the occurrence of large wood had an important role in controlling density or biomass of brown trout.

As part of an ongoing project at the department of electrical engineering, ISY, at Linköping University, a voice decoder using floating point formats has been the focus of this master thesis. Previous work has been done developing an mp3-decoder using the floating point formats. All is expected to be implemented on a single DSP.The ever present desire to make things smaller, more efficient and less power consuming are the main reasons for this master thesis regarding the use of a floating point format instead of the traditional integer format in a GSM codec. The idea with the low precision floating point format is to be able to reduce the size of the memory. This in turn reduces the size of the total chip area needed and also decreases the power consumption.One main question is if this can be done with the floating point format without losing too much sound quality of the speech. When using the integer format, one can represent every value in the range depending on how many bits are being used. When using a floating point format you can represent larger values using fewer bits compared to the integer format but you lose representation of some values and have to round the values off.From the tests that have been made with the decoder during this thesis, it has been found that the audible difference between the two formats is very small and can hardly be heard, if at all. The rounding seems to have very little effect on the quality of the sound and the implementation of the codec has succeeded in reproducing similar sound quality to the GSM standard decoder.

This study investigate water uptake in six different species of hardwood in tangential and radial section. Alder (Alnus glutinosa) and beech (Fagus sylvatika) represent semi-diffuse-porous hardwoods. Aspen (Popolus tremula) and birch (Betula pubescens) represent diffuse-porous group; oak (Quercus robur) and ash (Fraxinus excelsior) the ring-porous hardwoods. Spruce (Picea abies) was used as a reference sample. Significantly higher water uptake was observed in the diffuse-porous and the semi-diffuse-porous group. Water uptake varied among the species, nevertheless tangential section was more permeable in general. Any impact of density or annual rings width on water uptake was observed. Correlation between ratio of earlywood and latewood and water uptake in dependence on hardwood group was found out. Ring-porous species had low rate of earlywood and low water uptake, whereas diffuse-porous and semi-diffuse-porous hardwoods had high rate of earlywood and high water uptake. Relation between water uptake and microstructure of wood was observed.

During the 1960´s and 1970´s the number of grey seals in the Baltic Sea was decreasing rapidly, mostly due to hunting and toxic substances like DDT and PCB. When hunting became less intense and toxic substances decreased in the environment the grey seal population started to increase. Today grey seals are found common in the Baltic Sea and have started to become a big treat and a problem to the fishing industry. The grey seal destroys and enters fishing traps and consumes large quantities of the fish that have been caught. The knowledge of the grey seal, like abundance and food preferences, is today limited. It is also important to define the position of the grey seal in the ecosystem in the Baltic Sea and to be able to predict changes that could occur if the population would rapidly decrease or increase. This project was therefore started in an attempt to increase the knowledge about the grey seals food preferences. The study was made in tree separate parts. Part one contained analyses of prey remains from stomachs and digestive tract from fourteen individuals put down in two geographically separate areas. The collected material from the seal digestive tract was cleaned and otoliths (hearing stones from fish), scales and back vertebra from fish eaten by the grey seal were sorted out. With the help of hard parts collected from the intestines the food preferences of the seals could be estimated. Eight different species of prey was found. The species were herring (Clupea harengus membras), sprat (Sprattus sprattus), common whitefish (Coregonus spp), perch (Perca fluviatilis), salmon (Salmo salar), trout (Salmo trutta) and roach (Rutilus rutilus). In two of the digestive tracts several individuals of the isopod Saduria entomon were found. No earlier studies describe the isopod as a food source for the grey seals in the Baltic Sea. The findings are therefore unique information. The results showed that during summer the main part of the grey seal diet in the gulf of Sundsvall and in the surrounding coastal area of Hårte was herring and sprat. No significant difference in food preferences was shown between the investigated seals from the gulf of Sundsvall and seals from the surrounding coastal area of Hårte. The second part was made to investigate if it was possible to build a floating platform that would work as a resting place for the grey seal. The surface of the platform was covered by a layer that keeps the seal scats on the platform so that it could be collected. Otoliths from herring and common whitefish were found on the floating platform. Because the platform could not be under surveillance during the whole study some uncertainties about whether the otoliths found came from grey seal or from resting cormorants or other fish eating birds. However, the otolit size is linearly related to the fish size and this relationship can be used to track the predator. Otoliths from herring taken by grey seals and otoliths found on the platform were significantly bigger than the otoliths originating from the prey of cormorants. The results indicated that the common whitefish size was too big for a full grown cormorant bird to consume. The common whitefish size showed that it probably not had been cormorants that had deposited the otoliths on the platform. The platform method was concluded promising but it needs to be modified in order to work more effective in the future. In the third part scats were collected from the area of Österåsen to increase the amount of information about the grey seals food preferences. The knowledge of the grey seals diet in the Baltic Sea is today limited and few similar study’s have earlier been made. The collected scats and otoliths in this project are therefore unique. 2008:Bi 2

I have done a follow up study of the restoration of two rivers, Röälven and Grundan, in order to evaluate the effects of the restoration on the endemic population of trout. Both rivers have been used for timber floating during many years throughout the 20th century, and because of this, had all obstacles such as rocks and wood parts removed. In 2004-2005 both rivers were restored, and rocks and wood were put back into the rivers. Spawning grounds were created and boulder dams were constructed to promote the streaming water. The result showed that the trout population of both rivers increased after the restoration, but also that the trout population of Röälven increased more than that of Grundan. My conclusion is that the way the restoration is of a river contributes to the result.

Camera-on-a-chip systems have tried to include carefully chosen signal processing units for better functionality, performance and also to broaden the applications they can be used for. Image processing sensors have been possible due advances in CMOS active pixel sensors (APS) and neuromorphic focal plane imagers. Some of the advantages of these systems are compact size, high speed and parallelism, low power dissipation, and dense system integration. One can envision using these chips for portable and inexpensive video cameras on hand-held devices like personal digital assistants (PDA) or cell-phones In neuromorphic modeling of the retina it would be very nice to have processing capabilities at the focal plane while retaining the density of typical APS imager designs. Unfortunately, these two goals have been mostly incompatible. We introduce our MAtrix Transform Imager Architecture (MATIA) that uses analog floating--gate devices to make it possible to have computational imagers with high pixel densities. The core imager performs computations at the pixel plane, but still has a fill-factor of 46 percent - comparable to the high fill-factors of APS imagers. The processing is performed continuously on the image via programmable matrix operations that can operate on the entire image or blocks within the image. The resulting data-flow architecture can directly perform all kinds of block matrix image transforms. Since the imager operates in the subthreshold region and thus has low power consumption, this architecture can be used as a low-power front end for any system that utilizes these computations. Various compression algorithms (e.g. JPEG), that use block matrix transforms, can be implemented using this architecture. Since MATIA can be used for gradient computations, cheap image tracking devices can be implemented using this architecture. Other applications of this architecture can range from stand-alone universal transform imager systems to systems that can compute stereoscopic depth.

This research focuses on biologically inspired audio signal processing using programmable analog circuitry. This research is inspired by the biology of the human cochlea since biology far outperforms any engineered system at converting audio signals into meaningful electrical signals. The human cochlea efficiently decomposes any sound into the respective frequency components by harnessing the resonance nature of the basilar membrane, essentially forming a bank of bandpass filters. In a similar fashion, this work revolves around developing a filter bank composed of continuous-time, low-power, analog bandpass filters that serve as the core front end to this silicon audio-processing system. Like biology, the individual bandpass filters are tuned to have narrow bandwidths, moderate amounts of resonance, and exponentially spaced center frequencies. This audio front end serves to efficiently convert incoming sounds into information useful to subsequent signal-processing elements, and it does so by performing a frequency decomposition of the waveform with extremely low-power consumption and real-time operation. To overcome mismatch and offsets inherent in CMOS processes, floating-gate transistors are used to precisely tune the time constants in the filters and to allow programmability of analog components.

This study is to develop a 2D fully nonlinear numerical wave tank used to investigate the wave-induced dynamic properties of a dual pontoon floating structure (DPFS) with a liquid container on the top. The nonlinear numerical wave tank, developed based on the velocity potential function and the boundary element method (BEM), is to simulate dynamic properties including sway, heave, roll, and tension response. In addition, a physical model of the dual floating pontoon is tested in a hydrodynamic wave tank to validate the numerical model for simulation of wave and structure interaction. In the numerical model, a boundary integral equation method (BIEM) with linear element scheme is applied to establish a 2D fully nonlinear numerical wave tank (NWT). The nonlinear free surface condition is treated by combining the Mixed Eulerian and Lagrangian method (MEL), the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method (RK4) and a cubic spline scheme. The second-order Stokes wave theory is used to generate the velocity flux on the input boundary. Numerical damping zones are deployed at both ends of the NWT to dissipate or absorb the transmitted and reflected waves. Acceleration potential method and modal decomposition method are adopted to solve the unsteady potential functions £X1,t and £X2,t, while the system of motion equation is established according to Newton's 2nd law. Finally, the RK4 is applied to predict the motion of the platform, and the variation of free surface. As for the hydrodynamic laboratory model test, an image process scheme is applied to trace the floating structure motion and the variation of water surface inside the sloshing tank, while the mooring tension is measured by a load cell and stored in a data logger. The comparisons of numerical simulations and experimental data indicate that the numerical predictions are larger than measurements especially near the resonance frequency. This discrepancy is probably due to the fluid viscous effect. To overcome this problem and maintain the calculation efficiency, an uncoupled damping coefficient obtained through a damping ratio (£a=C/Ccr=0.02) is incorporated into the vibration system. Results reveal that responses of body motion near the resonant frequencies of each mode have significantly reduced and close to the measurements. Therefore, the suitable value of the damping ratio for the floating platform is £a=0.02. Then the numerical model with a damping ratio is applied to investigate the dynamic properties of the floating platform for different arrangements, including different mooring angle, spring constant, spacing, and the liquid container. Results demonstrate that the resonant frequency of each mode, responses of body motion and mooring tensions change along with the settings. As a whole, the platform with smaller mooring angle, longer spacing between the pontoons, higher water depth and wider width of the liquid container has relatively stable body motions and less mooring tension. Finally, the comparisons of the effects of random and regular waves on the floating structure illustrate that the variation of water surface in the liquid container is much severe in random waves than in regular waves such that the interaction between liquid and floating structure is more chaotic and thus reduces the amplitude of each response mode. As a result, the mooring tensions for random waves become much gentler than the regular waves. Key words: Boundary integral equation method; fully nonlinear numerical wave tank; dual pontoon floating structure

This paper investigates whether the ¡§Taylor rule¡¨ can appropriately describe the Central Bank¡¥s monetary policy in Asia-Pacific countries. The countries under consideration were export-oriented countries that adopted floating exchange rate system, and affected by the Asian financial crisis. They include Taiwan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore. In addition we divide the sample period into two sub period based on the mid-1997 outbreak of the Asian financial crisis, to check the robustness of our results from the whole period. Furthermore, we investigate that the central bank cares for the quarterly inflation, or annual inflation. The results over the whole period showed that the Taylor rule describe Central Bank¡¥s monetary policy except for Thailand, Japan and Singapore. The Taylor rule can not describe Japan's monetary policy when the period before Asian financial crisis is adopted. Besides, in addition to Thailand, the central banks concerned quarterly inflation rates than annual inflation rates.

In digital signal processing and multimedia applications, floating-point(FP) multiplication and addition are the most commonly used operations. In addition, FP multiplication operations are frequently followed by the FP addition operations. Therefore, in order to achieve high performance and low cost, multiplication and addition are usually combined into a single unit, known as the FP Multiply-Add Fused (MAF). On the other hand, the mobile devices nowadays are rapidly developing. For this kind of devices, performance and power sustainability have to become the major trend in the research area. As a result, the mechanisms to reduce energy consumption become more important. Therefore, we propose a multi-mode FP MAF based on the concept of iterative multiplication and truncated addition, to achieve different operating modes with different errors. This MAF, with a total of seven modes, includes three modes for the FP multiply-accumulate operations, two modes for single FP multiplication operation and single FP addition operation, respectively. FP multiply-accumulate operations provide three modes to user, and this three modes have 0%, 0.328% and 1.107% of error. The 0% error is the same with the standard IEEE754 single-precision FP Multiply-Add Fused operations. For FP multiplication and FP addition operations, the proposed MAF allows users to choose two kinds of error modes, which are 0%, 0.328% error for FP multiplication and 0%, 0.781% error for FP addition. The 0% error is the same with the standard IEEE754 single-precision floating-point operations. When compared with the standard IEEE754 single-precision FP MAF, the proposed multi-mode FP MAF architecture has 4.5% less area and increase about 22% delay to achieve the effect of multi-mode. To demonstrate the power efficiency of proposed FP MAF, it is used to perform the operations of FP MAF, FP multiplication, and FP addition in the application of RGB to YUV format conversion. Experimental results show that, the proposed multi-mode FP MAF can significantly reduce power consumption when the modes with error are adopted.