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1. Revisiting the Half-and-Half Functional

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.5c01402  

   Gray, Montgomery; Mandal, Aniket; Herbert, John M (May 2025, The Journal of Physical Chemistry A)
2. Tree species explain only half of explained spatial variability in plant water sensitivity

   https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17425  

   Konings, Alexandra_G; Rao, Krishna; McCormick, Erica_L; Trugman, Anna_T; Williams, A_Park; Diffenbaugh, Noah_S; Yebra, Marta; Zhao, Meng (July 2024, Global Change Biology)

   Abstract Spatiotemporal patterns of plant water uptake, loss, and storage exert a first‐order control on photosynthesis and evapotranspiration. Many studies of plant responses to water stress have focused on differences between species because of their different stomatal closure, xylem conductance, and root traits. However, several other ecohydrological factors are also relevant, including soil hydraulics, topographically driven redistribution of water, plant adaptation to local climatic variations, and changes in vegetation density. Here, we seek to understand the relative importance of the dominant species for regional‐scale variations in woody plant responses to water stress. We map plant water sensitivity (PWS) based on the response of remotely sensed live fuel moisture content to variations in hydrometeorology using an auto‐regressive model. Live fuel moisture content dynamics are informative of PWS because they directly reflect vegetation water content and therefore patterns of plant water uptake and evapotranspiration. The PWS is studied using 21,455 wooded locations containing U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis plots across the western United States, where species cover is known and where a single species is locally dominant. Using a species‐specific mean PWS value explains 23% of observed PWS variability. By contrast, a random forest driven by mean vegetation density, mean climate, soil properties, and topographic descriptors explains 43% of observed PWS variability. Thus, the dominant species explains only 53% (23% compared to 43%) of explainable variations in PWS. Mean climate and mean NDVI also exert significant influence on PWS. Our results suggest that studies of differences between species should explicitly consider the environments (climate, soil, topography) in which observations for each species are made, and whether those environments are representative of the entire species range. 

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3. US Water Pollution Regulation over the Past Half Century: Burning Waters to Crystal Springs?

   https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.4.51  

   Keiser, David A.; Shapiro, Joseph S. (November 2019, Journal of Economic Perspectives)
4. Double Half-Heuslers

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2019.04.003  

   Anand, Shashwat; Wood, Max; Xia, Yi; Wolverton, Chris; Snyder, G. Jeffrey (May 2019, Joule)
5. HALF-SPACE MACDONALD PROCESSES

   https://doi.org/10.1017/fmp.2020.3  

   BARRAQUAND, GUILLAUME; BORODIN, ALEXEI; CORWIN, IVAN (January 2020, Forum of Mathematics, Pi)

   null (Ed.)

   Macdonald processes are measures on sequences of integer partitions built using the Cauchy summation identity for Macdonald symmetric functions. These measures are a useful tool to uncover the integrability of many probabilistic systems, including the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) equation and a number of other models in its universality class. In this paper, we develop the structural theory behind half-space variants of these models and the corresponding half-space Macdonald processes. These processes are built using a Littlewood summation identity instead of the Cauchy identity, and their analysis is considerably harder than their full-space counterparts. We compute moments and Laplace transforms of observables for general half-space Macdonald measures. Introducing new dynamics preserving this class of measures, we relate them to various stochastic processes, in particular the log-gamma polymer in a half-quadrant (they are also related to the stochastic six-vertex model in a half-quadrant and the half-space ASEP). For the polymer model, we provide explicit integral formulas for the Laplace transform of the partition function. Nonrigorous saddle-point asymptotics yield convergence of the directed polymer free energy to either the Tracy–Widom (associated to the Gaussian orthogonal or symplectic ensemble) or the Gaussian distribution depending on the average size of weights on the boundary. 

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