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Communities are increasingly harnessing the coastal protection functions of marshes and other coastal ecosystems within built infrastructure, developing nature-based designs to stabilize coastlines. These “living shorelines” often include planting ecosystem-engineering plants, which have traits that attenuate waves and facilitate sediment accretion while limiting erosion. However, failure is common during plant establishment, requiring interdisciplinary approaches to inform planting designs that enhance short-term sediment stability. Here we combine hydrodynamic modelling with mesocosm experiments to assess different planting approaches for the marsh grass Spartina alterniflora. The model, parameterized with traits measured in the experiments, showed that random arrangement of plants outperformed regular arrangements, reducing areas of high flow velocities and increasing tortuosity, facilitating sediment stability. Furthermore, wide-diameter Spartina clumps with increased biomass reduced flow better than small-diameter clumps, even when the area occupied by the vegetation site-wide is identical. Our experiments revealed multiple factors that influence the diameter and biomass of Spartina clumps, including plant source, sediment characteristics, and spatial arrangement of propagules. While some sources performed better than others, their relative performance varied with time and environment, suggesting that practitioners plant multiple sources to ensure incorporating high-performers in variable and often unexamined planting environments. Furthermore, clumping propagules during planting best generated the large, dense clumps that facilitate sediment stability. 

Abstract A catastrophic Mw7.8 earthquake hit southeast Turkey and northwest Syria on February 6th, 2023, leading to more than 44 k deaths and 160 k building collapses. The interpretation of earthquake-triggered building damage is usually subjective, labor intensive, and limited by accessibility to the sites and the availability of instant, high-resolution images. Here we propose a multi-class damage detection (MCDD) model enlightened by artificial intelligence to synergize four variables, i.e., amplitude dispersion index (ADI) and damage proxy (DP) map derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, the change of the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) derived from optical remote sensing images, as well as peak ground acceleration (PGA). This approach allows us to characterize damage on a large, tectonic scale and a small, individual-building scale. The integration of multiple variables in classifying damage levels into no damage, slight damage, and serious damage (including partial or complete collapses) excels the traditional practice of solely use of DP by 11.25% in performance. Our proposed approach can quantitatively and automatically sort out different building damage levels from publicly available satellite observations, which helps prioritize the rescue mission in response to emergent disasters. 

Abstract In nuclear collisions at RHIC energies, an excess of$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$hyperons over$$\bar{\Omega }$$ $\overline{\Omega }$is observed, indicating that$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$has a net baryon number despitesand$$\bar{s}$$ $\overline{s}$quarks being produced in pairs. The baryon number in$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$may have been transported from the incident nuclei and/or produced in the baryon-pair production of$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$with other types of anti-hyperons such as$$\bar{\Xi }$$ $\overline{\Xi }$. To investigate these two scenarios, we propose to measure the correlations between$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$andKand between$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$and anti-hyperons. We use two versions, the default and string-melting, of a multiphase transport (AMPT) model to illustrate the method for measuring the correlation and to demonstrate the general shape of the correlation. We present the$$\Omega$$ $\Omega$-hadron correlations from simulated Au+Au collisions at$$\sqrt{s_\text{NN}} = 7.7$$ $\sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}}=7.7$and$$14.6 \ \textrm{GeV}$$ $14.6\text{GeV}$and discuss the dependence on the collision energy and on the hadronization scheme in these two AMPT versions. These correlations can be used to explore the mechanism of baryon number transport and the effects of baryon number and strangeness conservation on nuclear collisions.