Asymmetric responses of primary productivity to precipitation extremes: A synthesis of grassland precipitation manipulation experiments.

Climatic changes are altering Earth's hydrological cycle, resulting in altered precipitation amounts, increased interannual variability of precipitation, and more frequent extreme precipitation events. These trends will likely continue into the future, having substantial impacts on net primary productivity (NPP) and associated ecosystem services such as food production and carbon sequestration. Frequently, experimental manipulations of precipitation have linked altered precipitation regimes to changes in NPP. Yet, findings have been diverse and substantial uncertainty still surrounds generalities describing patterns of ecosystem sensitivity to altered precipitation. Additionally, we do not know whether previously observed correlations between NPP and precipitation remain accurate when precipitation changes become extreme. We synthesized results from 83 case studies of experimental precipitation manipulations in grasslands worldwide. We used meta-analytical techniques to search for generalities and asymmetries of aboveground NPP (ANPP) and belowground NPP (BNPP) responses to both the direction and magnitude of precipitation change. Sensitivity (i.e., productivity response standardized by the amount of precipitation change) of BNPP was similar under precipitation additions and reductions, but ANPP was more sensitive to precipitation additions than reductions; this was especially evident in drier ecosystems. Additionally, overall relationships between the magnitude of productivity responses and the magnitude of precipitation change were saturating in form. The saturating form of this relationship was likely driven by ANPP responses to very extreme precipitation increases, although there were limited studies imposing extreme precipitation change, and there was considerable variation among experiments. This highlights the importance of incorporating gradients of manipulations, ranging from extreme drought to extreme precipitation increases into future climate change experiments. Additionally, policy and land management decisions related to global change scenarios should consider how ANPP and BNPP responses may differ, and that ecosystem responses to extreme events might not be predicted from relationships found under moderate environmental changes.

An Electronic Healthcare Record Server Implemented in PostgreSQL.

This paper describes the implementation of an Electronic Healthcare Record server inside a PostgreSQL relational database without dependency on any further middleware infrastructure. The five-part international standard for communicating healthcare records (ISO EN 13606) is used as the information basis for the design of the server. We describe some of the features that this standard demands that are provided by the server, and other areas where assumptions about the durability of communications or the presence of middleware lead to a poor fit. Finally, we discuss the use of the server in two real-world scenarios including a commercial application.

Evaluation of ISO EN 13606 as a result of its implementation in XML.

The five parts of the ISO EN 13606 standard define a means by which health-care records can be exchanged between computer systems. Starting within the European standardisation process, it has now become internationally ratified in ISO. However, ISO standards do not require that a reference implementation be provided, and in order for ISO EN 13606 to deliver the expected benefits, it must be provided not as a document, but as an operational system that is not vendor specific. This article describes the evolution of an Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema through three iterations, each of which emphasised one particular approach to delivering an executable equivalent to the printed standard. Developing these operational versions and incorporating feedback from users of these demonstrated where implementation compromises were needed and exposed defects in the standard. These are discussed herein. They may require a future technical revision to ISO EN 13606 to resolve the issues identified.

A data types profile suitable for use with ISO EN 13606.

ISO EN 13606 is a five part International Standard specifying how Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) information should be communicated between different EHR systems and repositories. Part 1 of the standard defines an information model for representing the EHR information itself, including the representation of types of data value. A later International Standard, ISO 21090:2010, defines a comprehensive set of models for data types needed by all health IT systems. This latter standard is vast, and duplicates some of the functions already handled by ISO EN 13606 part 1. A profile (sub-set) of ISO 21090 would therefore be expected to provide EHR system vendors with a more specially tailored set of data types to implement and avoid the risk of providing more than one modelling option for representing the information properties. This paper describes the process and design decisions made for developing a data types profile for EHR interoperability.