Energy Expenditure in Egypt: Empirical Evidence Based on a Quantile Regression Approach

Environmental Modeling & Assessment - This paper investigates the key factors affecting household energy expenditure in Egypt. Based upon the latest 2015 Egyptian HIECS Survey, we develop a...     

The oldest African bat from the early Eocene of El Kohol (Algeria)

The Afro-Arabian Paleogene fossil record of Chiroptera is very poor. In North Africa and Arabia, this record is limited, thus far, to a few localities mainly in Tunisia (Chambi, late early Eocene), Egypt (Fayum, late Eocene to early Oligocene), and Sultanate of Oman (Taqah, early Oligocene). It consists primarily of isolated teeth or mandible fragments. Interestingly, these African fossil bats document two modern groups (Vespertilionoidea and Rhinolophoidea) from the early Eocene, while the bat fossil record of the same epoch of North America, Eurasia, and Australia principally includes members of the ??Eochiroptera.?? This paraphyletic group contains all primitive microbats excluding modern families. In Algeria, the region of Brezina, southeast of the Atlas Mountains, is famous for the early Eocene El Kohol Formation, which has yielded one of the earliest mammalian faunas of the African landmass. Recent fieldwork in the same area has led to the discovery of a new vertebrate locality, including isolated teeth of Chiroptera. These fossils represent the oldest occurrence of Chiroptera in Africa, thus extending back the record of the group to the middle early Eocene (Ypresian) on that continent. The material consists of an upper molar and two fragments of lower molars. The dental character association matches that of ??Eochiroptera.?? As such, although very fragmentary, the material testifies to the first occurrence of ??Eochiroptera?? in Algeria, and by extension in Africa. This discovery demonstrates that this basal group of Chiroptera had a worldwide distribution during the early Paleogene.     

Stream Temperature Modeling Using Functional Regression Models

Stream temperature is one of the most important environmental variables in lotic habitats as it has important and direct impacts on the ecosystem. Given the continuous nature of this variable, the aim of this paper was to introduce functional regression for the air‐stream temperature relation, being capable to model an entire seasonal or annual curve of temperatures as one entity, rather than multiple daily or weekly values in classical models. Three types of functional models were explored in the study and compared to two classical models (Generalized Additive Model and Logistic Model) for six rivers from the United States The results show the functional models have the best performance for all the considered rivers. When comparing functional models between them, one variant of the historical functional model performs better than the two other models and is the most parsimonious. Functional regression leads to encouraging results to model the complete annual stream temperature curve as one entity compared to other classical approaches.