This book provides a comprehensive discussion on plant responses in hyperarid regions of Egypt, China, Mexico, and Pakistan. It describes their location, physiographic features, accidental vegetation along two transects, endangered vegetation species, human impact, and variety of plant types (e.g. climbing, succulent, and parasitic). Studies on biotic and abiotic interactions, plant biodiversity, and soil-plant relationships are also covered. Covering a wide range of plant conditions and adaptations, this book analyzes what happens when plants must endure very high temperatures and aridity. Plants have adapted by evolving their physical structure to store and conserve water. Examples are the absence of leaves which reduces transpiration and the growth of extremely long roots, allowing them to acquire moisture at, or near the water table. Plants in hyperarid habitats have also made behavioral adaptations in order to survive by synchronizing with the seasons of greatest moisture and/or coolest temperatures. For example, desert perennials remain dormant during dry periods of the year, then spring to life when water becomes available. The book includes many color illustrations, and has extensive and up-to-date references for further reading.

In 2008 the Supreme People's Court (SPC) has promulgated the "Regulations on the Cause of Civil Action". The promulgation of the Regulations has significance in various regards. It clearly signals a new approach of the SPC to systemize and compile the status quo of the Chinese civil law system. With the Regulations the SPC aims to help lower courts and parties of legal actions to correctly apply the law. It further wants to collect accurate statistical information about court decisions and to gather these court decisions. The SPC ultimately intents to build a systematic collection of court decisions, which shall provide the people's courts with a reliable data base for reference in deciding cases in the future. This new approach of the SPC has deep impact on the understanding of the application of law in China as it undoubtedly reminds of the concept of writs in traditional English common law (i.e. types of action). The research compiled in this book is therefore going to the roots of the notion of law in China and to the relationship between claims arising from substantive law and the procedural arrangement to enforce these claims in civil procedure law.

A liner conference, as a self-regulation organisational form of liner shipping companies, constitutes a typical "hard-core cartel" with significant anti-competitive effect. One of the main three trade routes of liner shipping traffic is the Europe-Asia Trade, on the two ends of which both the European Community (EC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) play important roles in the international liner shipping market. However, the competition regimes on liner conferences in both jurisdictions are not equivalent. From a comparative point of view, this book reviews the historical development of maritime policy and regulatory legislation in the EC and the PRC, catches insight into the system of regulation regime and individual provisions in substantive and procedural meaning, and finally provides a wide-ranging perspective on the future competition regulation in respect of the latest developments in both jurisdictions.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive review of image quality assessment technology, particularly applications on screen content images, 3D-synthesized images, sonar images, enhanced images, light-field images, VR images, and super-resolution images. It covers topics containing structural variation analysis, sparse reference information, multiscale natural scene statistical analysis, task and visual perception, contour degradation measurement, spatial angular measurement, local and global assessment metrics, and more. All of the image quality assessment algorithms of this book have a high efficiency with better performance compared to other image quality assessment algorithms, and the performance of these approaches mentioned above can be demonstrated by the results of experiments on real-world images. On the basis of this, those interested in relevant fields can use the results obtained through these quality assessment algorithms for further image processing. The goal of this book is to facilitate the use of these image quality assessment algorithms by engineers and scientists from various disciplines, such as optics, electronics, math, photography techniques and computation techniques. The book can serve as a reference for graduate students who are interested in image quality assessment techniques, for front-line researchers practicing these methods, and for domain experts working in this area or conducting related application development.

Volume is indexed by Thomson Reuters BCI (WoS). This special issue covers mainly electrospinning, vibration-electrospinning, bubble electrospinning and blown bubble spinning, and it is a good reference not only for materials science, but also for various communities in physics, nanotechnology and chemistry.