J — Multidisciplinary Scientific Journal

Successful establishment during the first growing season is essential for productive short-rotation coppice plantations, yet the effectiveness of establishment management under mountainous conditions remains poorly understood. We evaluated early establishment of one single hybrid poplar clone, Mori-no-Mirai 17, in mountainous Japan using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial treatment structure comprising propagation type (rooted vs. unrooted cuttings), mulching (with vs. without mulch), and fertilization (with vs. without fertilizer). Survival and growth were assessed eight months after planting using mixed-effects models accounting for the experimental structure. Propagation type was the strongest determinant of establishment success. Rooted cuttings had significantly higher predicted survival than unrooted cuttings (50.4% vs. 32.5%). Mulching had a positive but non-significant effect on survival and did not significantly improve growth. Fertilization had no significant effect on survival, but the estimated increases in height and root collar diameter (RCD) under fertilization were greater for unrooted than rooted cuttings, narrowing differences between propagation types. Plot effects accounted for 20–28% of the total variation in height and RCD, indicating substantial fine-scale environmental heterogeneity. These findings suggest that the rooting status of cuttings at planting may be an important factor associated with early hybrid poplar establishment success under site conditions similar to those examined in this study.

Conventional flexible food packaging often relies on multilayer structures based on non-biodegradable petrochemical materials to achieve the required barrier performance, generating persistent waste and making recycling difficult. Replacing these systems with simpler cellulose-derived alternatives remains challenging, particularly because moisture protection is difficult to achieve with inherently hygroscopic materials. Ethyl cellulose (EC) is a rare cellulose derivative that is hydrophobic, thermoplastic and, being an ether rather than an ester, hydrolytically stable. Yet much of the foundational knowledge of EC film formation comes from pharmaceutical coating, where permeability is deliberately engineered rather than suppressed, and where each study varies one parameter in its own matrix. However, their relative effects have rarely been compared using the same film-preparation and testing conditions. We prepared different EC film formulations at a fixed EC concentration of 5 wt.% and systematically varied commercial grade, solvent system, plasticizer, or nanofiller while maintaining consistent casting and testing conditions. Solvent system and plasticizer formulation produced significant differences in water vapor transmission rate (WVTR), whereas commercial EC grade and nanofiller type and loading did not significantly affect WVTR. Plasticizer formulation produced the widest variation in mechanical properties, with tensile strength ranging from 4 to 49 MPa, compared with 12–34 MPa across the solvent systems. Apparent M_n^SEC showed no consistent relationship with film performance; notably, the highest-M_n^SEC grade exhibited the lowest tensile strength among the seven commercial grades. Tributyl citrate and glycerol at 0.1 wt.% jointly gave the best strength–elongation balance; ZnO- and SiO₂-filled films showed the highest mean mechanical values but none differed significantly from the unfilled control.

Automated blood-cell detection can support microscopic analysis, but detector performance depends strongly on the training configuration. This study investigates a topology-guided Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) strategy for jointly selecting 21 hyperparameters of YOLOv8n without modifying its architecture. This study uses 614 images from BCCD and LISC, with 5138 available annotations for red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and platelets. Random Search, Standard ACO, and topology-guided ACO were compared within the same discretized search space and with a maximum of 600 unique candidate evaluations per run. Across five reported runs, topology-guided ACO reached a mean best validation mAP@0.5 of $96.8\pm 1.2$%, compared with $94.3\pm 1.6$% for Standard ACO and $91.6\pm 2.2$% for Random Search. The selected detector achieved 94.4% precision, 93.3% recall, 95.8% mAP@0.5, and 62.3% mAP@0.5:0.95 on the reported held-out evaluation. Because LISC provides WBC-specific annotations rather than complete three-class labels, source-specific interpretation is required. The present contribution is therefore methodological: this study assesses whether transition-based search information can improve systematic hyperparameter selection for lightweight microscopic object detection.