Heavy metal pollution is now widely recognized to pose severe health and environmental threats, yet much of what is known concerning its adverse impacts on ecosystem health is derived from short-term ecotoxicological studies. Due to the frequent absence of long-term monitoring data, little is known of the long-tem ecological consequences of pollutants such as arsenic. Here, our dated sediment r...

Adapting methodology from resilience theory in ecology, we develop an empirical model of the response of the New York City public health ecosystem to sudden disaster. Contrary to cultural expectation, 'good' and 'bad' neighborhoods-starkly differentiated by public health status reflecting longstanding economic and racial segregation-respond similarly to challenge. This suggests that the differe...

“Jekyll and Hyde” embodies how information security affects today’s healthcare ecosystem. When security works, it promotes patient health and a smooth operating ecosystem (Dr. Jekyll); when it doesn’t, privacy and health compromises can occur (Mr. Hyde). In this paper, we argue that unusable security triggers this split personality and in doing so, compromises the heart of the healthcare ecosys...

The extent to which pollution from tar sands industrial activities in northeastern Alberta, Canada affects ecosystem and human health is a matter of growing concern that is exacerbated by uncertainty. In this paper we determine whether physical and ecological changes that result from tar sands industrial activities are detectable. We analyze a diverse set of environmental data on water and sedi...

Healthy forests provide human communities with a host of important ecosystem services, including the provision of food, clean water, fuel, and natural medicines. Yet globally, about 13 million hectares of forests are lost every year, with the biggest losses in Africa and South America. As biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation due to deforestation continue at unprecedented rates, with conc...

We present a model of the optimal timing of a large-scale habitat restoration project. The model is a dynamic benefit optimization that includes ecosystem costs caused by the presence of a large dam. We use a single stochastic variable to incorporate two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty about how ecosystem costs will evolve over time and the possibility of the ecosystem jumping to an undesir...

The importance of the gut and the soil microbiomes as determinants of human and ecosystem health, respectively, is gaining rapid acceptation in the medical and ecological literatures. This suggests that there is a wealth of highly transferable knowledge about the microbial ecology of human and non-human ecosystems that is currently being generated in parallel, but mostly in isolation from one a...

Augmented Reality is becoming increasingly popular. The success of a platform is typically observed by measuring the health of the software ecosystem surrounding it. In this paper, we take a closer look at the Vuforia ecosystem’s health by mining the Vuforia platform application repository. It is observed that the developer ecosystem is the strength of the platform. We also determine that Vufor...

background: gender inequality harms the health of millions of women and girls in all over the world. this study aimed to identify the state of gender equity in the health sector of the islamic republic of iran.   methods: this study was based on the secondary analysis of the available data in four provinces. the research team held three sessions to select the appropriate indicators for measurin...