A correct characterization of the status and trend of forest condition is essential to support reporting processes at national and international level. An international forest condition monitoring has been implemented in Europe since 1987 under the auspices of the International Co-operative Programme on Assessment and Monitoring of Air Pollution Effects on Forests (ICP Forests). The monitoring ...

The paper presents both the structure and application of a Decision Support System (DSS) for an important river in Brazil—along with the sustainable management of its watershed. This DSS assesses both surface-water quality and riverine microhabitats in terms of future scenarios, taking into account regulation limits and appropriate quality indexes. Our future scenarios consider: (a) population ...

"Clustering" the significance and application of this technique is spread over various fields. Clustering is an unsupervised process in data mining, that is why the proper evaluation of the results and measuring the compactness and separability of the clusters are important issues. The procedure of evaluating the results of a clustering algorithm is known as cluster validity measure. Different ...

Some concern about recently published nonpatient data, plus the fact that some records in the published sample of 600 nonpatients (Exner, 2001) were collected more than 20 years ago, prompted the initiation of a project to develop a new nonpatient sample. In this article, findings are presented for the first 175 participants tested in the new project. It is noted that the data from the new proj...

This paper proposes a reduced rank regression framework for constructing coincident and leading indexes. Based on a formal definition that requires that the first differences of the leading index are the best linear predictor of the first differences of the coincident index, it is shown that the notion of polynomial serial correlation common features can be used to build these composite variabl...

This thesis defines and designs succinct indexes for several abstract data types (ADTs). The concept is to design auxiliary data structures that ideally occupy asymptotically less space than the information-theoretic lower bound on the space required to encode the given data, and support an extended set of operations using the basic operators defined in the ADT. As opposed to succinct (integrat...

Health impact assessment has become important in the development of air quality policies and in finding the relationships between pollutants concentration and health effects. In our work we presented a novel index able to evaluate the effects on the human exposure caused by ambient air pollution in urban areas. The index is able to link both health risk factors and pollutants levels. The indexe...

Exposure to ambient air pollution has been associated with increases in blood pressure. We have previously demonstrated activation of the Rho/Rho kinase pathway in experimental hypertension in rats. In this investigation, we evaluated the effects of particulate matter of < 2.5 microm (PM(2.5)) exposure on cardiovascular responses and remodeling and tested the effect of Rho kinase inhibition on ...

Ria de Vigo is a funnel-shaped, fault-bounded coastal embayment in Galicia, NW Spain. There are a number of important centres of population and industrial activity along its margins, which serve as sources of pollution. Sixty-six subtidal sediment samples have been collected in the Ria. The samples have been subjected to a total digestion technique and analysed for major and trace elements (Al,...

Adverse health effects of exposures to acute air pollution have been well studied. Fewer studies have examined effects of chronic exposure. Previous studies used exposure estimates for narrow time periods and were limited by the geographic distribution of pollution monitors. This study examined the association of chronic particulate exposures with all-cause mortality, incident nonfatal myocardi...