The ecological footprint is a quantitative biophysical method commonly used to evaluate the status of regional ecological environment and the degree of sustainable development. In this paper, the concept and calculation process of the ecological footprint are introduced by taking a county located in central China as example. Computational analysis and empirical research of the region’s ecologic...

Since the first prehistoric people started to dig for stone to make implements, rather than pick up loose material, humans have modified the landscape through excavation of rock and soil, generation of waste and creation of artificial ground. In Great Britain over the past 200 years, people have excavated, moved and built up the equivalent of at least six times the volume of Ben Nevis. It is es...

The fundamental organizing elements of the New Urbanism are the neighborhood, the district and the corridor. Neighborhoods are urbanized areas with a balanced mix of human activity; districts are areas dominated by a single activity; corridors are connectors and separators of neighborhoods and districts. A single neighborhood standing free in the landscape is a village. Cities and towns are mad...

UNLABELLED Mentoring is a complex developmental relationship that contributes to individual growth and career advancement in different areas of human activity, including academic medicine. This article describes a broader environmental milieux in which mentoring occurs and considers the ways in which the environmental factors may affect the process and outcomes of mentoring. An ecological model...

Experimental evidence of extinction via an Allee effect (AE) is a priority as more species become threatened by human activity. Kramer & Drake (2010) begin the International Year of Biodiversity with the important--but double-edged--demonstration that predators can induce an AE in their prey. The good news is that their experiments help bridge the knowledge gap between theoretical and empirical...

Humans commonly engage in tasks that require or are made more efficient by coordinating with other humans. In this paper we introduce a task dynamics approach for modeling multi-agent interaction and decision making in a pick and place task where an agent must move an object from one location to another and decide whether to act alone or with a partner. Our aims were to identify and model (1) t...

While acknowledging the need for “sustainability,” this paper summarizes the problems that have been encountered in our understanding and use of this concept. It explores the efforts of others to define the concept within the context of specific disciplinary areas and sets forth a proposal for a basic understanding of the term “environmental sustainability” as an expansion of our common percept...

The usage of mobile network is significantly growing and it can be used in mobile platforms such as airplane, train, bus, car, etc. It is very useful for day-to-day activities of human beings. A mobile network can be connected to the Internet anywhere at anytime. But all these comforts depend on the technological aspects. The differences between the application demand and network performance ar...

Principles of self-organization play an increasingly central role in models of human activity. Notably, individual human displacements exhibit strongly recurrent patterns that are characterized by scaling laws and can be mechanistically modelled as self-attracting walks. Recurrence is not, however, unique to human displacements. Here we report that the mobility patterns of wild capuchin monkeys...

Transitions from marine to freshwater habitats constitute dramatic shifts between 'adaptive zones' that have initiated the radiation and speciation of many taxa. As recently as 10?000 years ago, deglaciation resulted in marine fauna being trapped in freshwater lakes. In modern times, human activity has caused the acceleration of freshwater invasions from marine or brackish habitats, leading to ...