© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org F many scientists, the only dust they think about is the thin film of material that accumulates on their computer monitor on a regular basis. However, dust has enormous relevance to a wide range of ecological processes and environmental management challenges. Dust is fine particulate material that is removed from the land surface by...

The most common method of evaluating beneficial impacts of environmental policies is cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In the present review, CBA methods for air pollution impacts are reviewed. Three types of air pollution effects are identified, including health, productivity, and amenity. Market valuation, stated preference methods, and revealed preference methods are identified for valuing benefi...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org B invasions, which join synergistically with habitat loss and fragmentation, climate change, natural resource overexploitation, pollution, and a multitude of other anthropogenic factors, are recognized as a leading threat to freshwater, marine, and terrestrial systems. The common notion of an invasive species is one that has become ...

The societal and environmental impacts of mining activity are the focus of greater interest today than ever before. Many emerging economies are in the process of developing environmental policies for the first time. These new policies will surely affect how mining operations are expected to perform: producing the raw material needed to drive the economy at the lowest possible cost becomes as im...

Concerns about harmful algal blooms (HABs) have grown in recent years. There is a pressing need for robust, quantitative, and cost-effective methods to detect and characterize algal blooms. Critical applications of these methods include long-term monitoring of coastal waters to indicate the degree to which present trends of HABs and human activities are linked, early warning systems to protect ...

Soil productivity is a complex interaction of physical, chemical, and biological processes. Unfortunately, the effects of biomass removal on these processes are not well understood or easily measured (Powers 2006). For example, removing logging slash from forest stands for biomass production, rather than leaving the harvest residues on site, can change nutrient availability (Sinclair 1992), soi...

In a diet, probiotics and prebiotics play an important role in regulating the immune response function through the intestinal microbiota, which in turn affects the immune system. While probiotics have been shown to reduce diseases, such as the flu, which is a respiratory infection. The National Health Commission of China and the National Bureau of Traditional Medicine of China recommend that pr...

Time-varying forces and accelerations occur in daily life, and are commonly experienced, for example, in an elevator and in aircraft, railway trains, and automobiles. All of these situations involve motion of the whole body transmitted through a seat, or from the floor in the case of a standing person, where the human response is commonly related to the relative motion of body parts, organs, an...

Studies of tree physiology within and outside the USA have historically focused on the impacts of environmental factors such as light, water and nutrients, and more recently on the global change factors of increasing CO2, ozone, and air and soil temperature, on various tree species ( Kramer and Kozlowski 1979, Norby et al. 1999, Hoeppner and Dukes 2012, Chung et al. 2013). One thing that has pl...