The principal aim of this study was to establish biogeographical patterns in the legume flora of southern Africa so as to facilitate the selection of species with agricultural potential. Plant collection data from the National Herbarium, South Africa, were analysed to establish the diversity and areas covered by legumes (Leguminosae/Fabaceae) indigenous to South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. A...

The vegetation space-time variability during 1999-2010 in the North of the Apulian region (Southern Italy) was analysed using SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) sensor data. Three bands of VEGETATION (RED, NIR and SWIR) were used to implement the vegetation index named reduced simple ratio (RSR) to derive leaf area index (LAI). The monthly average LAI is an indicator of biomass and canopy cover, while the d...

BACKGROUND Although natural resources play a central role in rural livelihoods across the globe, little research has explored the relationship between migration and natural capital use, particularly in combination with other livelihood capitals (i.e., human, social, financial and physical). OBJECTIVE Grounded in the rural livelihood framework, this paper explores the association between the l...

BACKGROUND Roadside pedestrian injuries represent a significant portion of trauma team activations, especially at urban trauma centers. Patient demographics and severity of injury vary greatly in this patient population. Herein, we hypothesize that injury patterns may be predictable, especially with respect to age. MATERIALS AND METHODS All patients with roadside pedestrian injuries evaluated...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are the flaming topic of research. VANET comprises of moving vehicles communicating with each other. VANETs involve three types of communication: vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to roadside (V2R) or vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication. VANETs consist of some vital components: RSU, OBU and Trusted Authority. Among them Roadside units (RSUs) are one ...

4 To improve the quality of wireless communication and extend the application of emerging net5 working paradigms in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), we design a hybrid routing scheme 6 for VANETs, called HRV. It presents a holistic solution for inter-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadside, 7 and inter-roadside communications in hybrid urban networks. The combination of roadside unit 8 (RSU) resources ...

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) are expected to have great potential to improve both traffic safety and comfort in the future. When many vehicles want to access data through roadside unit, data scheduling become an important issue. In this paper, we identify some challenges in roadside based data access. To address these challenges we first review some existing scheduling schemes. We then pro...

In this paper, a novel spectrally efficient half-duplex cooperative transmission protocol is proposed for cooperative multiple-access channels in wireless vehicular networks, where multiple sources (vehicles) deliver messages to a common destination (roadside base station or roadside infrastructure) with the help of multiple decode-and-forward relays (roadside stations). The basic idea is to ap...

OBJECTIVE To assess visual search and recognition of roadside targets and safety errors during a landmark and traffic sign identification task in drivers with Alzheimer's disease. METHODS 33 drivers with probable Alzheimer's disease of mild severity and 137 neurologically normal older adults underwent a battery of visual and cognitive tests and were asked to report detection of specific landm...

Every year, inattentive or impaired drivers strike law enforcement officials, emergency personnel, and other workers by the roadside. Preventative efforts include making at-risk parties more conspicuous to oncoming motorists in order to prompt safer driving behaviors. In contrast, this work evaluates active alerting mechanisms designed to induce defensive action from at-risk roadside personnel ...