In urban areas with a high level of human disturbance, wildlife has to adjust its behavior to deal with the so called “landscape of fear.” This can be studied in risk perception during movement in relation to specific habitat types, whereby individuals trade-off between foraging and disturbance. Due to its high behavioral plasticity and increasing occurrence in urban environments, wild boar (Su...

The elimination of urban-rural differences in the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) standard rates implies a need to re-examine all the PPS payment adjustments. Refinements for case mix, outliers, and the wage index can make a significant contribution to avoiding payment disparities in a single-rate system. However, changes in the adjustments for teaching and disproportionate-share (DSH...

Urban areas alter local atmospheric conditions by modifying surface albedo and consequently the surface radiation and energy balances, releasing waste heat from anthropogenic uses, and increasing atmospheric aerosols, all of which combine to increase temperatures in cities, especially overnight, compared with surrounding rural areas, resulting in a phenomenon called the “urban heat island” effe...

Recent studies showed that remote sensing (RS) is an effective, efficient and reliable technique used in almost all the areas of earth sciences. Remote sensing as being a technique started with aerial photographs and then developed employing the multi-spectral satellite images. Nowadays, it benefits from hyper-spectral, RADAR and LIDAR data as well. This potential has widen its applicability in...

Emergency response systems in urban areas should be located in such a way to ensure adequate coverage as well as a rapid response time. We developed a model for locating emergency vehicles on urban networks based on a generalization of the Hypercube Queuing Model. The proposed model considers spatial and temporal characteristics of demand such as the possibility that a server is not always avai...

Anthropogenic noise is debatably one of the most common threats to national parks' resources. Park visitors and workers generally suffer from adverse effects of noise from on- and off-road vehicles. The parks, studied here, are located in strictly urban areas, surrounded by streets with intense vehicle traffic. This study assesses the soundscape of urban parks in two cities of Odisha State, on ...