We assessed the impacts of anthropogenic threats on 93 protected areas in 22 tropical countries to test the hypothesis that parks are an effective means to protect tropical biodiversity. We found that the majority of parks are successful at stopping land clearing, and to a lesser degree effective at mitigating logging, hunting, fire, and grazing. Park effectiveness correlates with basic managem...

Climate change has driven many organisms to shift their seasonal timing. Are humans also shifting their weather-related behaviors such as outdoor recreation? Here we show that peak attendance in US national parks experiencing climate change has shifted 4 days earlier since 1979. Of the nine parks experiencing significant increases in mean spring temperatures, seven also exhibit shifts in the ti...

Urban green spaces provide important recreational services for urban residents. In general, when park visitors enjoy "the green," they are in actuality appreciating a mix of biotic, abiotic, and man-made park infrastructure elements and qualities. We argue that these three dimensions of structural diversity have an influence on how people use and value urban parks. We present a straightforward ...

Parks have long been sites for sexual activity, deviant behaviour, violence, and prostitution (Flowers, Hart, & Marriot, 1999; Humphreys, 1970; Mitchell, 1995). Yet leisure researchers have tended to leave these less socially acceptable activities unexamined, focusing their analyses instead on the “benefits” of leisure (Glover, 2003; Rojek, 1999, 2000). This research aims to deviate from the “b...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Soil is the main habitat of saprophytic and pathogenic fungi. Mucoromycotina constitutes a large group of soil fungi, with certain opportunistic members causing systemic infections in immunocompromised hosts. The majority of human and animal infections are caused by the members of the genera Rhizopus, Mucor, Rhizomucor, Lichtheimia (Absidia), Cunninghamella, and Mortierel...

This study examined the impact of two different detention basin designs on residential property value. The hedonic price model was applied to analyze two College Station, TX, subdivisions. One subdivision had only uniuse flood control detention basins (UDBs) and the other included amulti-use detention basin (MDB) integrating a detention pond with a recreational neighborhood park. Geographic inf...

Safe disposal of municipal sewage sludge is a challenging global environmental concern. The aim of this study was to assess the response of soil microbial functional diversity to the accumulation of municipal sewage sludge during landfill storage. Soil samples of a municipal sewage sludge (SS) and from a sewage sludge landfill that was 3 m from a SS landfill (SS3) were analyzed relative to an u...

INTRODUCTION The incidence of opportunistic fungal infections has increased in recent years and is considered an important public health problem. Among systemic and opportunistic mycoses, cryptococcosis is distinguished by its clinical importance due to the increased risk of infection in individuals infected by human immunodeficiency virus. METHODS To determine the occurrence of pathogenic Cr...