We identified the spatiotemporal patterns of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the years 1982-2008 in the desert areas of Northwest China and quantified the impacts of climate and non-climate factors on NDVI changes. The results indicate that although the mean NDVI has improved in 24.7% of the study region; 16.3% among the region has been stagnating in recent years and only ...

OBJECTIVES To describe Aggregate Demand Index (ADI) trends from 1999-2010; to compare ADI time trends to concurrent data for US unemployment levels, US entry-level pharmacy graduates, and US retail prescription growth rate; and to determine which variables were significant predictors of ADI. METHODS Annual ADI data (dependent variable) were analyzed against annual unemployment rates, annual n...

In an economy that proved to be highly sensitive to housing prices fluctuations it is at least intriguing why the U.S. has accurate housing price indices for the top 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) only. This is an important informational gap since in most the states, housing sales in Small Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) account for at least 30% of the total state sales. This p...

This cross-sectional study conducted between March and June 2006 examined stress at work and work ability of 180 people with different workplaces within an oil company. Office, laboratory, and oil-field workers were invited to complete the "Occupational Stress Assessment Questionnaire--the Oil Industry Version and Work Ability Index (WAI) Questionnaire". The overall response rate was 69.4%, and...

Marine ecosystem protection and conservation initiatives rely on the assessment of ecological integrity and health status of marine environments. The AZTI's Marine Biotic Index (AMBI), which consists on using macroinvertebrate diversity as indicator of ecosystem health, is used worldwide for this purpose. Yet, this index requires taxonomic assignment of specimens, which typically involves a tim...

Fifty known siblings and fifty unrelated pairs were genotyped using the ABI Identifiler STR system and sibship indices computed for each pair. Combined sibship indices (CSIs) for the known siblings ranged from less than 10 to greater than 1 billion. CSIs for the unrelated pairs ranged from 4.5 x 10(-8) to 0.12. In the known sibling group the percentage of loci where both alleles matched was app...

Nature conservation is increasingly based on a landscape approach rather than a species approach. Landscape planning that includes nature conservation goals requires integrated ecological tools. However, species differ widely in their response to landscape change. We propose a framework of ecologically scaled landscape indices that takes into account this variation. Our approach is based on a c...

This paper presents a new framework for comprehensively evaluating the sustainability content of a product through Product Sustainability Index (PSI) in terms of all three components of sustainability (economy, environment and society) over its total life-cycle (pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use, post-use). This method is useful in comparing various competitive products of the same family. ...