Non-invasive measures for assessing long-term stress in free ranging mammals are an increasingly important approach for understanding physiological responses to landscape conditions. Using a spatially and temporally expansive dataset of hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) generated from a threatened grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) population in Alberta, Canada, we quantified how variables representi...

Models of species' distributions are commonly used to inform landscape and conservation planning. In urban and semiurban landscapes, the distributions of species are determined by a combination of natural habitat and anthropogenic impacts. Understanding the spatial influence of these two processes is crucial for making spatially explicit decisions about conservation actions. We present a logist...

BACKGROUND Balancing animal conservation and human use of the landscape is an ongoing scientific and practical challenge throughout the world. We investigated reproductive success in female greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) relative to seasonal patterns of resource selection, with the larger goal of developing a spatially-explicit framework for managing human activity and sage-gro...

The conservation value of natural vegetation is degraded by proximity to anthropogenic land uses. Previous global assessments focused primarily on the amount of land protected or converted to anthropogenic uses, and on forest vegetation. Comparative assessments of extant vegetation in terms of proximity to anthropogenic land uses are needed to better inform conservation planning. We conducted a...

Soil inventories of anthropogenic radionuclides were investigated in altitudinal transects in 2 French regions, Savoie and Montagne Noire. Rain was negligible in these 2 areas the days after the Chernobyl accident. Thus anthropogenic radionuclides are coming hypothetically only from Global Fallout following Atmospheric Nuclear Weapon Tests. This is confirmed by the isotopic signatures ((238)Pu/...

Due to changing economic activity, emissions of air pollutants in East Asia are changing rapidly in space and time. Monthly emission estimates of nitrogen oxides derived from satellite observations provide valuable insight into the evolution of anthropogenic activity on a regional scale. We present the first results of a new emission estimation algorithm, specifically designed to use daily sate...

Aerosols affect the climate system by changing cloud characteristics. Using the global climate model ECHAM5-HAM, we investigate different aerosol effects on mixed-phase clouds: The glaciation effect, which refers to a more frequent glaciation due to anthropogenic aerosols, versus the de-activation effect, which suggests that ice nuclei become less effective because of an anthropogenic sulfate c...

On June 15, 2006, the United States President George W. Bush signed a proclamation that established the largest coral reef marine reserve in the world, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument (NWHI MNM). The NWHI MNM protects a chain of islands and atolls that encompass approximately 360,000 km 2 , including 11,650 km 2 of relatively undisturbed coral reef habitat that suppor...

Both heliophysical and anthropogenic (wastewater) effects on zooplankton biomass and abundance of the Imandra Lake (the largest subarctic lake at Kola Peninsula, Russia) were investigated during the 1990 - 2003 period. We used different indexes of solar activity (sunspot numbers and UV- radiation values) as heliophysical factors. Information about UV- radiation values was derived from satellite...