Accelerated global warming is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) due to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The climate changes are anticipated to have a long-term impact on human health, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, water resources and vegetation. Due to rising sea levels, low lying coastal regions will be flooded, farmlands will be threaten...

BACKGROUND The Sahel region of West Africa has the highest bacterial meningitis attack and case fatality rate in the world. The effect of climatic factors on patterns of invasive respiratory bacterial disease is not well documented. OBJECTIVE We aimed to assess the link between climatic factors and occurrence of invasive respiratory bacterial disease in a Sahel region of Niger. METHODS We c...

     Periodic vegetation patterns (PVPs) are striking features of many global drylands. Although they have attracted wide research study, resulting in many hypotheses, their origin and controlling factors remain unresolved. Theoretical works dominate a large literature seeking to account for the occurrence and properties of PVPs, especially banded vegetation patterns (‘tiger bush’). In light of...

Using National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration/Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOAA/AVHRR) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) climate datasets, we analyzed interannual trends in the growing-season Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in China from 1982 to 2011, as well as the effects of climatic variables and human activities on vegetation variation. Growing-season...

[1] Evidence is mounting that abrupt climatic shifts occurred during the last glacial-interglacial transition (LGIT) in the North Atlantic and other regions. However, few high-resolution climatic records of the LGIT exist from the high latitudes of the North Pacific rim. We analyzed lake sediments from southwestern Alaska for biogenic silica, organic carbon, organic nitrogen, diatom assemblages...

The identification of dissimilar regions in spatial and temporal data is a fundamental part of data exploration. This process takes place in applications, such as biomedical image processing as well as climatic data analysis. We propose a general solution for this task by employing well-founded statistical tools. From a large set of candidate regions, we derive an empirical distribution of the ...

Background: The present study aimed to validate the thermal regions in Iran with an emphasis on the identification of the climatic cycles during the recent half-century. Methods: Data on daily temperature were extracted for 383 synoptic stations of Iran Meteorological Organization. For the zoning of the temperatures of Iran, multivariate statistical techniques (cluster analysis and discriminan...

BACKGROUND The northern part of India harbours a great diversity of medicinal plants due to its distinct geography and ecological marginal conditions. The traditional medical systems of northern India are part of a time tested culture and honored still by people today. These traditional systems have been curing complex disease for more than 3,000 years. With rapidly growing demand for these med...

an increase, even moderate, in global temperature is expected to result in a change in frequency of extreme weather events like drought, heavy rainfall and storms. the study of extreme events is difficult due to the fact that it is difficult to find long-term homogeneous data series. also the delimitation of extreme events is not univocal since a parameter value that would be defined as an extr...

BACKGROUND Anthropometric variation can be fruitfully utilized to investigate microevolutionary processes. Anthropometric variations in the Indian subcontinent based on stature and three indices (Cephalic Index, Nasal Index, and Total Facial Index) are highly variable and discriminative among populations across geographical regions. AIMS Anthropometric variation in stature, Cephalic Index (CI...