BACKGROUND Physical activity is an important determinant of health. Walking is the most common physical activity performed by adults and the presence of sidewalks along roads is a determinant of walking. Geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to measure sidewalks; however, GIS sidewalk data are difficult to access. The purpose of this study was to present a new GIS method for measurin...

Behavioural responses can help species persist in habitats modified by humans. Roads and traffic greatly affect animals' mortality not only through habitat structure modifications but also through direct mortality owing to collisions. Although species are known to differ in their sensitivity to the risk of collision, whether individuals can change their behaviour in response to this is still un...

Aim Artificial light at night (ALAN) and roads are known threats to nocturnally migrating birds. How associations with ALAN defined in combination for these species the population level across full annual cycle has not been explored. Location Western Hemisphere. Methods We estimated range-wide exposure, predictor importance prevalence of positive a weekly temporal resolution 166 bird three orde...

Safety analysis of the roads through the accident rates which is one of the widely used tools has been resulted from the direct exposure method which is based on the ratio of the vehicle-kilometers traveled and vehicle-travel time. However, due to some fundamental flaws in its theories and difficulties in gaining access to the data required such as traffic volume, distance and duration of the t...

Landfill sites receive 92% of total annual solid waste produced by municipalities in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. In this study, candidate sites for an appropriate landfill location for the Abu Dhabi municipal area are determined by integrating geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) analysis. To identify appropriate landfill sites, eight input map layers including...

Multi-service traffic has a strong impact in Mobile Broadband Systems (MBS) revenues, allowing one to obtain merit functions for optimisation purposes. A ‘net cost’ model is presented for the design trade-offs between re-use pattern, K, the coverage distance, R, and the spectral efficiency, Sef(R). It allows for the determination of the revenue per basic channel, R384, that achieves a given val...

while risk reduction has been mainly addressed by seismologists and engineers by now, the total impact of earthquake greatly depends on urban planning factors. the effects of planning can be considered in the socio economic and physical aspects. urban planning may have a dominant role in various earthquake phases: at the time of earthquake; rescue, and emergency, as well as temporary and perman...

Forest roads are often subject to intense runoff and erosion, the rates can be increased by other disturbance factors, such as wildfires. Since scarce literature exists on effects of wildfires rill erosion forest roads, this study presents first results a wider research, evaluating in four different types Hellìn (Castilla-La Mancha, Central-Eastern Spain): unpaved made native materials (soil fo...

Regional studies of land cover change are often limited by available data and in terms of comparability across regions, by the transferability of methods. This research addresses the role of roads and infrastructure improvements across a tri-national frontier region with similar climatic and biophysical conditions but very different trajectories of forest clearing. The standardization of method...