Archaeological settlement systems are usually analysed in terms of the relation between the rank of a settlement and its size (Zipf’s law). We argue that this approach is unreliable, and can be misleading, in application to archaeological data where the recovery rate of settlements can be low and their size estimates are often approximate at best. An alternative framework for the settlement dat...

as long as the government in the concept of urban management plays the role of “direct provider” instead of “facilitator” to improve the life’s welfare level and provide a situation for poor societies and particularly informal settlements, its sole result is the increase in the number of open mouths that their dependence on government enlarges per day. therefore the investigation of different g...

Manipulative field experiments carried out on sheltered rocky shores investigated settlement and post-settlement interactions between Semibalanus balanoides and three species of fucoid canopy algae, Fucus spiralis L., Ascophyllum nodosum (L.) Le Jolis and Fucus serratus L. All three species had a negative effect on settlement and early recruitment of S. balanoides, densities being significantly...

We develop two individual-based models using a large and detailed data set (information gathered over more than a century) on a population of a longlived and territorial predator, the Spanish imperial eagle. We investigated the relationship between survival and predator pressure, prey behaviour and patch availability (i.e. settlement areas). Survival of dispersing individuals was highly depende...

The ability of nest predation to influence habitat settlement decisions in birds is widely debated, despite its importance in limiting fitness. Here, we experimentally manipulated nest predation risk across a landscape and asked the question, do migratory birds assess and respond to variation in nest predation risk when choosing breeding habitats? We examined habitat preference by quantifying t...

Despite the fact that image texture features extracted from high-resolution remotely sensed images over urban areas have demonstrated their ability to distinguish different classes, they are still far from being ideal. Multiresolution grayscale and rotation invariant texture classification with Local Binary Patterns (LBPs) have proven to be a very powerful texture feature. In this paper we perf...

A lack of effective options in local technology poses challenges when onsite household sanitation facilities are eventually filled to capacity in unplanned settlement areas within Mzuzu City, located in northern Malawi. Vacuum trucks currently dominate the market but focus on emptying septic tanks in the more easily accessible planned settlement areas, rather than servicing the pit latrines com...

The relative importance of deterministic and stochastic processes driving patterns of human settlement remains controversial. A main reason for this is that disentangling the drivers of distributions and geographic clustering at different spatial scales is not straightforward and powerful analytical toolboxes able to deal with this type of data are largely deficient. Here we use a multivariate ...

Structured settlement underwriting is the underwriting of medically impaired lives for the purchase of an annuity to fund the settlement. Other than risk assessment, structured settlement (SS) underwriting has little in common with traditional life insurance underwriting. Most noteworthy of these differences is the relative lack of actuarial data on which to base decisions about mortality and t...