Rift Valley fever (RVF) virus is a mosquito-borne phlebovirus of the Bunyaviridae family that causes frequent outbreaks of severe animal and human disease in sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Based on its many known competent vectors, its potential for transmission via aerosolization, and its progressive spread from East Africa to neighbouring regions, RVF is considered a hig...

The notion of sustainability is widely used from micro to macro scale studies but only few approaches deal with its measurement. Increased global interest in sustainability has triggered attention in indicators as a means of achieving a more sustainable world. Although the search for indicators has led to the development of criteria for good indicators, it has also been dominated by scientific ...

Genetic evaluation and core collection construction of crape myrtle accessions using 1 newly developed EST-SSR markers 2 Yuanjun Ye, Lu Feng, Yiqian Ju, Ming Cai, Tangren Cheng, Jia Wang, Qixiang Zhang, 3 Huitang Pan 4 Beijing Key Laboratory of Ornamental Plants Germplasm Innovation & Molecular 5 Breeding, National Engineering Research Center for Floriculture, Beijing Laboratory of 6 Urban and ...

Ecological security is an important research topic, especially urban ecological security. As highly populated eco-systems, cities always have more fragile ecological environments. However, most of the research on urban ecological security in literature has focused on evaluating current or past status of the ecological environment. Very little literature has carried out simulation or prediction ...

Landscape ecology offers a spatially explicit perspective on the relationships between ecological patterns and processes that can be applied across a range of scales. Concepts derived from landscape ecology now permeate ecological research across most levels of ecological organization and many scales. Landscape ecology developed rapidly after ideas that originated in Europe were introduced to s...

The landscape pattern of Daqing City, China has undergone a significant change during the last two decades as a result of rapid urbanization. A quantitative analysis describing the spatial fragmentation caused by urban sprawl from satellite images was presented on three dates: 1979, 1990, and 2000. Five landscape indices with supplementary ecological meanings were chosen to facilitate our exami...

Virtual geographic environments (VGE) are environments pertaining to the relationship between post-humans and 3-D virtual worlds. Post-humans are defined as a combination of humans in the real world with 3-D avatars in 3-D virtual worlds. VGE can be a platform for the public participation in spatial data analyses, in model computation and simulation, and in environmental planning and decision m...

Very high resolution satellite images are used to derive the spatial distributions of landscape ecological metrics within suburban areas. These indicators are weighted mean patch size and lacunarity computed from thresholded normalized difference vegetation index obtained from multispectral IKONOS-2 imagery. Spatial distributions of the metrics are derived for an extensive suburban area on the ...

Describing and quantifying the spatial heterogeneity of land cover in urban systems is crucial for developing an ecological understanding of cities. This paper presents a new approach to quantifying the fine-scale heterogeneity in urban landscapes that capitalizes on the strengths of two commonly used approaches—visual interpretation and object-based image analysis. This new approach integrates...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America H have been transforming the environment to support production and cultural functions for thousands of years, yet until recently, most ecologists had not been involved in the design of these intensively managed landscapes. The publication of Ian McHarg’s Design with nature in 1969 challenged landscape designers to provide an ecologi...