In this issue, Robinson’s highly influential paper is reprinted, along with a paper advocating the use of multi-level thinking by Subramanian et al., and commentaries by Oakes and Firebaugh. On re-reading Robinson’s paper, I was again struck by the clarity of the basic take-home message: ecological data can estimate individual associations in only very rare situations. Robinson illustrated the ...

The ecologic study design is routinely used by epidemiologists in spite of its limitations. It is presently unknown how well the challenges of the design are dealt with in epidemiologic research. The purpose of this bibliometric review was to critically evaluate the characteristics, statistical methods, and reporting of results of modern cross-sectional ecologic papers. A search through 6 major...

BACKGROUND Owing to the emergence of some challenges in the demographic structure of many countries and possible decrease in young human workforce in the future decades, the reduction in the fertility rate has become a major public concern. This study aimed to investigate the effects of climatic factors on fertility. AIM In this correlational study conducted during 2005-2009, the relationship...

Water in the XXI century has become the primary factor for sustainable development, eradication of poverty and reversal of ecosystem degradation. Increasing water demand for agriculture and urbanisation, combined with pollution, eutrophication and amplification of the stochastic character of climatic processes, increases water limitations for ecosystems and societies. The transdisciplinary scie...

We introduce a symbolic representation like set theory to consider ecologic interactions between species (ECOSET). The ecologic exclusion principle (Gause) is put in a symbolic way and used as operational tool to consider more complex cases like interaction with sterile species (SIT technique), two species with two superposed sources (niche differentiation) and N+P species competing by N resour...

We used ecologic niche modeling of outbreaks and sporadic cases of filovirus-associated hemorrhagic fever (HF) to provide a large-scale perspective on the geographic and ecologic distributions of Ebola and Marburg viruses. We predicted that filovirus would occur across the Afrotropics: Ebola HF in the humid rain forests of central and western Africa, and Marburg HF in the drier and more open ar...

Supply chain management is an area which gains much attention both from scholars and practitioners when considering the relationship between economic and ecologic issues and goals. Initiatives from Green IT and Green IS are widely discussed and broad supply chain management concepts like Green SCM, which extends the concept of global supply chain management with ecological aspects like resource...