Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is a fatal disease in Asia. Pigs are considered to be the effective amplifying host for JEV in the peridomestic environment. Bali Island and Java Island in Indonesia provide a model to assess the effect of pigs on JEV transmission, since the pig density is nearly 100-fold higher in Bali than Java, while the geographic and climatologic environments are equivalen...

Water managers are tasked with resolving conflicts between freshwater resource uses, which range from municipal water supply, to recreation, and to sustaining aquatic ecosystem integrity. Further complicating management, hydrologic processes experience numerous sources of periodic, quasi-periodic, and episodic variation. Water allocation trade offs are often most complex and contentious when av...

Interdisciplinary research efforts to integrate the ecological aspects of water with its physical and societal roles have a long history as well as some interesting new developments. Small, paired, experimental watersheds, with their long-term monitoring systems for data collection and their integrated ecosystem approach to analysis, have been at the center of recent advances. A study now under...

The meningeal worm (Parelaphostrongylus tenuis) is a nematode parasite that commonly infects white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus; WTD) throughout the deciduous forest biome and deciduous-coniferous ecotone of eastern and central North America; the species is not known to occur west of the grassland biome of central North America. We used county-specific prevalence data to evaluate potenti...

This study investigated the dynamics of cyanobacteria in two deep, eutrophic reservoirs in a semi-arid region of Brazil during periods of stratification and destratification. Four collections were carried out at each reservoir at two depths at three-month intervals. The following abiotic variables were analyzed: water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, water transparency, total phosp...

Recent studies have demonstrated that surface wetness can be inferred when thermal infrared measurements are coupled with a spectral vegetation index (VI) that is linearly related to percentage vegetation cover. Even though it has later been shown that a proper interpretation of this relationship requires additional information of soil evaporation and the fractional vegetation cover, the ‘tempe...

BACKGROUND The effect of ambient temperature on cardiovascular disease has previously been studied. Less known are the effects of climate on blood pressure (BP) regulation, specifically, the role of temperature on BP variability. METHODS We investigated the effect of temperature and barometric pressure on ambulatory BP variability in 333 men and women with above-optimal BP or stage 1 hyperten...

Mapping and anticipating risk is a major issue in the fight against malaria, a disease causing an estimated one million deaths each year. Approximately half the world's population is at risk and it is of prime importance to evaluate the burden of malaria at the spatial as well as the temporal level. The role of the environment with regard to the determinants of transmission and burden of the di...

The properties of seasonal snow and near surface polar firn can be measured using radars operating at the microwave frequencies. These frequencies offer an optimal combination of bandwidth and penetration required for snow studies. Because the velocity of microwave signals in dry snow and firn is primarily controlled by density, wave travel times can be converted to snow depth, snow water equiv...