We present several models of residential development at the rural–urban fringe to evaluate the effectiveness of a greenbelt located beside a developed area, for delaying development outside the greenbelt. First, we develop a mathematical model, under two assumptions about the distributions of service centers, that represents the trade-off between greenbelt placement and width, their effects on ...

Landscape-scale population genetic structure in vagile vertebrates was commonly considered to be a contradiction in terms whereas recent studies have demonstrated behaviour and habitat associated structure in several such species. We investigate whether landscape features influence morphological and genetic differentiation in a widespread, mobile raptor. To accurately describe genetic different...

In order to evaluate the landscape and its agrarian components in the low mountainous region of the Alpujarras in Southeastern Spain, Conjoint Analysis (C.A.) was used, and both ranking and rating approaches were considered as a way of assessing preferences. Data was obtained from a preference test carried out with a sample survey of 165 visitors to the area. Three main landscape components wer...

The loss of biological diversity is a major environmental problem occurring on a global scale. Human-environment researchers have an important role in shaping policy and programs at a local, national and international level. This paper explores human preference for landscapes relative to ecological quality and assesses the relationship between these preferences and land management behavior. A s...

In this paper we present results of an agent-based model of foraging of hominids. The model represents foraging activities in a landscape that is based on detailed measurements of food availability in the modern East African environments. These current landscapes are used as a model for the environment of the hominids one million years ago. We use the model to explore possible rankings of food ...

Genome-wide binding preferences of the key components of eukaryotic preinitiation complex (PIC) have been recently measured at high resolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Rhee and Pugh. However, the rules determining the PIC binding specificity remain poorly understood. In this study, we show that nonconsensus protein-DNA binding significantly influences PIC binding preferences. We estimate ...

In the wake of urbanisation processes and the constitution of metropolitan regions, the role of the city's rural surroundings is receiving more attention from researchers and planners as rural areas offer various (cultural) ecosystem services for the urban population. Urban dwellers increasingly desire recreation and landscape experience. Although this need for recreation is generally recognize...

Managers in southern Africa are concerned that continually increasing elephant populations will degrade ecosystems. Culling, translocation and birth control are flawed solutions. An alternative is providing elephants more space but this hinges on identifying landscape preferences. We examined two diverse ecosystems and uncovered similarities in elephant habitat use, expressing these as ‘rules’....

We present and evaluate an agent based model (ABM) of land use change at the rural-urban fringe, comparing its performance to a mathematical model of the same process. Our simplified model was developed in Swarm using agents with heterogeneous preferences and a landscape with heterogeneous properties. The context of this work is a larger project that includes surveys of the preferences of resid...

This work incorporates Selectional Preferences (SP) into a Semantic Role (SR) Classification system. We learn separate selectional preferences for noun phrases and prepositional phrases and we integrate them in a state-of-the-art SR classification system both in the form of features and individual class predictors. We show that the inclusion of the refined SPs yields statistically significant i...