BACKGROUND Melioidosis is a frequently fatal infectious disease caused by the soil dwelling Gram-negative bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. Environmental sampling is important to identify geographical distribution of the organism and related risk of infection to humans and livestock. The aim of this study was to evaluate spatial distribution of B. pseudomallei in soil and consider the implic...

Introduction This paper addresses a central debate in research and policy on population and environment, namely the extent to which rapid population growth is associated with the massive deforestation currently underway in the tropics. Although temporal and spatial associations strongly suggest a connection between population growth and deforestation (Preston, 1994), some research indicates tha...

Indigenous participation in land-based practices such as hunting, fishing, ceremony, and land care has a long history. In recent years, researchers and policy makers have advocated the benefits of these practices for both Indigenous people and the places they live. However, there have also been documented risks associated with participation in these activities. Environmental change brought abou...

Introduction This paper addresses a central debate in research and policy on population and environment, namely the extent to which rapid population growth is associated with the massive deforestation currently underway in the tropics. Although temporal and spatial associations strongly suggest a connection between population growth and deforestation (Preston, 1994), some research indicates tha...

Reconstructing deep time trends in biodiversity remains a central goal for palaeobiologists, but our understanding of the magnitude and tempo of extinctions and radiations is confounded by uneven sampling of the fossil record. In particular, the Jurassic/Cretaceous (J/K) boundary, 145 million years ago, remains poorly understood, despite an apparent minor extinction and the radiation of numerou...

This study assessed knowledge of health inequities, importance and benefits/barriers of addressing inequities, and ways of communicating information about inequities among municipal officials. Five focus groups (N=47) were conducted with officials from economic development, land use and housing, public safety, education, and environment departments. Discussions were recorded, transcribed and an...

In recent years, geotagged social media has become popular as a novel source for geographic knowledge discovery. Ground-level images and videos provide a different perspective than overhead imagery and can be applied to a range of applications such as land use mapping, activity detection, pollution mapping, etc. The sparse and uneven distribution of this data presents a problem, however, for ge...

• Increasing tree cover on agricultural land is a way to enhance ecosystem services. The benefits, costs and effects beneficiaries of increasing uneven. Land-sparing can increase regulating benefits but reduces provisioning benefits. Land-sharing maintain recognised as potential mechanism In this case study, we assessed mapped the impacts services dis-services different land-sparing land-sharin...

Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is ‘properly valued’ in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: ...

Landing control is one of the important issues for biped walking robot, because robots are expected to walk on not only known flat surfaces but also unknown and uneven terrain for working at various fields. This paper presents a new controller design for a robotic foot to land on unknown terrain. The robotic foot considered in this study equips springs to reduce the impact force at the foot lan...