Abandoned oil and gas wells provide a potential pathway for subsurface migration and emissions of methane and other fluids to the atmosphere. Little is known about methane fluxes from the millions of abandoned wells that exist in the United States. Here, we report direct measurements of methane fluxes from abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, using static flux chambers. A total of 42 an...

Programs should create and enforce written policies on the designation, retention, and disposal of abandoned embryos. In the absence of program-specific policies, it is ethically acceptable for a program or facility to consider embryos to have been abandoned if at least 5 years have passed since contact with an individual or couple, diligent efforts have been made to contact the individual or c...

The matter of ‘abandoned embryos’ arises when surplus IVF embryos are frozen and stored for later use. If the fertility clinic or storage facility in question does not have clear direction about what to do with these embryos, and/or payment for storage ceases, and/or the embryo providers cannot be reached, the embryos raise an ethical and practical challenge. On the one hand, there is a commitm...

As an alternative to the tracking-based approaches that heavily depend on accurate detection of moving objects, which often fail for crowded scenarios, we present a pixelwise method that employs dual foregrounds to extract temporally static image regions. Depending on the application, these regions indicate objects that do not constitute the original background but were brought into the scene a...

Abandonment of agricultural land is a global issue and a waste of resources and brings a negative impact on the local economy. It is also one of the key contributing factors in certain environmental problems, such as soil erosion and carbon sequestration. In order to address such problems related to land abandonment, their spatial distribution must first be precisely identified. Hence, this stu...

Colonization of abandoned lands by woody vegetation may be a great opportunity for ecosystem recovery given the current and future trend of land abandonment. This may help to reverse the generalized condition of ecosystem degradation of developed countries which is an urgent need. However, ecosystem recovery in abandoned lands can be seriously limited by biotic and abiotic factors. Indentify su...

We describe a single-camera system capable of detecting abandoned packages under severe occlusions, which leads to complications on several levels. The first arises when frames containing only background pixels are unavailable for initializing the background model a problem for which we apply a novel discriminative measure. The proposed measure is essentially the probability of observing a part...