The US dairy sector is facing structural changes including a geographical shift in dairy production and a tendency toward the implementation of more intensive production systems. These changes might significantly affect farm efficiency, profitability, and the long-term economic sustainability of the dairy sector, especially in more traditional dairy production areas. Consequently, the goal of t...

Management practices can disturb ecological communities in grazing lands, which represent one-quarter of land surface. But three knowledge gaps exist regarding disturbances: disturbances potentially interact but are most often studied singly; experiments with multiple ecosystems as treatment units are rare; and relatively new metrics of phylogenetic community structure have not been widely appl...

Development of affordable and low carbon biobased manufacturing depends critically on strategies that reduce cost emission profiles. This paper indicates efforts around the reduction capital costs by intensification process equipment need to be carefully weighed against inherently fast increasing financial climate driving forces used for intensification. The fundamental relation between expendi...

Subsistence intensification – the extraction of increased amounts of energy from a given area at the expense of foraging efficiency – figures prominently in discussions of the Epipaleolithic period (ca. 21,000–11,500 cal bp). Despite their paramount status, intensification trends are not often subjected to rigorous testing using multiple archaeological data sets. This study aims to fill this ga...

BACKGROUND Regular recertification is mandatory to maintain board certification status in all specialties. However, the evidence that physicians' performance decreases with time since initial certification is limited. We therefore carried out a study to determine whether the frequency of antihypertensive treatment intensification for diabetic patients changes with time since their physicians' l...

Understanding growth patterns at the metropolitan level is instructive for better planning and policy making on sustainable urban development. Using DMSP/OLS data from 1992 to 2013, this article aims to investigate growth patterns of major metropolitans in Mainland China from the aspects of intensification and expansion. We start by calibrating the DMSP/OLS data and selecting 45 major metropoli...

Declines in economic activity and associated changes in human livelihood strategies can increase threats of species overexploitation. This is exemplified by the effects of economic crises, which often drive intensification of subsistence poaching and greater reliance on natural resources. Whereas development theory links natural resource use to social-economic conditions, few empirical studies ...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that the projected massive global increase in demand for livestock products will continue for several decades. According to Delgado et al. (1999), it is appropriate to term the course of these events a " Livestock Revolution, " which, as opposed to the Green Revolution, is driven by demand. While more precise production techno...

BACKGROUND Hypertension is widely prevalent yet remains uncontrolled in nearly half of US hypertensive adults. Treatment intensification for hypertension reduces rates of major cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality, but clinical inertia remains a notable impediment to further improving hypertension control. This study examines the likelihood and determinants of treatment intensification...

BACKGROUND To describe common type 2 diabetes treatment intensification regimens, patients' characteristics and changes in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and body mass index (BMI). METHODS We constructed a national retrospective cohort of veterans initially treated for diabetes with either metformin or sulfonylurea from 2001 through 2008, using Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Medicare d...