The reed Phragmites australis Cav. is aggressively invading salt marshes along the Atlantic Coast of North America. We examined the interactive role of habitat alteration (i.e., shoreline development) in driving this invasion and its consequences for plant richness in New England salt marshes. We surveyed 22 salt marshes in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, and quantified shoreline development, P...

Coastal development has severely affected habitats and biodiversity during the last century, but quantitative estimates of the impacts are usually lacking. We utilize predictive habitat modeling and mapping of human pressures to estimate the cumulative long-term effects of coastal development in relation to fish habitats. Based on aerial photographs since the 1960s, shoreline development rates ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the direct costs of treating asthma in Kuwait. MATERIALS AND METHODS Population figures were obtained from the 2005 census and projected to 2008. Treatment profiles were obtained from the Asthma Insights and Reality for the Gulf and Near East (AIRGNE) study. Asthma prevalence and unit cost estimates were based on results from a Delphi technique. These estimates were appl...

The Kuwaiti oil wells set on fire by retreating Iraqi troops at the end of the Persian Gulf War released complex particles, inorganic and organic gases, and hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, damaging the environment where many people live and work. In this study, we assessed the health effects of particles from the Kuwaiti oil fires by instilling hamsters intratracheally with particles (<3.5 mi...

In recent years, support vector machine (SVM) has been widely applied in remote sensing image classification, since its experience can also minimize errors and maximize the geometric characteristics of the edge area. In this article SVM classification algorithm will be introduced the remote sensing extraction coastline. Fujian Province Landsat7 ETM + image will be a test region to be classified...

[1] Measurements of Eulerian flow velocity obtained within the swash zone on a relatively steep beach face (gradient 1:23) are compared with an extended ballistic swash model. The model only requires a friction factor, beach slope and terminal bore velocity as input. The following model predictions matched well with observations: (1) The maximum Eulerian flow velocity is the shoreline velocity ...

Shoreline stability is an important issue along much of the Mediterranean’s Coasts. European project MEDDOOC INTERREG BEACHMED-e focused on the strategic management of beach protection for the sustainable development of the Mediterranean coastal zone. In the framework of this project, a video system has been installed in Valras (Gulf of Lions / France) to monitor coastal evolutions and recent p...

This paper presents a semi-automated approach to detecting coastal shoreline change with high spatialand temporal-resolution using X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The method was applied at the Sand Motor, a “mega-scale” beach nourishment project in the Netherlands. Natural processes, like waves, wind, and tides, gradually distribute the highly concentrated sand to adjacent beaches. ...

The role interethnic genetic differences play in plasma lipid level variation across populations is a global health concern. Several genes involved in lipid metabolism and transport are strong candidates for the genetic association with lipid level variation especially lipoprotein lipase (LPL). The objective of this study was to re-sequence the full LPL gene in Kuwaiti Arabs, analyse the sequen...