Isla del Caño is a marine protected area on the south Pacific coast of Costa Rica, surrounded by coral reefs and coral communities. The ecology of these coral reefs has been studied for over 20 years, but they have not been mapped. Maps are considered a great research, planning, management and monitoring tool. Medium to high resolution images (HyMap 2005 and Quickbird 2007 respectively) were pr...

There is an increasing demand for tools which support the land use planning process and one of the most complex tasks of this process is the design of a land use zoning map. With this aim an algorithm based on simulated annealing has been designed to optimize the delimitation of land use categories according to suitability and compactness criteria. The high number of plots involved in a land us...

The risk of rainstorm disaster is expected to increase with rising disaster losses as a consequence. Besides the uncertainty of frequency and severity of rainfalls, it can also be attributed to the expansion of settlement and industrial areas and the resulting accumulation of population and assets. Therefore, it’s important to both analyze historical precipitation and estimate land use conditio...

China is facing ecological and environmental challenges as its urban growth rate continues to rise, and zoning protected ecological areas is recognized as an effective response measure. Zoning inherently involves both site attributes and aggregation attributes, and the combination of mathematical models and heuristic algorithms have proven advantageous. In this article, an improved artificial b...

Rayleigh distillation models are developed to describe theoretical growth zoning of Lu, Hf, Rb, Sr, Sm, and Nd in typical garnet crystals from metapelites and metabasites. Effects of diffusion-limited transport within the matrix and intracrystalline diffusion are also considered qualitatively. Theoretical zoning profiles show strong depletions of Lu in garnet rims compared to cores, but virtual...

Parks and protected area managers use zoning to decrease interpersonal conflict between recreationists. Zoning, or segregation, of recreation-often by non-motorized and motorized activity-is designed to limit physical interaction while providing recreation opportunities to both groups. This article investigated the effectiveness of zoning to reduce recreation conflict in the Vail Pass Winter Re...

Many small-scale private forest owners increasingly focus their management on amenity functions rather than on wood production functions. This paradigm shift is an opportunity to implement novel forestry management approaches, such as forested land zoning. Forest zoning consists in separating the land base in three zones that have different management objectives: (1) conservation zones; (2) eco...

Optimal zoning of protected natural areas is important for conserving ecosystems. It is an NP-hard problem which is difficult to solve by using common geographic information system (GIS) functions. Another problem is that existing optimization methods ignore potential land-use dynamics in formulating optimal patterns. This article has developed a new method for solving complicated zoning proble...

Zircon and monazite from granitic sheets and dikes in the Monashee complex, Canadian Cordillera, were investigated to determine whether igneous crystallization occurred at 1.9 Ga or 50 Ma with 1.9 Ga inherited zircon and monazite. Four of the five samples are weakly deformed to undeformed, despite occurring in a gneiss dome at the structurally deepest exposed level of the orogen that elsewhere ...