To ensure sufficient and balanced supply of rice production, the Council of Agriculture (COA) must monitor any possible change to the land use and cycle for rice productions. Though COA has been carrying out nation-wide rice inventory procedure in every cropping season for more than 20 years, current COA approach still requires a huge amount of works on photo interpretation, field survey, data ...

We combine a recently developed framework for describing dietary generalism with compositional data analysis to examine patterns of omnivory in a large widely distributed mammal. Using the brown bear (Ursus arctos) as a model species, we collected and analyzed data from the literature to estimate the proportions of macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and lipid) in the diets of bear populatio...

AIM To analyze worker burnout and the prevalence of psychiatric illness among primary care physicians, and to determine how burnout is related with sociodemographic and work-related factors. DESIGN Cross-sectional, descriptive study. SETTING Primary care centers in Area 8, Madrid (central Spain).Subjects. All 244 physicians (family medicine and pediatrics) who provided care at centers in Ar...

Effects of climate change on productivity of agricultural crops in relation to diseases that attack them are difficult to predict because they are complex and nonlinear. To investigate these crop-disease-climate interactions, UKCIP02 scenarios predicting UK temperature and rainfall under high- and low-CO(2) emission scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s were combined with a crop-simulation model pr...

Global demands for agricultural and forestry products provide economic incentives for deforestation across the tropics. Much of this deforestation occurs with a lack of information on the spatial distribution of benefits and costs of deforestation. To inform global sustainable land-use policies, we combine geographic information systems (GIS) with a meta-analysis of ecosystem services (ES) stud...

Optimal Immigration Policy: Permanent, Guest-Worker, or Mode IV? Immigration continues to be on the forefront of the policy debate on both sides of the Atlantic. A number of reforms of permanent and guest-worker (GW) immigration programs are being considered, and the temporary movement of service providers under Mode IV (GATS) is being negotiated at the Doha Round of the WTO. This paper contrib...

BACKGROUND Childhood cancer is the main cause of disease-related death in children in Spain. Although little is known about the etiology, environmental factors are potential explanations for a fraction of the cases. Previous studies have shown pesticides to be associated with childhood cancer. The difficulty of collecting personal environmental exposure data is an important limitation; this lac...

Agriculture is known to be a dangerous industry in which to work.1 In fact, in the late 1980s, the National Coalition for Agricultural Safety and Health stated, “America’s most productive work force is being systematically liquidated by an epidemic of occupational disease and traumatic death and injury in the face of diminishing local and Federal resources.”2 Researchers have found agricultural...

A group of 150 persons living in the Lublin province of eastern Poland and occupationally exposed to tick bite were examined by the immunoenzymatic ELISA test for the presence of antibodies against tick-borne Spotted Fever Group (SFG) rickettsiae. The group consisted of 75 forestry workers employed in 3 forest inspectorates and 75 agricultural workers living in 2 villages. As a control group, 4...