Governments worldwide are recognising ecosystem services as an approach to address sustainability challenges. Decision-makers need credible and legitimate measurements of ecosystem services to evaluate decisions for trade-offs to make wise choices. Managers lack these measurements because of a data gap linking ecosystem characteristics to final ecosystem services. The dominant method to address...

The main goal of this study was to quantify within and between field variability in mapping agricultural crop types, their biophysical characteristics, and yield for precision farming applications using near-real-time and historical (archival) Landsat TM images. Data for 6 crops (wheat, barley, chickpea, lentil, vetch, and cumin) were gathered from a representative benchmark study area in the s...

Finger millet ( Eleusine coracana Gaertn L.) is an important grain crop for small farmers in many countries. Reliable estimates of parameters, such as growth and nitrogen (N) content, through remote sensing techniques can improve in-season management finger millet. This study investigated the relationships hyperspectral reflectance with canopy height, green cover, leaf area index (LAI), N conce...

The complex structure of human skin and its physicochemical properties turn it into an efficient outermost defence line against exogenous factors, and help maintain homeostasis of the human body. This role is played by the epidermal barrier with its major part - stratum corneum. The condition of the epidermal barrier depends on individual and environmental factors. The most important biophysica...

Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to clothing and equipment designed to protect individuals from chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards. The materials used to provide this protection may exacerbate thermal strain by limiting heat and water vapor transfer. Any new PPE must therefore be evaluated to ensure that it poses no greater thermal strain than the curre...

The challenge in studying the surface architecture of different microbial pathogens is to integrate the most current biochemical, spectroscopic, microscopic, and processing techniques. Individually these methods have insufficient sensitivity to reveal complex structures, such as branched, large, viscous polymers with a high structure hydration, size, and complexity. However, when used in combin...

Dams have been a fundamental part of the U.S. national agenda over the past two hundred years. Recently, however, dam removal has emerged as a strategy for addressing aging, obsolete infrastructure and more than 1,100 dams have been removed since the 1970s. However, only 130 of these removals had any ecological or geomorphic assessments, and fewer than half of those included before- and after-r...