Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is increasingly being used to enhance the accuracy of biomass estimates in tropical forests. Although the technological development of ALS instruments has resulted in ever-greater pulse densities, studies in boreal and sub-boreal forests have shown consistent results even at relatively small pulse densities. The objective of the present study was to assess the effe...

Introduction Article level metrics are usually the preferred choice for research evaluation. However, for recent articles they may be integrated or substituted considering some measure of journal impact (Abramo et al., 2012). The use of journal level metrics is also often considered as particularly appealing for administrative purposes, because of their readily availability, easiness to use and...

Measuring high level quality attributes of operation-critical IT systems is essential for keeping the maintainability costs under control. International standards and recommendations, like ISO/IEC 9126, give some guidelines regarding the different quality characteristics to be assessed, however, they do not define unambiguously their relationship to the low level quality attributes. The vast ma...

The commonly used validation metrics for the local agreement of a structure model with the observed electron density, namely the real-space R (RSR) and the real-space correlation coefficient (RSCC), are reviewed. It is argued that the primary goal of all validation techniques is to verify the accuracy of the model, since precision is an inherent property of the crystal and the data. It is demon...

Forest fires have profound impacts on the spatial distribution of vegetation type and density. This research analyzes the impacts of the 2002 Ponil Fire in New Mexico on landscape patterns using a moving-window analysis of landscape metrics. Categorically derived landscape metrics and a measure of fire severity—the Normalized Burn Ratio—are used to produce a quantitative, spatial distribution o...

BACKGROUND Exposure to air pollution is frequently associated with reductions in birth weight but results of available studies vary widely, possibly in part because of differences in air pollution metrics. Further insight is needed to identify the air pollution metrics most strongly and consistently associated with birth weight. METHODS We used a hospital-based obstetric database of more than...