Protected Areas (PAs) are a main conservation tool to halt biodiversity loss. However, their performance has been often questioned and the need to improve their effectiveness is now more apparent than ever. Here, we propose Roadless Areas as a conservation target to increase the cover and effectiveness of PAs. Roadless Areas represent natural and semi-natural areas of high conservation value th...

Europe has the world's most extensive network of conservation areas. Conservation areas are selected without taking into account the effects of climate change. How effectively would such areas conserve biodiversity under climate change? We assess the effectiveness of protected areas and the Natura 2000 network in conserving a large proportion of European plant and terrestrial vertebrate species...

Routing is essential to a network. Routing scalability is essential to a large network. When routing does not scale, there is a direct impact on the stability and performance of a network. Therefore, routing scalability is an important issue, especially for a large network. This document identifies major factors affecting routing scalability as well as basic principles of designing scalable rou...

In recent decades artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown great ability in modeling and forecasting non-linear and non-stationary time series and in most of the cases especially in prediction of phenomena have showed very good performance. This paper presents the application of artificial neural networks to predict drought in Yazd meteorological station. In this research, different archite...