Male orchid bees were collected by chemical baiting in four forest fragments in parks of the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil. One thousand three hundred and twenty-five males belonging to 14 species were captured within one year. The capture data were compared through correlation tests. The data suggest that abundance of orchid bees tend to increase with fragment size,...

We map and analyse the Human Footprint Index at 1 km scale for 1834 terrestrial Nature Reserves of mainland China. There are fewer, larger, more pristine reserves in the colder, drier, less densely-populated pastoral areas of the north and west; and more numerous, smaller, more heavily modified reserves in the warmer, wetter, more densely populated arable agricultural areas of the south and eas...

Socioeconomic and ecological analyses of eleven coral reef conservation efforts make clear that marine protected areas are not the answer, and that in fact support of local communities is far more important than some government mandated 'fishing closure'. Apparently there are marine 'paper parks' just as there are terrestrial 'paper parks'.

After asking participants to propose analogies favoring a zerodeficit policy, Blanchette and Dunbar (2000) obtained a high proportion of base analogs lacking superficial similarities with the target, thus questioning the validity of a long experimental tradition demonstrating their centrality on retrieval. Through the use of culturally shared bases, we overcame two limitations in their study th...

Urban agriculture/community gardening in the Bronx has multiple roles, including health-promoting, economic, environmental, and cultural. These roles are particularly important in light of urban sustainability issues and environmental justice concerns, such as differential access to open space, recreation, and fresh produce in poorer communities and communities of color, as well as differential...

In Spain, voltage regulation in transmission networks is mainly done by controlling the reactive power in conventional generators. In wind energy, an incentive payment related to the reactive power compensation is applied. The maximum value of incentive payment and the objective power factor depend on the period of the day: peak, valley or flat. In this paper, a different behaviour is proposed,...

To provide information on the ecology of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in nature, bacteriological surveillance was performed in the defined area in Hokkaido, Japan. P. aeruginosa was isolated from water samples of Ushubetsu River in the down stream from the urban area of Asahikawa. P. aeruginosa was isolated from fecal samples of pigs but not from samples of soil of a tomato field, sand of sandboxes i...

t a time of ever more constrained finances and increasing demands on state parks, the support of a constituency with a statewide focus on the health and integrity of a park system as a whole can be critical. This paper assesses Missouri’s experience with constituency groups, including, in the past two decades, a citizen organization devoted solely to state parks and historic sites, the Missouri...

BACKGROUND Reliable and comprehensive measurement of physical activity settings is needed to examine environment-behavior relations. METHODS Surveyed park professionals (n = 34) and users (n = 29) identified park and playground elements (e.g., trail) and qualities (e.g., condition). Responses guided observational instrument development for environmental assessment of public recreation spaces ...

The healing power of nature, vis medicatrix naturae, has traditionally been defined as an internal healing response designed to restore health. Almost a century ago, famed biologist Sir John Arthur Thomson provided an additional interpretation of the word nature within the context of vis medicatrix, defining it instead as the natural, non-built external environment. He maintained that the heali...