Stochastic oil spill models have traditionally focussed on the production of statistics for oil on the sea surface and along shorelines. Environmental risk analyses of potential spills therefore have tended to neglect potential risks to organisms in the water column. StatMap fills this void, supplying in addition statistics on the spatial distribution of hydrocarbon concentrations in the water ...

BACKGROUND Ecological replacement involves the introduction of non-native species to habitats beyond their historical range, a factor identified as increasing the risk of failure for translocations. Yet the effectiveness and success of ecological replacement rely in part on the ability of translocatees to adapt, survive and potentially reproduce in a novel environment. We discuss the welfare as...

The characterisation of the risk of (new) chemicals to species/communities, when both the exposure/environmental concentration and effects (species sensitivity) are variable and uncertain, is the central issue in Probabilistic Environmental Risk Assessment. The spatial variability is one of the largest components of the total variability. This paper tries to explicitly account for this spatial ...

) i t ] is twice the variance of the single interspike intervals [ var( 1 i t   ]. If bursting occurs, successive intervals are no longer independent, and this relation is violated. Thus, the difference between the two variances is a measure for bursting. If we divide this difference by the squared average interspike interval, a normalized burst measure (B) is obtained that is sensitive only ...

Two predictive models were developed within a geographic information system using Genetic Algorithm Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) and the growing degree day (GDD)-water budget (WB) concept to predict the distribution and potential risk of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in the State of Bahia, Brazil. The objective was to define the environmental suitability of the disease as well as to obtain a deeper...

Obesity and physical inactivity are major public health problems in the United States. Campus-Community partnerships have the potential to address the community health and quality of life issues at the local level. The purposes of this study were: (a) to identify groups who are at risk for being overweight and physically inactive; (b) to identify a relationship between broad social ecological l...

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCP) are compounds with special physical and chemical properties that address the care of animal and human health. PPCP have been detected in surface water and wastewater in the ng/L to µg/L concentration range worldwide. PPCP ecotoxicity has been studied in a variety of organisms, and multiple methods have been used to assess the risk of PPCP in the...

The potential for competitive inhibition to limit the growth of microbial pathogens in food raises questions about the external validity of typical predictive microbiology studies and suggests the need to consider microbial community dynamics in food safety risk assessment. Ecological theory indicates, however, that community dynamics are highly complex and may be very sensitive to initial cond...

Acquiring a good seems to increase its value to the owner, as consumers show reluctance to trade away their possessions for similarly valuable money or other goods. The established explanation for this endowment effect is that consumers evaluate potential trades with respect to their current holdings. From this perspective, selling prices exceed buying prices because owners of a good regard its...

In this paper, we consider the problem of the mechanism design for the multi-agents system. We develop the social learning model for the mechanism design for creating the collective action with an efficient cost sharing rule. We consider the situation in which self-interest agents have incentives to cooperate each other for jointly acquiring the environmental level with sharing the necessary co...