The effects of substrate geomorphic surface and physical vernal pool dimensions on plant species richness and composition, and large branchiopod occurrences were investigated for 814 vernal pools at Beale Air Force Base, Yuba County, California. Vernal pools mostly occurred on four geomorphic surfaces: the Mehrten, Laguna, Riverbank, and Modesto Formations. Plant species richness was positively...

In this commentary, we establish a relationship between medical sociology and the study of medical tourism and cross-border healthcare by introducing Ronald Andersen's behavioral model of healthcare use, and linking this model to the recent empirical study of Kovacs et al. on patients travelling to Hungary for orthopedic treatment. Finally, we plead for more measurement in the field of patient ...

Medical tourism in Ireland, like in many Western states, is built around assumptions about individual agency, choice, possibility, and mobility. One specific form of medical tourism—the flow of women from Ireland traveling in order to secure an abortion—disrupts and contradicts these assumptions. One legacy of the bitter, contentious political and legal battles surrounding abortion in Ireland i...

Mathematical models of geomorphic processes can have value as both predictive tools and precise conceptual frameworks. Well-posed mechanistic models have great conceptual value because they link geomorphic processes to universal scientific principles, such as conservation of energy, momentum, and mass. Models without this linkage (e.g., models based exclusively on cellular rules or empirical co...

The tourism footprint family comprises the tourism ecological footprint (TEF), the tourism carbon footprint (TCF) and the tourism water footprint (TWF). The tourism footprint represents an important tool for quantitatively assessing the impact of tourism activities on the ecosystem of a tourist destination. This paper systematically reviews the relevant literature on TEF, TCF and TWF, analyses ...

Two of the geomorphic Laws of Drainage Net Composition are discussed and it is shown that they are essentially abstract mathematical relationships that hold for any bifurcating system. Some of the geomorphic factors that determine the value of the characteristic coefficients that are obtained by application of the Laws to single nets are also discussed.

Following the identification of medical tourism as a growth sector by the Malaysian government in 1998, significant government sector and private-sector investments have been channeled into its development over the past 15 years. This is unfolding within the broader context of social services being devolved to for-profit enterprises and 'market-capable' segments of society becoming sites of int...

Infectious disease threat events (IDTEs) are increasing in frequency worldwide. We analyzed underlying drivers of 116 IDTEs detected in Europe during 2008-2013 by epidemic intelligence at the European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control. Seventeen drivers were identified and categorized into 3 groups: globalization and environment, sociodemographic, and public health systems. A combination...

China tourism industry is investing to develop a “Golden Tourism Project”. One of the main objectives of this project is to improve web-based tourism online service quality and implement tourism e-commerce. In order to develop successfully the project it is necessary to investigate who are main tourism website users, what are their requirements for online tourism services and how do they assess...

“Urbanization” encompasses a diverse array of watershed alterations that influence the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of streams. In this chapter, we summarize lessons learned from the last half century of research on urban streams and provide a critique of various mitigation strategies, including recent approaches that explicitly address geomorphic processes. We focus first...