The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and park boundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being proposed and implemented to protect both forest resources and livelihoods. Developing a spatially-explic...

Motivated by recent developments in wireless communication, this thesis aims to characterize the secrecy performance in several types of typical wireless networks. Advanced techniques are designed and evaluated to enhance physical layer security in these networks with realistic assumptions, such as signal propagation loss, random node distribution and non-instantaneous channel state information...

We use cryptographic techniques to study zone enumeration in DNSSEC. DNSSEC is designed to prevent attackers from tampering with domain name system (DNS) messages. The cryptographic machinery used in DNSSEC, however, also creates a new vulnerability, zone enumeration, enabling an adversary to use a small number of online DNSSEC queries combined with offline dictionary attacks to learn which dom...

Marine reserves (or No-Take Zones) are implemented to protect species and habitats, with the aim of restoring a balanced ecosystem. Although the benefits of marine reserves are commonly monitored, there is a lack of insight into the potential detriments of such highly protected waters. High population densities attained within reserves may induce negative impacts such as unfavourable trophic ca...

Protected areas due to their long-term protection are expected to be characterized by good water quality. However, in catchments where arable fields dominate, the impact of agriculture on water pollution is still problematic. In Poland, recently, the fertilization level has decreased, mostly for economic reasons. However, this applies primarily to phosphorus and potassium. In order to evaluate ...

We calculated the mean Human Footprint (HF) for 196,498 polygons representing state and federally administrated ”protected areas” (e.g., National Forests, National Parks, State and Provincial Parks, etc.) of Canada, Mexico, and the Continental United States. Separate sets of calculations were made for (1) the area in each protected area which ranged in size from less than one to over 11 million...