Protected areas (including areas that are nominally fully protected and those managed for multiple uses) encompass about a quarter of the total tropical forest estate. Despite growing interest in the relative value of community-managed lands and protected areas, knowledge about the biodiversity value that each sustains remains scarce in the biodiversity-rich tropics. We investigated the species...

Groundwater is connected to the landscape above and is thus affected by the overlaying land uses. This study evaluated the impacts of land uses upon groundwater quality using trilinear analysis. Trilinear analysis is a display of experimental data in a triangular graph. Groundwater quality data collected from agricultural, septic tank, forest, and wastewater land uses for a 6-year period were u...

ai = time aircraft i lands after the preferred landing time Pi (i 1; . . . ; N) bi = time aircraft i lands before the preferred landing time Pi (i 1; . . . ; N) C = cost coefficient vector defined in the linear programming problem Ei = earliest landing time for aircraft i (i 1; . . . ; N) fi = penalty cost per unit of time if aircraft i lands before the preferred landing time Pi (i 1; . . . ; N...

Wide-ranging species cannot persist in reserves alone. Consequently, there is growing interest in the conservation value of agricultural lands that separate or buffer natural areas. The value of agricultural lands for wildlife habitat and connectivity varies as a function of the crop type and landscape context, and quantifying these differences will improve our ability to manage these lands mor...

Urbanization is developing unprecedentedly on a global scale. One of the chief repercussions of urbanization, caused by man-made alterations in land-use/land-cover (LULC), is the formation of urban heat islands. Albeit, differences among landscape structures and its accompanied effects on the environment are mostly neglected. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to survey the variou...

The proposals have also drawn anger from the energy industry. Kathleen Sgamma, a director of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents 400 oil and natural-gas companies, said the new policy could block some promising lands from drilling. “They’re treating lands arbitrarily as de facto wildernesses,” she said. And Dean Heller, a Republican representative from Nevada, said: “The message of th...