In face of a dramatic decline of wild bee species in many rural landscapes, potential conservation functions of urban areas gain importance. Yet effects of urbanization on pollinators, and in particular on wild bees, remain ambiguous and not comprehensively understood. This is especially true for amenity grassland and extensively managed wastelands within large-scale residential housing areas. ...

Rivers are under enormous threat worldwide and large amounts of money invested in river restoration. Contrary to the costs, benefits restoration much harder quantify. In this study, restoring different sections Yongding River Beijing, China, estimated through a discrete choice experiment (DCE). Place attachment is measured by sampling residents upstream downstream using as labelled alternatives...

We simulated fuel reduction treatments on a 16,000 ha study area in Oregon, US, to examine tradeoffs between placing fuel treatments near residential structures within an urban interface, versus treating stands in the adjacent wildlands to meet forest health and ecological restoration goals. The treatment strategies were evaluated by simulating 10,000 wildfires with random ignition locations an...

We compare the restorative effects on cognitive functioning of interactions with natural versus urban environments. Attention restoration theory (ART) provides an analysis of the kinds of environments that lead to improvements in directed-attention abilities. Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention ab...

This paper presents an efficient and reliable Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm for solving Power System Restoration (PSR). The main objective is that after an incident due to electrical failure, power system restoration becomes a complex process involving decision-making problems of combinatory nature that can be formulated as a multi-stage, nonlinear, continuous and binary constrain...