Biodiversity is important in maintaining ecosystem viability, and the availability of adequate biodiversity data is a prerequisite for the sustainable management of natural resources. As such, there is a clear need to map biodiversity at high spatial resolutions across large areas. Airborne and spaceborne optical remote sensing is a potential tool to provide such biodiversity data. The spectral...

Vegetation is traditionally regarded as passive, doing nothing but what is essential to grow and survive. Evidence is accumulating, however, in support of formerly esoteric notions that plants can communicate, remember, even count--features that one would call cognitive if they were observed in animals. Michael Gross reports.

This chapter demonstrates that a person’s level of cognitive abilities is a key determinant of financial decisions. Households with high cognitive abilities tend to participate more in the stock market and accumulate more financial wealth than households with low cognitive abilities. Upon participation, portfolio performance improves with experience but it is negatively correlated with age due ...

We investigate the relationship between aging, cognitive abilities and retirement using the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a household panel that offers the possibility of comparing several European countries using nationally representative samples of the population aged 50+. We use a version of the model proposed by Grossman (1972) as a guide for our empirical specif...

We investigate the relationship between ageing, cognitive abilities and retirement using the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a household panel that offers the possibility of comparing several European countries using nationally representative samples of the population aged 50þ . The human capital framework suggests that retirement may cause an increase in cognitive de...

Cognitive performance is characterized by at least two distinct life course trajectories. Many cognitive abilities (e.g., "effortful processing" abilities, including fluid reasoning and processing speed) improve throughout early adolescence and start declining in early adulthood, whereas other abilities (e.g., "crystallized" abilities like vocabulary breadth) improve throughout adult life, rema...

The human ability to echolocate differs between individuals. Blind perform significantly better then sighted. There is very limited research on psychological factors underlying this ability. This study is based on earlier research by Schenkman and Nilsson (2010). The research questions in the present study were whether blind individuals perform better then sighted on general cognitive tasks, if...

OBJECTIVES Including questions about sexual health in the annual Health Survey for England (HSE) provides opportunities for regular measurement of key public health indicators, augmenting Britain's decennial National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal). However, contextual and methodological differences may limit comparability of the findings. We examine the extent of these diffe...

Reflectance retrieval is a key parameter for land cover mapping from hyperspectral imagery. However most of the inverse methods to estimate these reflectances are limited in urban areas with the use of high spatial resolution sensors because they do not take into account the 3D radiative impact of the urban environment. A recent tool, ICARE [1], is able to retrieve surface reflectance in the re...

We examined the hierarchical structure of the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI) as a function of gender and examined the occurrence of gender differences in anxiety sensitivity (AS) dimensions in a large nonclinical sample of children and adolescents (N = 1698). Separate principal components analyses (PCAs) on the 18 CASI items for the total sample, boys, and girls revealed similar low...