Over the past two decades there has been increasing interest in developing indicators to monitor environmental change. Remote sensing techniques have been primarily used to generate information on land use/land cover changes. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has used this technology to monitor wetland trends and recently developed a set of remotely-sensed indicators to characterize and assess t...

The challenges of managing natural resources of protected areas not only come from the inside of the protected boundaries, but also from the surrounding territories because most of protected lands are open systems that face threats from adjacent areas. The lands of such open systems alter water quality and flow regimes, increase the likelihood of invasive plant and animal range expansions, redu...

Benthic macroinvertebrates were collected from streams located in an urban area from regions featuring different environmental conditions. Physicochemical variables and land use types pertaining to sampling sites were analyzed concurrently. Multivariate analyses (cluster analysis and non-metric multidimensional scaling) and rank-abundance diagrams were used to characterize community patterns to...

We examined the influence of land use/land cover (LULC) on macroinvertebrate assemblages and environmental conditions in streams draining 18 small watersheds in the Southern Outer Piedmont ecoregion in Georgia, USA, over a 24-mo period of record. Specifically, we analyzed relationships among LULC categories (i.e., % impervious surface [IS], pasture, silviculture, and deciduous/evergreen forest)...

Recently, many publications have explored the utility of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote-sensed imagery to approximate the regional causes of water pollution (Basnyat 1999; Basnyat 2000; Griffith 2002). In such studies, water pollution data is placed in a geographic context to see what generalizations can be made about the impact of regional land use practices on water quality. ...

The Passage mechanism introduced in this paper provides an easy and intuitive way to transport various types of digital objects by using also normal physical objects without any special identification tags. The current implementation of the Passage mechanism utilizes electronic scales and contact-free identification devices and thus allows for identification of arbitrary physical objects as wel...

There is growing interest in sustainability, sustainable development, and sustainable transportation. This paper identifies issues related to the definition, evaluation and implementation of sustainable transportation. Significant issues include the range of definitions of sustainability, the range of issues considered under sustainability, the range of perspectives, criticism of sustainability...

Cadastre is the essential land register and the basis for many services in the area of land administration and land management. Although European parcel based cadastral system is used in many countries, differences in business processes between countries exist. Through a long period of time these differences have been adapting to development of technology, legislation and other conditions withi...

Land plants and other photosynthetic organisms (algae, bacteria) use the beneficial effect of sunlight as a source of energy for the photosynthesis and as a major source of information from the environment. However, the ultraviolet component of sunlight also produces several types of damage, which can affect cellular and integrity, interfering with growth and development. In order to reduce the...