Water resources play a vital role in ecosystem stability, human survival, and social development in drylands. Human activities, such as afforestation and irrigation, have had a large impact on the water cycle and vegetation in drylands over recent years. The Badain Jaran Desert (BJD) is one of the driest regions in China with increasing human activities, yet the connection between human managem...

Characterizing habitat associations of species is fundamental to understanding the mechanistic basis of community organization. Typically, investigators estimate microhabitat characteristics that account for significant amounts of variation in species composition. Nonetheless, highly resolved microhabitat characteristics may account for no more variation in species composition than coarse macro...

sohrabi and nalchigar (2010) proposed a new data envelopment analysis (dea) model to identify the most efficient decision-making unit (dmu) in presence of imprecise data. in this paper, it is shown that the proposed model is not able to determine the most efficient dmu and is randomly introduced an efficient dmu. in addition, it is shown that this model determines the most efficient dmu in the ...

patients and methods fifty nine patients with indication for carpal tunnel release randomly assigned into two groups: open (n=30) or knifelight (n=29). the patients compared regarding scar length, operation duration, time to return to daily activities and amount of pain at three weeks after operation based on visual analog scale. results there was no significant differences regarding age and se...

We consider the allocation of a limited budget to a set of activities or investments in order to maximize return from investment. In a number of practical contexts (e.g., advertising), the return from investment in an activity is effectively modeled using an S-curve, where increasing returns to scale exist at small investment levels, and decreasing returns to scale occur at high investment leve...