Nature reserves are often designated ad hoc. Despite increasing conservation efforts, loss of biodiversity is still accelerating. Considering land scarcity and demand for alternative uses, efficiency in conservation strongly correlates with efficiency in land allocation. Systematic conservation planning can effectively prioritize conservation activities. Previous studies minimize opportunity co...

Drawing upon the Landsat satellite images of Nanjing from 1985, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2013, this paper integrates the convex hull analysis and common edge analysis at double scales, and develops a comprehensive matrix analysis to distinguish the different types of urban land expansion. The results show that Nanjing experienced rapid urban expansion, dominated by a mix of residential and manufac...

Highway planning is a process wherein a highway network con­ sidered adequate to meet both the present and future traffic demands of an auto-oriented, ever-growing populace is visualized. It is also the process in which a procedure designed to implement the plan should be formulated. The first step in the planning process is the determination of high­ way needs. The elimination of these needs r...

Web services are self-contained, self-describing, and loosely-coupled computational components designed to support machine-to-machine interaction by programmatic Web method calls, which allow structured data to be exchanged with remote resource. In the environment of service-oriented computing (Zhang et al, 2007), complex service-oriented systems are usually dynamically and automatically compos...

The Xplorah Planning Support Systems has been under development since 2000 to provide the Puerto Rico Planning Board with an advanced capacity to forecast land-use changes as the result of various scenarios and to assess alternative planning and policy options in their fully integrated, dynamic and spatial context. To fully deploy the analytic capabilities of Xplorah, high quality geographicall...

Land fragmentation is a significant problem in many parts of the world which hinders rational agricultural development and rural sustainable development. Land consolidation is considered to be the most effective land management approach for solving the problem of land fragmentation. It involves the re-organisation of the land tenure structure through land reallocation (or readjustment) and the ...

While UML is the accepted visual language for object-oriented system modeling, it lacks a common semantic foundation with a standard visual syntax. Furthermore, it does not cleanly mesh with external visual modeling languages such as entity relationship diagrams and relational data models. By restating UML and ER in terms of a common underlying semantic and syntactic modeling platform, a compre...

The nexus of advocacy and science has been a recurring discussion theme since the earliest days of the Society for Conservation Biology. When Michael Soulé defined conservation as a “mission-oriented discipline,” he succinctly captured the issue. He and others have asked whether biologists on a mission to save ecosystems, ecological communities, species, and populations can provide the value-fr...

Humans have diierent problem solving strategies at their disposal and they can exibly employ several strategies when solving a complex problem, whereas previous planning and theorem proving systems typically employ a single strategy or a hard coded combination of a few strategies. We introduce multi-strategy proof planning that allows to combine a number of strategies and to switch between them...