In late August 2005, 80 researchers from more than 15 countries convened for a 4-day conference entitled “The Tenth Anniversary of 51 Peg b: Status and Prospects for Hot Jupiter Studies”. The meeting was held at l’Observatoire de Haute-Provence, the location of the 1.93-m telescope and ELODIE spectrograph used to discover the planetary companion to 51 Peg roughly 10 years ago. I summarize sever...

A decision support system with over one billion rows of data has been developed at Lands’ End using the IBM DATABASE 2” (DB2@) relational database management system. This corporate database is a subset of an Information Warehouse” framework and functions as both a decision support system server and an application enabler. The corporate database uses operational data gathered from order processi...

Degraded lands have often been suggested as a solution to issues of land scarcity and as an ideal way to meet mounting global demands for agricultural goods, but their locations and conditions are not well known. Four approaches have been used to assess degraded lands at the global scale: expert opinion, satellite observation, biophysical models, and taking inventory of abandoned agricultural l...

As the barren lands play a key role in the interaction between land cover dynamics and climate system, an efficient methodology for the global-scale extraction and mapping of the barren lands is important. The discriminative potential of the existing soil/bareness indexes was assessed by collecting globally distributed reference data belonging to major land cover types. The existing soil/barene...

This forum manuscript examines the importance of grazing lands for sequestering soil organic carbon (SOC), providing societal benefits, and potential influences on them of emerging policies and legislation. Global estimates are that grazing lands occupy ,3.6 billion ha and account for about one-fourth of potential carbon (C) sequestration in world soils. They remove the equivalent of ,20% of th...

The main objective of this study is to assess the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover/land use changes in the lower Mekong Delta over the last 40 years with the coastal Tran Van Thoi District of Ca Mau Province, Vietnam as a case study. Land cover/land use change dynamics are derived from moderate to high spatial resolution (Landsat and SPOT) satellite imagery in six time intervals ranging f...

1. Significance of Land Reclamation 2. Evaluation of Possible Expansion of Arable Lands 3. Peculiarities and Principles of Efficiency Evaluation 4. History of the Question 5. Expenses for Construction of Reclamation Systems and Land Development 6. Running Costs. Income 7. Methods of Economic Efficiency Evaluation 7.1 Traditional Methods 7.2 Discounting methods. 7.3 Uncertainty and Risk Calculat...