Ecuador will experience a significant expansion of the oil industry in its Amazonian region, one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. In view of the changes that are about to come, we explore the conflicts between oil extraction interests and biodiversity protection and apply systematic conservation planning to identify priority areas that should be protected in different oil exploitation...

Citation: Amon DJ, Gobin J, Van Dover CL, Levin LA, Marsh L and Raineault NA (2017) Characterization of Methane-Seep Communities in a Deep-Sea Area Designated for Oil and Natural Gas Exploitation Off Trinidad and Tobago. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:342. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00342 Characterization of Methane-Seep Communities in a Deep-Sea Area Designated for Oil and Natural Gas Exploitation Off Trinid...

Geothermal energy is a clean, green renewable resource, which can be utilized for power generation, heating, cooling, and could effectively replace oil, gas, and coal. In recent years, oil companies have put more efforts into exploiting and utilizing geothermal energy with advanced technologies for heat-tracing oil gathering and transportation, central heating, etc., which has not only reduced ...

Both soil and water become contaminated by oil and oil derivatives due to accidental spills in their exploitation, transportation, processing, storing and utilization. In 2010, 3.91 billion tons of crude oil was produced (BP Statistical Review, 2011) and estimations are that annually 0.1% of produced petroleum is released into the environment (Ward et al., 2003) as a result of anthropogenic act...

This paper introduces a variant of the ADALINE in which the input signals are normalized to have zero mean and unit variance, and in which the bias or “threshold weight” is learned slightly differently. These changes result in a linear learning element that learns much more efficiently and rapidly, and that is much less dependent on the choice of the step-size parameter. Using simulation experi...

The yellow pages service of GTE SuperPages enables Web users to flexibly search through liitings of 11 million businesses in over 17000 categories. To achieve the flexibility desired it uses an Information Retrieval (IR) engine to search through complex listing objects. The objects themselves are stored in an object database. The use of the IR engine enables us to create an index that spans all...

Animal behavior is often altruistic. In the frame of the theory of natural selection, altruism can only exist under specific conditions like kin selection or reciprocal cooperation. We show that reciprocal cooperation, which is generally invoked to explain non-kin altruism, requires very restrictive conditions to be stable. Some of these conditions are not met in many cases of altruism observed...