1,720,967 research outputs found
Changes in landscape configuration and occupancy of northern goshawk and Ural owl territories
Get PDFLandscape fragmentation is one of the processes strongly related to human activities. During this process, an area is divided into smaller pieces and usually, these pieces have different predestination. As a result, natural areas lose their connections, which are vital for animals and plants. Finland is mainly covered with forest that is also affected by landscape fragmentation. Thus, forest species are under threat and biodiversity can be reduced to a critical level. Monitoring of the biodiversity is usually a complicated and long process, but for facilitating research indicator species are often used. Examples of these are the northern goshawk and Ural owl. In this research, the relationship between this species occupancy and landscape configuration in Suupohja area was investigated and tested. A strong connection was found between Northern goshawk occupancy and the mature spruce forest. Furthermore, a connection between decreasing species population and increasing amount of low-stocking forest was observed. Changes in the protected areas in Suupohja were also studied for the period 2009- 2013. As a result, a decrease in human activities and an increase in the amount of mature forest due to natural growth were found, which confirms the security of this area and its name of protected areas
State of the environment as a determinant of life quality: a local scale approach
Get PDFTraditionally nature plays a significant role for people worldwide. Thousands of years ago our ancestors made their life-related decisions by accounting for the environmental situation. They relied on natural phenomena, divinized and defied them. Due to the high dependence on the resources provided by the surrounding environment, people were vulnerable, and changes in environmental conditions motivated them towards migration processes and search for ways of communication. In the 21st century this link to the local environment is not so clear for many people and the role of nature for well-being appears to be disappearing in the shadow of traditional socio-economic factors affecting life quality. However, in circumstances of the global environmental crisis caused by climate change, local nature becomes an important indicator of stress with impact on society. At the same time, the role of local nature for well-being of community is not well known. In this thesis, I studied the impact of the local environment on people’s well-being reflected by the sea surface water quality for inhabitants of a coastal community. These environmental conditions were measured objectively with professional scientific equipment and subjectively by surveying people, who made general assessments of their local environmental conditions. First, I investigated if and how accurately respondents’ perception of water quality corresponds with objective measures, and if socio-demographic status can affect people’s evaluations. My findings suggest that the accuracy of assessing water quality is high and potentially adequate for considering their use in policymaking. Over 70% of people assessed the state of water quality in the right direction and almost 60% were correct in their estimates. At the same time, socio-demographic status had an effect on perceptions but did not markedly improve their reliability. Next, I tested the effect of the local environmental conditions (objectively measured and perceived) on the well-being of individuals in combination with traditional socio-economic factors. I found that the objectively measured state of the environment has a less pronounced impact on life quality, but that the way people perceive their surrounding environmental (water) quality plays a significant role for well-being (life quality). This finding highlights the psychological effect of how the local environment is perceived. Moreover, the strength of this positive relationship between life quality and water quality is conditional on income level, such that people with income issues are more dissatisfied with their life regardless of the quality of surrounding environmental. In my third chapter, I found that local nature can buffer the adverse impacts of global stress on the life quality of individuals. My investigation of the changes in life quality before and during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that there is a significant role of good environmental conditions for mitigation of the personal impacts of the pandemic. I found that the pandemic had a negative impact on well-being, especially for people who lived in areas with poor coastal water quality. Additionally, I found that the pandemic changed the people-nature relationship toward environmentally-friendly behavior. Lastly, I studied if property prices are influenced by local environmental conditions and whether environmental aspects generate economic benefits through a positive effect on property prices, presented by price perception extracted from real estate listings. My findings indicate that people responsible for the price perception value, property owners and real estate agents, do take into consideration the water quality conditions in their evaluation, and that good water quality corresponds with higher property prices in advertisements. The results of this thesis highlight the significant role of the local environment for life quality of community members. Based on the results, I conclude that local environmental conditions can be buffer to stress impacts, which is important in light of the negative effects of the climate change crisis that small communities are exposed to. This thesis suggests that local councils should involve residents in decision-making and thereby promote environmental democracy.ei tietoa saavutettavuudest
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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