West Nile Virus Infections Projected from Blood Donor Screening Data, United States, 2003

Routine donor nucleic acid amplification testing is a valuable surveillance screening tool

Location patterns of urban industry in Shanghai and implications for sustainability

China’s economy has undergone rapid transition and industrial restructuring. The term “urban industry” describes a particular type of industry within Chinese cities experiencing restructuring. Given the high percentage of industrial firms that have either closed or relocated from city centres to the urban fringe and beyond, emergent global cities such as Shanghai, are implementing strategies for local economic and urban development, which involve urban industrial upgrading numerous firms in the city centre and urban fringe. This study aims to analyze the location patterns of seven urban industrial sectors within the Shanghai urban region using 2008 micro-geography data. To avoid Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) issue, four distance-based measures including nearest neighbourhood analysis, Kernel density estimation, K-function and co-location quotient have been extensively applied to analyze and compare the concentration and co-location between the seven sectors. The results reveal disparate patterns varying with distance and interesting co-location as well. The results are as follows: the city centre and the urban fringe have the highest intensity of urban industrial firms, but the zones with 20–30 km from the city centre is a watershed for most categories; the degree of concentration varies with distance, weaker at shorter distance, increasing up to the maximum distance of 30 km and then decreasing until 50 km; for all urban industries, there are three types of patterns, mixture of clustered, random and dispersed distribution at a varied range of distances. Consequently, this paper argues that the location pattern of urban industry reflects the stage-specific industrial restructuring and spatial transformation, conditioned by sustainability objectives

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc