Difficulties in using land use pressure and soil quality indicators to predict water quality.

Intensive agriculture can impair river water quality. Soil quality monitoring has been used to measure the effect of land use intensification on water quality at a point and field scales but not at the catchment scale. Other farm scale land use pressures, like stocking rate and the value of land, which relate to land use intensity are now publicly available, nationally.

Mapping bare ground in New Zealand hill-country agriculture and forestry for soil erosion risk assessment: An automated satellite remote-sensing method.

Removing vegetation cover from hill-slope land increases risk for soil erosion and delivery of sediment to waterways. In New Zealand's productive landscapes, clear-fell harvesting of forestry blocks and winter forage grazing by agricultural livestock are two significant causes of vegetation removal. Bare ground exposed by these activities varies annually and seasonally in location and spatial extent.

The extractive industry in Latin America and the Caribbean: health impact assessment as an opportunity for the health authority.

Objectives: The extractive industries have contributed to the economic and social development of Latin America and the Caribbean for centuries. We have undertaken a narrative review to assess the role of the health authority in the decision-making process as it relates to extractive industry projects.

Methods: A narrative literature review was conducted with a keyword search conducted using PubMed, Scientific Electronic Library Online and Google.

The role of health impact assessment in advancing sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The World Health Organization's (WHO's) Commission on Social Determinants of Health formally adopted Health Impact Assessment (HIA) more than a decade ago as a promising concept to address underlying health issues. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) remains one of the regions of the world with minimal application of HIA in public programs and policies. This special report documents the need for public mechanisms to incorporate HIA, the benefits from its application, and steps to promote its use.

The impact of the State Children's Health Insurance Program's unborn child ruling expansions on foreign-born Latina prenatal care and birth outcomes, 2000-2007.

The 2002 "unborn child ruling" resulted in State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) expansion for states to cover prenatal care for low-income women without health insurance. Foreign-born Latinas who do not qualify for Medicaid coverage theoretically should have benefited most from the policy ruling given their documented low rates of prenatal care utilization. This study compares prenatal care utilization and subsequent birth outcomes among foreign-born Latinas in six states that used the unborn child ruling to expand coverage to those in ten states that did not implement the expansion.