Spatial variation in determinants of agricultural land abandonment in Europe.

Agricultural abandonment is widespread and growing in many regions worldwide, often because of agricultural intensification on productive lands, conservation policies, or the spatial decoupling of agricultural production from consumption. Abandonment has major environmental and social impacts, which differ starkly depending on the geographical context, as does its potential to serve as a land reservoir for recultivation. Understanding determinants of abandonment patterns, and especially how their influence varies across broad geographic extents, is therefore important.

Spatial distribution of arable and abandoned land across former Soviet Union countries.

Knowledge of the spatial distribution of agricultural abandonment following the collapse of the Soviet Union is highly uncertain. To help improve this situation, we have developed a new map of arable and abandoned land for 2010 at a 10 arc-second resolution. We have fused together existing land cover and land use maps at different temporal and spatial scales for the former Soviet Union (fSU) using a training data set collected from visual interpretation of very high resolution (VHR) imagery.

Early palliative care for adults with advanced cancer.

Background: Incurable cancer, which often constitutes an enormous challenge for patients, their families, and medical professionals, profoundly affects the patient's physical and psychosocial well-being. In standard cancer care, palliative measures generally are initiated when it is evident that disease-modifying treatments have been unsuccessful, no treatments can be offered, or death is anticipated. In contrast, early palliative care is initiated much earlier in the disease trajectory and closer to the diagnosis of incurable cancer.

Challenges and opportunities in mapping land use intensity globally.

Future increases in land-based production will need to focus more on sustainably intensifying existing production systems. Unfortunately, our understanding of the global patterns of land use intensity is weak, partly because land use intensity is a complex, multidimensional term, and partly because we lack appropriate datasets to assess land use intensity across broad geographic extents. Here, we review the state of the art regarding approaches for mapping land use intensity and provide a comprehensive overview of available global-scale datasets on land use intensity.

Intracoronary administration of bone marrow-derived mononuclear cells and arrhythmic events in patients with chronic heart failure.

Aims: There are continued debates on potential proarrhythmic effects of intracoronary bone marrow-derived progenitor cell (BMC) therapy for treatment of chronic heart failure. Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), a mainstay of heart failure therapy, provide the possibility of validly assessing arrhythmias in patients with chronic heart failure. The aim of this analysis was to assess the arrhythmogenic potential of intracoronary BMC therapy, continuously documented by ICD-stored intracardiac electrograms.