查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.The superblock urban planning model is a response to mass rapid urbanization with large migration to big cities commonly seen in many Asian megacities. This paper investigates the evolution and transformation of superblocks in Gangnam District in Seoul during a period of intense urbanization between 1980 s and 2020 s, and its effects on urban ventilation environment. Four superblocks were selected, and mapping studies, CFD wind simulation analysis and field measurements were performed to identify areas of poor ventilation using minimum wind velocity criteria (<1.0 m/s). Significant changes in urban form are: a) average 43% increase in site coverage ratio from 1980 s to 2020 s; b) edge densification of large and taller buildings along superblock perimeter; and c) inner-block densification of low and mid-rise buildings within narrow street networks. It is found that large areas of inner block with little open space experience poor ventilation with air flow passing over much of these dense areas. Perimeter densification of tall buildings and inner grid discontinuous streets demonstrated to worsen the ventilation conditions. Winds from large perimeter roads are blocked from reaching inner areas forming a walled effect as seen from more than 67% of poor ventilation areas occurring in the inner-block areas. Although ventilation has worsened with densification maximum block velocities has increased between 8 and 50% with high velocities of more than 6 m/s occurring at perimeters near large edge roads. Superblocks with wider through roads and large ground-level open space of recent building redevelopments improves surrounding ventilation and allows for winds to reach further into the block. Superblocks as large living blocks must be allowed to breathe through increasing porosity not only along the perimeter but also by adding voids within inner areas to become a healthy, livable, cross-connected compact urban planning model.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022The Atlantic Forest in Paraguay has been severely affected by large-scale habitat loss and fragmentation, processes that have increasingly isolated its protected areas. Here we identified priority areas capable of maximizing connectivity between protected areas for multiple species while minimizing potential socio-economic conflicts in Paraguay's Atlantic Forest. We built multi-scale habitat suitability models for 15 species and mapped connectivity using circuit theory and least-cost path methods. Then, we used connectivity maps and different socio-economic factors to identify priority areas. We created three scenarios to explore the effects of including socio-economic factors in prioritization: Optimized-connectivity Scenario that assumes no conflicts; Optimistic Conflict Scenario that seeks a balance between biodiversity and socio-economic interests, with the former having greater priority over the latter; and Pessimistic Conflict Scenario that represents a high conflict situation. The inclusion of socio-economic data in the analysis caused a shift in priority areas from east to west and reduced the representation of connectivity by up to 15%. Regardless of the scenario considered, forest restoration is needed to improve connectivity. The Optimistic Conflict Scenario returned the likely most cost-effective solution because, compared to the Optimized-connectivity Scenario, the 7% decline in connectivity (from 34 to 27%) was offset by a reduction in restoration efforts from 2.2% to 0.6% of the study area. Our study presents solutions to balance the trade-offs between socio-economic issues and connectivity conservation in Paraguay's Atlantic Forest. In particular, well-planned conservation and restoration efforts outside protected boundaries have the potential to improve connectivity while boosting local socio-economic development.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Mountainous agricultural landscapes experienced large-scale land cover changes in the past decades due to traditional land modification practices and increasing permanent agricultural abandonment. However, there is lack of observation of short-period land cover transitions and paddy field dynamics of fallowing and recultivation. This study was implemented in the Philippines’ Ifugao rice terraces with three aims. The first aim is to analyze rapid land cover transitions by mapping land cover maps in consistent five-year intervals from 1990 to 2020. The second aim is to analyze paddy field dynamics that involve permanent abandonment, fallowing, first-time cultivations, and recultivation by developing an analysis framework involving time-series land cover maps. The third aim is to confirm the relationship between abundance of vegetation land covers and permanent abandonment of paddy fields by implementing regression analysis. Results show that a two-step process involving low vegetation as an intermediary land cover typically occurs in between agricultural abandonment and afforestation that was widely observed in mountainous agricultural landscapes. Observed temporal dynamics of paddy fields aligned with historical records such as high rates of permanent abandonment in the 1990s and recultivation (416% increase) in the 2000s. Regression analysis revealed that there is a significant correlation between low vegetation cover abundance and subsequent paddy field permanent abandonment (P = 0.0498), which confirms that afforestation in the landscape decreased the water yield and promoted agricultural abandonment. The findings suggest that planning of mountainous agricultural landscapes should address social and environmental driving factors to mitigate the land-transition feedback loop that further promotes agricultural abandonment.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Exposure to nature is associated with various mental health benefits. Nature connectedness (NC), a psychological construct that measures individuals’ subjective sense of connection to nature, is found to influence the relationship between nature exposure and mental health, including well-being and ill-being. However, studies from non-Western cultures have only examined either nature exposure and mental health or NC and mental health, with little research investigating the relationship among all three in a single study. Based on a face-to-face survey in Guangzhou (N = 863), this study investigates the relationship among nature exposure (greenspace visitation frequency, duration, and greenspace accessibility), NC, and mental well-being and ill-being. Based on the results, NC is stronger than nature exposure in predicting mental well-being, while greenspace visitation frequency and duration are stronger than NC in predicting ill-being. Having a higher-than-average NC is associated with a 7% increase in feelings of worthwhileness, a 6.4% increase in life satisfaction, and a 2.5% decrease in depression risk. NC could function as both mediator and moderator, depending on the specific nature exposure–mental health link examined. Future studies are required to understand the complex interaction of nature exposure, NC, and mental health. Our study indicates that a shift in policymaking to enhance NC is recommended to achieve the related psychological benefits. To this end, research on the influencing factors of NC (e.g., characteristics of nature experiences) and effective interventions to cultivate NC are required.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Natural habitats have been converted to urban areas across the globe such that many landscapes now represent matrices of developed and protected lands. As urbanization continues to expand, associated pressures on wildlife will increase, including effects on animals in adjacent protected habitats. For prey species (e.g., ungulates), an understanding of the ecological impacts of urbanization is typically confounded by coincident effects from co-occurring predators. Yet, understanding how urbanization affects prey behaviors in the absence of predators is becoming increasingly relevant as many top predators face extirpation. We placed camera traps at varying distances from urban areas within protected areas in the Florida Keys, USA, to evaluate the influence of urbanization on the behavior of the key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium), an endangered species that has been without non-human mammalian predators for ～ 4000 years. We predicted that as distance to urban areas decreased, key deer would use sites at the same rate, exhibit bigger group sizes, and shift activity patterns to be more nocturnal. Our results indicate that intensity of site use decreased with proximity to urban areas, potentially reflecting human avoidance. Group size increased closer to urban areas, consistent with other studies relating this behavior to anthropogenic subsidies and vigilance for humans. Activity patterns changed but did not become more nocturnal near urban areas as predicted by global analyses relating human disturbance to wildlife nocturnality. Our results have important implications for ungulate behavioral ecology and, taken together, suggest that influences on protected species from adjacent land uses are an important consideration when planning land use and designing protected areas.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Urban vacant land is a growing issue worldwide. However, most of the existing research on urban vacant land has focused on small-scale city areas, while few studies have focused on large-scale national areas. Large-scale identification of urban vacant land is hindered by the disadvantage of high cost and high variability when using the conventional manual identification method. Criteria inconsistency in cross-domain identification is also a major challenge. To address these problems, we propose a large-scale automatic identification framework of urban vacant land based on semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images and select 36 major cities in China as study areas. The framework utilizes deep learning techniques to realize automatic identification and introduces the city stratification method to address the challenge of identification criteria inconsistency. The results of the case study on 36 major Chinese cities indicate two major conclusions. First, the proposed framework of vacant land identification can achieve over 90 percent accuracy of the level of professional auditors with much higher result stability and approximately 15 times higher efficiency compared to the manual identification method. Second, the framework has strong robustness and can maintain high performance in various cities. With the above advantages, the proposed framework provides a practical approach to large-scale vacant land identification in various countries and regions worldwide, which is of great significance for the academic development of urban vacant land and future urban development.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Characterizing the physico-chemical properties of urban soils on a large scale remains a significant challenge. The heterogeneity and difficulty of access to these soils lead to very localized studies that are difficult to transfer to a whole urban area. This heterogeneity is mainly explained by the human factor in the formation and evolution of soils, which is a major contributor to the pedogenesis in cities. Throughout their evolution, urban soils undergo contrasting human activities that modify their properties and thus determine the historical trajectories of land use. Characterizing this human pedogenesis factor seems to be an essential condition for a better understanding of the functioning of urban soils and for qualifying them on a large scale. The aim of this work is to describe this human factor by an analysis of the historical trajectories and an evaluation of their impacts on soil properties. We focus on soils in the conurbation of Paris over the last 70 years. The different historical trajectories were identified thanks to a database provided by a local land use inventory. Results show that 80% of the total surface area is affected by 21 historical trajectories. More than 60% of this area is characterized by single use trajectories showing that most of the area has not changed land use over the last 70 years. The urbanisation of agricultural land, leading to residential areas is a representative trajectory of land use described in the paper that transforms original soils into Technosols.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Increasing conflict between nomadic pastoralists and settled farmers are occurring across West Africa, due to issues of land availability and access. This study is the first detailed investigation of changes in land availability for nomadic pastoralists in Nigeria, where most conflicts occur. The study maps land use changes between cultivated and grazing land in three study areas surrounding Kano, the largest city in savanna Africa. Results indicate that grazing land availability decreased by 150 % and fallow land by almost 300 % in areas close to the city between 1980 and 2014, but at a much lower rate in distant areas despite massive growth in rural population. The lower loss of grazing land is attributed to the presence of grazing reserves in the most distant study area, as well as distance from the city. Spatial metrics analysis showed decreased connectedness between patches of grazing land due to farmland encroachment across traditional migration routes near to the city. Increased connectedness in the distant study area is attributed to the presence of grazing reserves acting as foci, connecting grazing with access to water. Government land policies should focus on creation of new, accessible grazing reserves and routeways away from large urban centres, accompanied by measures for soil and pasture improvement and digital tagging of livestock. Accompanying efforts to intensify agricultural production across Nigeria would deter further agricultural encroachment on grazing land. Since Nigeria's GDP is the highest in Africa, but among the lowest in agricultural intensity, this should be possible.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022Landscape change occurs as a result of both human and natural forces. When changes are abrupt and drastic, they can negatively impact people who had become attached to a landscape's prior character. Place-based models of landscape change assert that the strength of people's attachments can influence their experience of and response to change. We apply a qualitative deductive-inductive approach to examine rapid change experienced by family forest owners in the northern Great Lakes region of the U.S. (N = 17), whose densely forested property was in the path of a major windstorm and near an ongoing pine barrens restoration. Through in-depth interviews we found that landowners had a strong sense of place for the Northwoods, a culturally-constructed landscape character of big trees and continuous canopy of relatively recent origin in our study area. This sense of place acted as a lens through which they experienced multiple and sometimes cumulative drivers of change resulting in a spectrum of losses, including solastalgia. Sense of place affected how they responded to change on their own property, with most wanting to assist or let “Mother Nature take its course” in returning the land to its Northwoods character rather than its more open, ecologically-based conditions. Responses to the pine barrens restoration ranged from negative to somewhat positive, with those expressing positive feelings mentioning aesthetic, ecological, and functional reasons. Implications for management and place-based model development are discussed.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 The Author(s)Spain is the country with the most biosphere reserves (BRs) in the world. The aim of this paper is to investigate why BRs have come to proliferate to such a degree in Spain and why there is a gap between UNESCO's framework and the practicalities observed in Spain. After outlining how a BR is conceived according to UNESCO and reviewing the large volume of research published to date in this respect, Spain's BRs are characterised. The study here is based on an empirical research undertaken in five BRs located in north-western Spain by making use of 60 semi-structured interviews. The results are the outcome of the coding, categorization and interpretation of these conversations with the interviewees, obtaining three large semiotic clusters: the perceptions held of the BR tool; the development or application of the BR concept; and the reasons for their designation. Two specific underlying motives are detected for the prodigious momentum acquired by Spain's BRs: one is geopolitical, in the context of the constant conflicts between the Spanish Government and the devolved autonomous communities; the other is the prominent role conceded to tourism in justifying the BRs. Hence, the paper reveals how BRs are political and economic products that have little in common with the theoretical environmental and sustainable development dimensions described in the UNESCO framework on BRs.
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