Journal ArticleDOI
Ecosystem services and urban heat riskscape moderation: water, green spaces, and social inequality in Phoenix, USA
TLDR
The results suggest the need for a systems evaluation of the benefits, costs, spatial structure, and temporal trajectory for the use of ecosystem services to moderate climate extremes.Abstract:
Urban ecosystems are subjected to high temperatures—extreme heat events, chronically hot weather, or both—through interactions between local and global climate processes. Urban vegetation may provide a cooling ecosystem service, although many knowledge gaps exist in the biophysical and social dynamics of using this service to reduce climate extremes. To better understand patterns of urban vegetated cooling, the potential water requirements to supply these services, and differential access to these services between residential neighborhoods, we evaluated three decades (1970–2000) of land surface characteristics and residential segregation by income in the Phoenix, Arizona, USA metropolitan region. We developed an ecosystem service trade-offs approach to assess the urban heat riskscape, defined as the spatial variation in risk exposure and potential human vulnerability to extreme heat. In this region, vegetation provided nearly a 25°C surface cooling compared to bare soil on low-humidity summer days; the ma...read more
Citations
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From quantity to quality: enhanced understanding of the changes in urban greenspace
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a new index, dynamic index of urban greenspace (UGDI), that measures changes of urban green spaces by quantifying the loss and gain on UG simultaneously in a 100m×100m grid cell.
Journal ArticleDOI
Socio-economic and environmental vulnerability to heat-related phenomena in Bucharest metropolitan area
Ines Grigorescu,Irena Mocanu,Bianca Mitrică,Monica Dumitraşcu,Cristina Dumitrică,Carmen-Sofia Dragotă +5 more
TL;DR: The paper aims to develop a multi-criteria vulnerability assessment using both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess various components of socio-economic and environmental vulnerability to heat-related phenomena in Romania.
Journal ArticleDOI
Forests and urban green areas as tools to address the challenges of sustainability in Latin American urban socio-ecological systems
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented a model that integrates and explains the socio-ecological urban relations of a Latin American city considering three high-level approaches: forestry, geography, and psychology.
Journal ArticleDOI
Green spaces and heterogeneous social groups in the U.S.
TL;DR: This article analyzed the way the attributes of green spaces have been defined and evaluated in the literature and found that most articles focused on access more than other attributes (such as ecological benefits, visual and esthetic values, amenities, sociability, and safety).
Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological contributions to human health in cities
TL;DR: In this article, an urban ecology of human health framework that considers how the ecological contributions to health risks and benefits are driven by interacting influences of the environment, active management, and historical legacies in the context of ecological self-organization is proposed.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy
TL;DR: Multilevel analyses showed that a measure of collective efficacy yields a high between-neighborhood reliability and is negatively associated with variations in violence, when individual-level characteristics, measurement error, and prior violence are controlled.
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Toward a metabolic theory of ecology
James H. Brown,James H. Brown,James F. Gillooly,Andrew P. Allen,Van M. Savage,Van M. Savage,Geoffrey B. West,Geoffrey B. West +7 more
TL;DR: This work has developed a quantitative theory for how metabolic rate varies with body size and temperature, and predicts how metabolic theory predicts how this rate controls ecological processes at all levels of organization from individuals to the biosphere.
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A soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI)
TL;DR: In this article, a transformation technique was presented to minimize soil brightness influences from spectral vegetation indices involving red and near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths, which nearly eliminated soil-induced variations in vegetation indices.
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Impact of regional climate change on human health
TL;DR: The growing evidence that climate–health relationships pose increasing health risks under future projections of climate change is reviewed and that the warming trend over recent decades has already contributed to increased morbidity and mortality in many regions of the world.
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Using the satellite-derived NDVI to assess ecological responses to environmental change
Nathalie Pettorelli,Jon Olav Vik,Atle Mysterud,Jean-Michel Gaillard,Compton J. Tucker,Nils Chr. Stenseth +5 more
TL;DR: The use of the NDVI in recent ecological studies is reviewed and its possible key role in future research of environmental change in an ecosystem context is outlined.