PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to test whether population mortality rates from heart, respiratory and kidney disease were higher as a function of levels of Appalachian coal mining after control for other disease risk factors. METHODS The study investigated county-level, age-adjusted mortality rates for the years 2000-2004 for heart, respiratory and kidney disease in relation to tons of...

Toronto’s Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) has faced on-going challenges concerning its demographic shifts in the urban and rural fringe tending to become a megacity over the coming decades, due to rapid population increase and urban amalgamation. For this research we examine past urban land use transitions in Toronto’s CMA based on collected remote sensing data between 1973 and 2010. A Markov Ce...

The world is rapidly urbanizing, and for the first time in history over 50% of the world’s population reside in urban areas. This rapid urbanization brings about tremendous challenges at the intersection of governance, infrastructure and the environment. Advanced sensing and data analytics techniques have been developed in the context of so called “smart cities” with the goal of providing insig...

Cities comprise various functional zones, including residential, educational, commercial zones, etc. It is important for urban planners to identify different functional zones and understand their spatial structure within the city in order to make better urban plans. In this research, we used 77976010 bus smart card records of Beijing City in one week in April 2008 and converted them into two-di...

thirteen environmental elements were distinguished in the livers of various species of fish thathave been sampled from 15 sites in a restricted area of the khorramabad river basin in lorestan province(west of iran). sites sampled represented agricultural, mining, mixed, and urban/recreation land uses andbackground conditions. lithium and silver were not detected at any of the sites. the minimum...

This project builds on our previous published work using the stable isotope dilution method to estimate the bioavailability of soil Pb in human volunteers who ingest milligram quantities of soil (and microgram quantities of Pb) in gelatin capsules. The primary aims of this project are to: 1) determine estimates of the bioavailability of Pb in soils from a mining site, smelting site and urban si...

In this paper, we discuss the main informatics challenges that arise when a high throughput sensor network is constructed with view to addressing real environmental challenges, such as real-time urban air pollution monitoring and mapping. We present a distributed infrastructure based on grid technology and data integration and mining tools, and describe our experience in developing such compone...

The recycling of demolition waste is essential to lower the construction sectors primary material demand, responsible for 50% global consumption. Almost all used as filler roads, preventing further reuse or after this application. built environment generates considerable annual in-and outflows. However, there has been little discussion on availability and application potential supply secondary ...