Satellite-derived thermal information over urban areas offers and attractive and inexpensive method which have been utilized in diverse studies including land cover classification, energy flux interactions, and as input for models of urban surface atmosphere exchange. In this study, we utilize Landsat ETM+ imagery to analyze the dependence of energy fluxes on the urban surface properties in Yor...

Long-term application of fertilizers containing P, especially organic fertilizers, usually increases the water soluble and available P of soil and at the same time may result in P accumulation in soil. Organic fertilizers may also increase movement of P in the soil profile that could result in surface and ground water pollution. An experiment was conducted on field plots that received three app...

This article presents a literature review that explores the challenges for planning in urban regions in connection with the preservation of ecosystem services. It further presents some best practice examples for meeting these challenges. The demand for the provision of ecosystem services within urban regions changed during the transition from a largely agrarian society to an industrial society ...

objectives the aim of this study was to assess soils of khorramabad metropolis in order to establish the concentration of lead and develop a contamination factor map. materials and methods soil samples were collected from 25 different urban parks in khorramabad, iran. the mean pb contents in the urban topsoil samples were compared with mean concentrations for other cities around the world. a sp...

Concentrations and chiral signatures of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were measured in outdoor air (using polyurethane foam (PUF)--disk passive samplers) and surface soil samples taken at approximately monthly intervals over 1 year at 10 locations on a rural-urban transect across the West Midlands of the U.K. In both air and soil, concentrations clearly decrease with increasing distance from...

A pilot study of metal content and basic soil properties was undertaken in a number of parks and allotments in the cities of Glasgow, UK, Torino, Italy, and Sevilla, Spain. Between 40 and 60 samples were collected from each city, with soil from two depths. The maximum metal contents (aqua regia) found were 698 mg/kg Cu; 1004 mg/kg Zn; 300 mg/kg Ni; 356 mg/kg Cr and 7051 mg/kg Pb. Variability of...

Rapid urbanization has occurred in northwestern China, threatening the sustainability of its fragile dryland ecosystems. A lack of precise urban land-cover information has limited our understanding on the urbanization in the dryland. Here, we examined urban land-cover changes from 2000 to 2014 in 21 major cities that comprise over 50% of the developed land in arid China, using Landsat Enhanced ...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...