Installation of impervious surfaces in urban areas has attracted increasing attention due to its potential hazard to urban ecosystems. Urban soils are suggested to have robust carbon (C) sequestration capacity; however, the C stocks and dynamics in the soils covered by impervious surfaces that dominate urban areas are still not well characterized. We compared soil organic C (SOC) densities and ...

Urban soil may be a source of occupational exposure to various pollutants in gardening and land cultivation. This paper presents data of a one-year follow-up of lead, cadmium, nickel, chromium, and vanadium in the environment of the city of Bologna. Samples of soil and leaves were collected at three locations; gardens from the inner-city high-traffic area, parks in moderate-traffic area, and pa...

Ecologists increasingly use plot-scale data to inform research and policy related to regional and global environmental change. For soil chemistry research, scaling from the plot to the region is especially difficult due to high spatial variability at all scales. We used a hierarchical Bayesian model of plot-scale soil nutrient pools to predict storage of soil organic carbon (oC), inorganic carb...

Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii) is in decline in urban areas of the Pacific Northwest. Maintaining significant populations of this species requires development of restoration techniques for urban environments. My research consists of investigating the effects of light, irrigation and native soil on the establishment of Pacific madrone. I transplanted 104 one year madrone seedlings into an u...

1 State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yangling 712100, China 2 College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Northwest University, Xi’an 710027, China; E-Mails: [email protected] (X.Y.); [email protected] (J.Z.); [email protected] (Y.L.); [email protected] (Y.Z.); zha...

This paper explores the use of assumptions to build multiple models about sustainable development in a compositional way. It presents a model aiming at supporting stakeholders to improve their understanding about a water basin system under the pressure of changes in land use. Domain knowledge is approached from three perspectives: urban, semi-urban and rural. Simulations explore sustainability ...

The soil temperature regime is a relevant part of comprehensive topoclimatic research. Soil temperature data series measured at selected stations of the metropolitan station system of Olomouc in 2010–2011 were analysed. The focus was on the identification of geofactors influencing the soil temperature regime in the area of interest. The possibility of soil temperature simulation using knowledge...

mercury is a dangerous and an extremely toxic element, which can transfer to the food chain.presence of this element in the atmosphere particularly during the rainy seasons cause soil and environmental pollution, therefore this research will evaluate the transformation of mercury vapor from the atmosphere through precipitation into the soil. in the present study, mercury concentrations were det...

Mitigation of the urban heat island (UHI) effect at the city-scale is investigated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in conjunction with the Princeton Urban Canopy Model (PUCM). Specifically, the cooling impacts of green roof and cool (white/highalbedo) roof strategies over the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area during a heat wave period (7 June–10 June 2008) are assess...

The objective of this study was to identify the effect of different land uses in peri-urban agriculture on the soil properties. Soil health indicators were evaluated in the top 10 cm at five tilled agricultural sites involving different cropping systems and use of agrochemicals within the peri-urban agricultural areas of Yaounde, Cameroon, and compared with a native forest land. The experimenta...