Urban expansion is a major driving force altering local and regional hydrology and increasing non-point source (NPS) pollution. To explore these environmental consequences of urbanization, land use change was forecast, and long-term runoff and NPS pollution were assessed in the Muskegon River watershed, located on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. A land use change model, LTM, and a web-based...

In a rapidly urbanizing world, trace element pollution may represent a threat to human health and wildlife, and it is therefore crucial to assess both exposition levels and associated effects of trace element contamination on urban vertebrates. In this study, we investigated the impact of urbanization on trace element contamination and stress physiology in a wild bird species, the common blackb...

It is a fact that the urban sprawl, known as the process of gradual spread out of urbanization has become a worldwide phenomenon. The growing consumption of land, as a result of the extension of highway networks, open up vast space of territory, which seems to have become an unstoppable cancer, and affects virtually all the contemporary metropolis. The expansion of the cities had its origin in ...

Asthma is increasing worldwide secondary to both increasing access to healthcare with more and more asthma recognition and to urbanization. Asthma in children is different from adult with multiple phenotypes and variable natural course. It is frequently underdiagnosed and undertreated that result in poor quality of life in children and their parents. Asthma in children has significant socio-eco...

Demographic, socioeconomic, and urbanization level variations in Parkinson's disease (PD) are rarely investigated, especially in Asia. This study describes an eight-year trend in PD incidence and prevalence in Taiwan as well as assessing the effects of sociodemographics and urbanization on the incidence and prevalence of PD. The data analyzed were acquired from the Taiwan National Health Insura...

I conduct a cross-country analysis of the human development index (HDI) components, income, life expectancy, literacy and gross enrolment ratios, using Gray and Purser’s 1970-2005 quinquennial database for 111 countries. 1) A descriptive analysis uncovers a complex pattern of divergence and convergence for these components’ evolution. Development is not a smooth process but consists of a series...

Many ectotherms show a decrease in body size with increasing latitude due to changes in climate, a pattern termed converse Bergmann's rule. Urban conditions-particularly warmer temperatures and fragmented landscapes-may impose stresses on development that could disrupt these body size patterns. To test the impact of urbanization on development and latitudinal trends in body size, we launched a ...

Urban areas are increasing in size and human population density. The implications of widespread urbanization are apparent for a wide variety of stream organisms, but the responses of stream-dwelling salamanders to urbanization have been understudied historically. Studies on this assemblage have increased sufficiently over the last decade to warrant a review and synthesis of current knowledge. O...

Despite decades of work in environmental science and ecology, estimating human influences on ecosystems remains challenging. This is partly due to complex chains of causation among ecosystem elements, exacerbated by the difficulty of collecting biological data at sufficient spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. Here, we demonstrate the utility of environmental DNA (eDNA) for quantifying asso...

The rapidly increasing rate of urbanization has a major impact on the ecology and evolution of species. While increased temperatures are a key aspect of urbanization ("urban heat islands"), we have very limited knowledge whether this generates differentiation in thermal responses between rural and urban populations. In a common garden experiment, we compared the thermal performance curves (TPCs...