In general, the history of environmental research is not known very well. Our study contributes to filling this gap by focusing on the history of the methods that were used during the 20th century to study the state of the urban sea area in Helsinki, Finland. From the beginning of the past century, the methodological basis of municipal water pollution studies in Helsinki was broad, involving th...

BACKGROUND To investigate air pollution effects during pregnancy or in the first weeks of life, models are needed that capture both the spatial and temporal variability of air pollution exposures. METHODS We developed a time-space exposure model for ambient NO2 concentrations in Bern, Switzerland. We used NO2 data from passive monitoring conducted between 1998 and 2009: 101 rural sites (24,49...

Numerical modelling was used to study the impact of urban air pollution from Setúbal City in two important natural reserves. Setúbal is a city in the middle south Portugal with a large resident population, important industry and intense traffic activities. There is an important harbour, which is responsible for intense heavy vehicle traffic. Setúbal is surrounded by two natural reserves, a moun...

The current study was aimed to investigate the mercury pollution in urban road runoff. A total of 34 rainfall events were monitored on 5 independent road catchments from 2015 to 2016 in Nanjing city, China. Events mean concentrations of mercury and the impact factors of mercury pollution in urban road runoff were also carried out in the current study. Results revealed that the concentration of ...

After decades of rapid economic development, China is facing severe environmental problems. In particular, smog in urban areas has recently attracted a great deal of scientific and media attention both domestically and internationally. Our focus in this article is on public perceptions of smog in the northern city of Tangshan, which is routinely ranked as one of the urban areas with the worst a...

Noise is a global problem. In 1972 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified noise as a pollutant. Since then, most industrialized countries have enacted laws and local regulations to prevent and reduce acoustic environmental pollution. A further aim is to alert people to the dangers of this type of pollution. In this context, urban planners need to have tools that allow them to evaluate t...

Air pollution is a major problem in Calcutta. In this study, exfoliated sputum cytology of the exposed population was done in order to get an insight into the response of the lungs to air pollutants at the individual level. 468 residents from Calcutta and 60 from Sunderban islands, where ambient air pollution is negligible, were studied. Results showed remarkable increase in alveolar macrophage...

The House Sparrow is a globally distributed species and is closely associated with anthropised environments. They are well-adapted to urban life; therefore the decline of their populations in Europe represents an unexpected event that demands an investigation into its causes. Causes that have promoted this decline are not well-known, but one of the highlighted hypotheses is an increase of oxida...

Air pollution predictions for environmental impact assessments are usually generated by Gaussian plume/puff models driven by observationally-based meteorological inputs. An alternative approach is to use prognostic meteorological and air pollution models, which are better founded than the Gaussian approach, but tend to require much expertise and time to set up and large computing resources to r...