Urban grasslands, landscapes dominated by turfgrasses for aesthetic or recreational groundcovers, are rapidly expanding in the United States and globally. These managed ecosystems are often less diverse than the natural or agricultural lands they replace, leading to potential losses in ecosystem functioning. Research in non-urban systems has provided evidence for increases in multiple ecosystem...

Urban sprawl is one of the main problems that threaten the limited highly fertile land in the Nile Delta of Egypt. In this research, satellite images Landsat TM 1993, ETM+ 2001 and Egypt Sat-1, 2009 has been used to study the urban sprawl and its impact on agricultural land in Qalubiya Governorate. Maximum likelihood supervised classification and post-classification change detection techniques ...

Estimating the distribution of impervious surface, a major component of the vegetation–impervious surface–soil (V–I–S) model, is important in monitoring urban areas and understanding human activities. Besides its applications in physical geography, such as run-off models and urban change studies, maps showing impervious surface distribution are essential for estimating socio-economic factors, s...

Companion animals are an important aspect in human life. However, they may also be considered a source of pathogens. An example of zoonotic parasitoses is toxocarosis or cutaneous larva migrans (CLM). The aim of the study was to detect zoonotic nematodes of dogs living in different areas and the intensity of contamination in parasite polluted environments that are hazardous to human health. The...

In the 21st century the fresh water scarcity increased very rapidly due to the urbanization and industrialization process. In these conditions the urban wastewater plays an important role in the water usage criteria. In this aspect, in all the major cities, wastewater treatment plants have been constructed to treat the urban wastewater in view of decreasing the water scarcity. The presence of n...

Assessing the concentration of potentially harmful heavy metals in the soil of urban parks is imperative in order to evaluate the potential risks to residents and tourists. To date, little research on soil pollution in China's urban parks has been conducted. To identify the concentrations and sources of heavy metals, and to assess the soil environmental quality, samples were collected from 30 u...

The Dublin SURGE (Soil Urban Geochemistry) Project is Dublin's first baseline survey of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants in topsoils and is part of a Europe-wide initiative to map urban geochemical baselines in ten cities. 1,058 samples were collected as part of a stratified random sampling programme in the greater Dublin area to give an overview of baseline conditions in the city...

A survey on the incidence of Salmonellae in soil was conducted on 12 kindergartens in. the Klang District, The organism. was isolated from fioe (three urban and two rural) kindergartens from one or more soil samples tested. Ten isolates comprising six serotypes, namely, Salmonella bareilly, S.haifa, S.abony, S.weltevreden, S.agona and S.stanley, were encountered. The possible role that these so...

Adult coho salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch return each autumn to freshwater spawning habitats throughout western North America. The migration coincides with increasing seasonal rainfall, which in turn increases storm water run-off, particularly in urban watersheds with extensive impervious land cover. Previous field assessments in urban stream networks have shown that adult coho are dying premature...

A semidistributed, physical-based Urban Forest Effects – Hydrology (UFORE-Hydro) model was created to simulate and study tree effects on urban hydrology and guide management of urban runoff at the catchment scale. The model simulates hydrological processes of precipitation, interception, evaporation, infiltration, and runoff using data inputs of weather, elevation, and land cover along with nin...