Impervious surfaces are ubiquitous in urban environments and constitute a substrate onto which atmospheric 10 constituents can deposit and undergo photochemical and oxidative processing, giving rise to “urban grime” films. HNO3 and N2O5 are important sinks for NOx in the lower atmosphere and may be deposited onto these films, forming nitrate through surface hydrolysis. Although such deposition ...

Carbon sources and sinks as a result of land use and land cover changes (LUCC) are significant for global climate change. This paper aims to identify and analyze the temporal and spatial changes of land use-based carbon emission in the Hubei Province in China. We use a carbon emission coefficient to calculate carbon emissions in different land use patterns in Hubei Province from 1998 to 2009. T...

Urban areas play an important role in the global carbon cycle, and human-induced carbon emissions from urban areas urgently need to be reduced. Therefore, understanding the relationship between carbon sources and sinks is the first step toward mitigating the effect of urban areas on climate change. Combined with the land use and land cover (LULC) empirical coefficients and statistical methods, ...

Designing tools that aim at a sustainable management of waste and organic residues requires a good knowledge of the available sources and their use potential. Resulting choices should consider localisation of these sources and of the sinks capable of absorbing them. Absorptive capacities of such sinks like crops may vary in space and time as a function of their nutritional requirements. Positio...

Urban watersheds are often sources of nitrogen (N) to downstream systems, contributing to poor water quality. However, it is unknown which components (e.g., land cover and stormwater infrastructure type) of urban watersheds contribute to N export and which may be sites of retention. In this study we investigated which watershed characteristics control N sourcing, biogeochemical processing of ni...

We review the evolution, state of the art and future lines of research on the sources, transport pathways, and sinks of particulate trace elements in urban terrestrial environments to include the atmosphere, soils, and street and indoor dusts. Such studies reveal reductions in the emissions of some elements of historical concern such as Pb, with interest consequently focusing on other toxic tra...

Most areas are exposed to landscaping by tipping and excavation. The reasons for this are numerous. New substrates are the body of soil formation. These soils are young and not much developed or stratified into horizons. Accumulation of humus will be visible, indicating that the soils are already sinks for carbon dioxide. An adverse characteristic of soils tipped in the last 30 to 40 years is s...