Urban development has a marked effect on the ecological and behavioural traits of many living organisms, including birds. In this paper, we analysed differences in the numbers of wintering birds between rural and urban areas in Poland. We also analysed species richness and abundance in relation to longitude, latitude, human population size, and landscape structure. All these parameters were ana...

Over recent decades, the study of psychological restoration has attracted a considerable amount of interest within and without the boundaries of environmental psychology, with most of the work focused on analyzing restoration in natural contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the (possible) restorative potential of urban settings, as they have usually been expected not to be restor...

Bird feeding is one of the most widespread direct interactions between man and nature, and this has important social and environmental consequences. However, this activity can differ between rural and urban habitats, due to inter alia habitat structure, human behaviour and the composition of wintering bird communities. We counted birds in 156 squares (0.25 km(2) each) in December 2012 and again...

Vegetation as an essential positive sustainable element of urban spaces has recently gathered increased attention from landscape architects and urban planners. Vegetation growing in urban settings can bring environmental benefits that enhance the health and well-being of citizens through, for example, improved air quality, increased thermal insulation for buildings, reduction of the urban heat-...

A Cellular Automata model based on Partial Least Squares Approaches is proposed for simulating complex urban systems. The core part of Geo-CA model is the transition rules and a mass of independent spatial variables are involved in the process of creating CA model. Studies have focused on eliminating correlation using Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), but t...

visibility is an important factor of environmental quality that has various influences on the quality of neighborhood. this paper aimed to find the relationship between urban form and visual quality. a public space with a spatial configuration in one of bushehr city's neighborhoods was selected as the case study. bushehr city is surrounded by urban development and the sea. compact urban sp...

Cities are the “engines of growth” because entrepreneurial and creative activities are concentrated in cities. This suggests that cities grow by hosting new businesses and “churning” industries advantageously. In so doing, cities need to adapt their spatial structure to mitigate negative externalities. Our previous paper (Lee and Gordon 2007) found that the links between urban structure and gro...

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP)’s Operational Line-scan System (OLS) stable nighttime light (NTL) imagery offers a good opportunity for characterizing the extent and dynamics of urban development at the global and regional scales. However, their ability to characterize intra-urban variation is limited due to saturation and blooming of the data values. In this study, we adopt...