Often centralized water supply, sanitation and solid waste services struggle to keep up with the rapid expansion of urban areas. The peri-urban areas are at the forefront of this expansion and it is here where decentralized technologies are increasingly being implemented. The introduction of decentralized technologies allows for the development of new opportunities that enable the recovery and ...

A serious concern for managers of water resources, pathogens in the urban environment easily enter waters through a number of pathways, including discharge of inadequately treated sewage, stormwater runoff, combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overflows. Pathogens in US ambient water bodies are regulated under the Clean Water Act (CWA), while pathogens in drinking water supplies are regu...

Snowmelt dominates the hydrograph of many temperate montane streams, yet little work has characterized how streamwater sources and nitrogen (N) dynamics vary across wildland to urban land use gradients in these watersheds. Across a third-order catchment in Salt Lake City, Utah, we asked where and when groundwater vs shallow surface water inputs controlled stream discharge and N dynamics. Stream...

Buildings structures and surfaces are explicitly being used to grow plants, and these "urban plantings" are generally designed for aesthetic value. Urban plantings also have the potential to contribute significant "ecological values" by increasing urban habitat for animals such as arthropods and by increasing plant productivity. In this study, we evaluated how the provision of these additional ...

BACKGROUND The functional convergence of tree transpiration has rarely been tested for tree species growing under urban conditions even though it is of significance to elucidate the relationship between functional convergence and species differences of urban trees for establishing sustainable urban forests in the context of forest water relations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We measured sa...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org H are increasingly influencing biogeochemical cycles at a global scale (Vitousek et al. 1997; Rojstaczer et al. 2001). From the publication of “man’s role in changing the face of the Earth” (Thomas 1956) to the recent syntheses on climate change (eg Solomon et al. 2007), the role of cities in altered biogeochemical cycles has receiv...

This paper uses simple hydro-economic optimization to investigate a wide range of regional water system management options for northern Baja California, Mexico. Hydro-economic optimization models, even with parsimonious model formulations, enable investigation of promising water management portfolios for supplying water to agricultural, environmental and urban users. CALVIN, a generalized hydro...

Leptospirosis is an emerging disease around the globe. South Andaman Island is an endemic region for leptospirosis. We herein compared the prevalence of leptospires in urban and rural areas of South Andaman Island. The PCR detection and isolation of Leptospira revealed that pathogenic leptospires were prevalent in sewage water and household drainage water in urban areas and in paddy fields, veg...