Urban agriculture is growing in cities across the United States. It has the potential to provide multiple benefits, including increased food security. Concerns about soil contamination in urban areas can be an impediment to urban agriculture. Lead is the most common contaminant in urban areas. In this paper, direct (soil ingestion via outdoor and indoor exposure) and indirect (consumption of fo...

Ecohydrology. 2017;10:e1813. https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.1813 Abstract The use of green infrastructure for reducing stormwater runoff is increasingly common. One under‐studied component of the green infrastructure network is the urban forest system. Trees can play an important role as the “first line of defense” for restoring more natural hydrologic regimes in urban watersheds by intercepting r...

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................1 Rainfall and Runoff Characteristics for Urban Areas .............................................................................................2 Small Storm Hydrology.............................................................

Recent urban landscape vegetation surveys conducted in many cities in China identified numerous plant nutrient deficiencies, especially in newly developed cities. Soil nutrients and soil nutrient management in the cities of Hubei province have not received adequate attention to date. The aims of this study were to characterize the available nutrients of urban soils from nine cities in Hubei pro...

Regularly managed electric power line corridors may provide habitats for both early-successional grassland plant species and disturbance-dependent alien plant species. These habitats are especially important in urban areas, where they can help conserve native grassland species and communities in urban greenspace. However, they can also provide further footholds for potentially invasive alien sp...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous organic pollutants in urban environments and are considered as the priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The objective of this study was to determine the depth-wise distribution (0–15, 15–30, and 30–45 cm) of 16 PAHs compounds in four urban soils of different land uses (residential, public parks, public buildings,...

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...

The effects of irrigation with treated urban wastewater (WW) on the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) diversity and soil microbial activities were assayed on a long-term basis in a semiarid orange-tree orchard. After 43 years, the soil irrigated with fresh water (FW) had higher AMF diversity than soils irrigated with WW. Microbial activities were significantly higher in the soils irrigated wit...

Arsenic contamination is of great environmental concern due to its toxic effects as a carcinogen. Knowledge of arsenic background concentrations is important for land application of wastes and for making remediation decisions. The soil clean-up target level for arsenic in Florida (0.8 and 3.7 mg kg for residential and commercial areas, y1 respectively) lies within the range of both background a...