In this paper, we use night light imagery data at two scales – the city and within the city. Since many of the urban characteristics of cities including traffic and paved area are correlated with each other we derive components for our sample of 286 cities in China. We then correlate these measures for average DN values from night light imagery at the center and periphery of the city (using buf...

County-based spatial distribution characteristics and the related geological factors for iodine in drinking-water were studied in Shandong Province (China). Spatial autocorrelation analysis and spatial scan statistic were applied to analyze the spatial characteristics. Generalized linear models (GLMs) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) studies were conducted to explore the relationshi...

Knowledge about the spatial distribution of active-layer (AL) soil thickness is indispensable for ecological modeling, precision agriculture, and land resource management. However, it is difficult to obtain the details on AL soil thickness by using conventional soil survey method. In this research, the objective is to investigate the possibility and accuracy of mapping the spatial distribution ...

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major public health problem in China, and its incidence shows certain regional disparities. Systematic investigations of the social and environmental factors influencing TB are necessary for the prevention and control of the disease. Data on cases were obtained from the Chinese Center for Disease and Prevention. Social and environmental variables were tabulated to in...

Based on annual average PM2.5 gridded dataset, this study first analyzed the spatiotemporal pattern of PM2.5 across Mainland China during 1998-2012. Then facilitated with meteorological site data, land cover data, population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data, etc., the contributions of latent geographic factors, including socioeconomic factors (e.g., road, agriculture, population, industry)...

Previous investigations of geographic concentration of urban poverty indicate the contribution of a variety of factors, such as economic restructuring and class-based segregation, racial segregation, demographic structure, and public policy. However, the models used by most past research do not consider the possibility that poverty concentration may take different forms in different locations a...

Differences in spatial supports (shape, size, etc.) among spatial data often complicate spatial data analyses, and spatial support conversions, such as aggregation, disaggregation, and interpolation, are often applied to cope with them. However, in general, spatial support conversions present the following problems: (i) how to convert data accurately? and (ii) how to reduce biases caused by the...

African Americans in the U.S. often live in poverty and segregated urban neighborhoods, many of which have dense industrial facilities resulting in high exposure to harmful air toxics. This study aims to explore the relationship between racial composition and cancer risks from air toxics exposure in Memphis/Shelby County, Tennessee, U.S.A. Air toxics data were obtained from 2005 National Air To...

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) (Brunsdon et al. 1996; Fotheringham et al. 2002) is a useful technique for modelling local spatial relationships between variables. The essential idea of GWR is that observations near to a model calibration point have more influence in the estimation of regression coefficients than observations farther away do. The standard GWR model employs a single ban...