10 We examined the impact of the urban environment on the spatial and temporal activity of brood parasitic Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) in Boulder County, CO, USA. We found that cowbirds used the urban areas for foraging and roosting and traveled into the 3240 ha wildland preserve of ponderosa pine in the mornings to parasitize songbird hosts. Cowbird abundance decreased with distance...

Industrial activities and high traffic density are the most important heavy metal pollution sources in urban areas. Roadside dust created by atmospheric deposition can be one of the best indicators for heavy metal contamination levels. The present study reports the spatial distribution patterns and degree of heavy metal pollution (Cd, Cr, Ni, Pb, Zn, and As) in 50 roadside dust samples from urb...

Road traffic has severe effects on animals, especially when road-kills are involved. In many countries, official road-kill data are provided by hunters or police; there are also road-kill observations reported by citizen scientists. The aim of the current study was to test whether road-kill reports by hunters stem from similar landscapes than those reported by citizen scientists. We analysed th...

Roads are significant objects of an infrastructure and the extraction of roads from aerial and satellite images are important for different applications such as automated map generation and change detection. Roads are also important to detect other structures such as buildings and urban areas. In this paper, the road extraction approach is based on Active Contour Models for 1-meter resolution g...

Identifying the factors that influence the spread of exotic species is essential for evaluating the present and future extent of plant invasions and for the development of eradication programs. We randomly established a network of 250 plots on an exotic Pinus radiata D. Don plantation on Tenerife Island in order to determine if roads and urban centers are favouring the spread of exotic plant sp...

BACKGROUND Air pollution from road traffic has been associated to an increased risk of lung cancer. Herein, we investigated the association between lung cancer mortality and residence near Italian highways or national major roads. METHODS Information on deaths for lung cancer registered from 1990 to 2010 and stratified by age, gender, and urban or rural municipality of residence at death were...

Protected areas' chief conservation objectives are to include species within their boundaries and protect them from negative external pressures. Many protected areas are not achieving these goals, perhaps in part due to land development inside and outside protected areas. We conducted spatial analyses to evaluate the ability of Canadian protected areas to mitigate the effects of nearby land dev...

The objective of this research is to evaluate multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR data for urban land-cover classification using a novel classification scheme. Six-date RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric SAR data in both ascending and descending orbits were acquired during June to September 2008 in the rural-urban fringe of the Greater Toronto Area. The major land-cover types are builtup areas, roa...