Identified by the EPA as the leading threat to surface water quality in the United States, nonpoint source (NPS) pollution is channeled into rivers and streams via impervious surfaces. Impervious surfaces are anthropogenic features, such as roads, buildings, and parking lots, through which water cannot infiltrate into the soil. Research from the past 15 years shows a consistent, inverse relatio...

A wide range of urban ecosystem studies, including urban hydrology, urban climate, land use planning and resource management require current and accurate geospatial data of urban impervious surfaces. We developed an approach to quantify urban impervious surfaces as a continuous variable by using multi-sensor and multi-source datasets. Subpixel percent impervious surfaces at 30-meter resolution ...

The accurate mapping of impervious surfaces is of key significance for various urban applications. Usually, traditional methods extract the proportion image of impervious surfaces from remote sensing images; however, the proportion image cannot specify where the impervious surfaces spatially distribute within a pixel. Meanwhile, impervious surfaces often locate urban areas and have a strong cor...

The knowledge of impervious surfaces, especially the magnitude, location, geometry, spatial pattern of impervious surfaces, is significant to urban ecosystem studies, including urban hydrology, urban climate, land use planning and resource management.Impervious surface area (ISA) is considered a key indicator of environmental quality and can be used to address complex urban environmental issues...

Urban soils and vegetation contain large pools of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) and may sequester these elements at considerable rates; however, there have been no systematic studies of the composition of soils beneath the impervious surfaces that dominate urban areas. This has made it impossible to reliably estimate the net impact of urbanization on terrestrial C and N pools. In this study, we c...

Installation of impervious surfaces in urban areas has attracted increasing attention due to its potential hazard to urban ecosystems. Urban soils are suggested to have robust carbon (C) sequestration capacity; however, the C stocks and dynamics in the soils covered by impervious surfaces that dominate urban areas are still not well characterized. We compared soil organic C (SOC) densities and ...

The rapid expansion of urbanization has caused land cover change, especially the increasing area of impervious surfaces. Such alterations have significant effects on the soil ecosystem by impeding the exchange of gasses, water, and materials between soil and the atmosphere. It is unclear whether impervious surfaces have any effects on soil bacterial diversity and community composition. In the p...

Urban stormwater runoff is a transport medium for many contaminants from anthropogenic sources. There are many alternative management strategies available to treat these contaminants. One of the technologies suggested for this purpose is the use of permeable pavements to minimise the quantity of surface runoff generated by impervious surfaces within an urban catchment. Reported herein are the r...