BACKGROUND: Dramatic disparities in a range of health outcomes persist in Alameda County, California. Age-standardised mortality rates range from 300 to 1300 deaths per 100 000 across census tracts in this county, with life expectancies lagging by 10 years in the most disadvantaged census tracts. Finding factors at the community level that affect neighbourhood health levels is a key step towards addressing these inequalities. Walking to work may be one of these factors, and is something that local policy makers could effectively act upon through city planning and maintenance initiatives.

The classification of remotely sensed images such as aerial photographs or satellite sensor images for deriving ecosystem-related maps (e.g., land cover, land use, vegetation, soil) is generally based on clustering of spatial entities within a spectral space. In most cases, Boolean logic is applied in order to map landscape patterns. One major concern is that this implies an ability to divide the gradual variability of the Earth's surface into a finite number of discrete non-overlapping classes, which are considered to be exhaustively defined and mutually exclusive.

Agricultural land suitability evaluation for crop production is a process that requires specialized geo-environmental information and the expertise of a computer scientist to analyze and interpret the information. This paper presents ALSE, an intelligent system for assessing land suitability for different types of crops in tropical and subtropical regions (e.g. mango, banana, papaya, citrus, and guava) based on geo-environmental factors that automates the process of evaluation and illustrates the results on an attribute table.

Fresh water provisioning is a crucial ecosystem service (ES) in the agrarian societies of East Africa. Water resources are highly dependent on several other ES such as the water retention capacity of vegetation and the purification properties of soil. However, ES are constantly challenged by dynamic changes within water–land–vegetation–human relations. Environmental policies usually address immediate anthropic pressures but overlook multiple historical stressors, or ‘drivers’.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program recently inventoried trees on 257 sample plots in the urbanized areas of Oregon and Washington. Plots were located on the standard grid (≈1 plot/2428ha) and installed with the 4-subplot footprint (≈.067ha with 4 circular subplots).

Assessment of the environmental impact of Non Point Source (NPS) pollutants on a global, regional and localized scale is the key component for achieving sustainability of agriculture as well as preserving the environment. The knowledge and information required to address the problem of assessing the impact of NPS pollutants like Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), etc., on the environment crosses several sub-disciplines like remote sensing, Geographical Information System (GIS), hydrology and soil science.

The present study was carried out in Singrauli area of the north India to know the water quality at selected sites. Physico-chemical parameters like pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), bicarbonate, hardness, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, copper, iron, cobalt, manganese, zinc, and chromium were analyzed in 27 water samples. Locations selected for sampling were based on the preliminary field survey carried out to understand the overall impact of mining and industrialization on the surface and groundwater resources of Singrauli.

Natural, protected areas offer many possibilities for recreation in rural areas such as camping, one of the most popular activities. The system established for protected areas in Turkey aims to provide a foundation for conserving areas for recreation. One such area, Abant Natural Park, is convenient for visits from Turkey’s two most populated metropolitan areas, Istanbul and Ankara. It also attracts tourists from other regions and countries.

This paper examines the extensive and intensive margin changes in land use in the U.S. likely to be induced by biofuel policies and the implications of these policies for GHG emissions over the 2007-2022 period. The policies considered here include the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by itself as well as combined with current biofuel tax credits or a carbon price policy.

Land use and land cover change (LUCC) can modify the physical and thermodynamic characteristics of the land surface, including surface roughness, albedo, and vegetation fraction, among others. These direct changes can result in a series of impacts on regional climate. In this paper, the simulated results over China under the scenario of LUCC using weather research and forecasting model are presented. The period for the simulation is from December 2006 to December 2011. Two experiments are initialized by the LUCC datasets derived from the MODIS data of 2001 and 2008, respectively.