water obtained from any source may contain impurities induced by erosion, dissolved minerals, dissolved gases and material produced from organic matter decomposing. if the amount of these substances exceed a certain limit, not only the water would not be potable, but the water containing the material will not be suitable to be used in most applications, or at least before treatment cannot be ap...

In April 1995, the US Geological Survey began a study to determine the occurrence and temporal distribution of 49 pesticides and pesticide metabolites in air and rain samples from an urban and an agricultural sampling site in Mississippi. The study was a joint effort between the National Water-Quality Assessment and the Toxic Substances Programs and was part of a larger study examining the occu...

The Manchester urban area evolved rapidly in the early 19th century from a series of small towns to a major industrial conurbation with huge material flows and worldwide trade connections. A combination of the availability of nearby coalfields, canals, and free trade, which encouraged entrepreneurial enterprise, made Manchester into the ‘shock’ city of the industrial revolution. Rapid nucleated...

Detailed studies on the spatiotemporal patterns of urban agglomeration in the Middle Yangtze River Basin (MYRB) are rare. This paper analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization in the MYRB using multi-temporal remote sensing data circa 2000, 2008 and 2016 integrated with geographic information system (GIS) techniques and landscape analysis approaches. A multi-level analysis of the rate...

This study aimed to evaluate the co-occurrence of caffeine and the extent of its influence as compared to other traditional water quality parameters (microbiological and physico-chemical) in order to characterize it as an efficient indicator of anthropic pollution of urban aquatic environments. Caffeine is an ingredient in a variety of beverages (coffee, tea, and caffeinated soft drinks) and nu...

After a major flood with a peak discharge of 177 m3/s in the city of Martigny (Valais, Switzerland) by the alpine river Drance in October 2000, the local authorities are strengthening efforts for the protection of the urban area. The Drance has an annual average discharge of 10 m3/s and the most important floods occur in the late summer. Two lateral torrents potentially supply the Drance with d...

Despite the fact that cities are increasingly the fundamental socioeconomic units of human societies worldwide, a unified quantitative framework concerning urban form and function has yet to be established. As a step in this direction, we analyze settlement data from the Prehispanic Basin of Mexico to show that this system displays spatial scaling properties analogous to those observed for mode...

Sediment stratigraphy and diatom succession were studied in an 80.5-cm core taken from the deepest part of Third Sister Lake, a small kettle hole in a recently urbanized landscape of southeastern Michigan. Alternating light clay and dark organic bands documented sporadic inputs of clay from outside the basin during rain events, rather than annual laminations. Urban construction activity also di...

ALAN L. KOLATA Cities, and the larger political formations within which they are embedded, are dynamic congeries of political, economic, and social institutions that are shaped and reshaped by historical circumstance. This dynamism and mutability in the face of exogenou-s forces might suggest the impossibility of a coherent, general theory about the forms and forces of urban transformation of t...

Studies on the effects of urbanization on stream ecosystems have evolved from documenting impacts to attempting to understand the driving factors responsible for stream conditions. In 1999, the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment Program initiated a series of pilot studies to assess the effects of urbanization on physical habitat, biotic assemblages (algal, fish, inverteb...