Urban acoustic environments consist of various sound sources including traffic noise, human-generated sounds, and natural sounds that affect the soundscape perception of a given location. However, these sound sources are indistinguishable by noise maps that are based on sound pressure levels. Hence, soundscape maps based on the perception of sounds are necessary to describe an acoustic environm...

introduction one of the critical issues associated with sustainability in the twenty-first century is how cities are growing and developing in the space. rapid urban growth and physical development of cities cause disintegration of the spatial organization of cities and consequently spatial inequality between urban spaces. this phenomenon can be considered as spatial segregation or fragmentatio...

Trees are valued in California’s urban areas for the many benefits they provide, including modification of the local environment. Besides serving as a source of oxygen and water vapor, trees give off other chemical compounds into the atmosphere, including volatile organic compounds (VOC) that can react in the atmosphere and contribute to the formation of ozone, a principal air quality problem i...

China’s domestic urban planning only worked on researches of urban space control, the scope definition of urban development is not clear enough. The purpose of this study is to present a new urban growth boundary (UGB) delimitation method which combined land suitability evaluation (LSE) and cellular automata (CA). This method gave credence to LSE’s advantage in sustainable land use, and CA’s ad...

Urbanization is one of the major forms of habitat alteration occurring at the present time. Although this is typically deleterious to biodiversity, some species flourish within these human-modified landscapes, potentially leading to negative and/or positive interactions between people and wildlife. Hence, up-to-date assessment of urban wildlife populations is important for developing appropriat...

From time to time, emergencies occur where pedestrians are required to flee large metropolitan areas. Some of these areas may include: concerts, parades, and stadiums. An urban-based pedestrian modeling system can be developed to take into account the set of interdependencies, or specific repercussions, which may affect the outcome when a large number of individuals are required to quickly evac...

Urban planning is associated with land transformation from natural areas to modified and developed ones which leads to modification of natural environment. The basic knowledge of relationship between both should be ascertained before proceeding for the development of natural areas. Changes on land surface due to build up pavements, roads and similar land cover, affect surface water flow. There ...

BACKGROUND To study the nasal carriage rate of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) (including methicillin-resistant strains) in secondary school community of the urban and rural districts of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, a cross-sectional population based survey was carried out in the city Duhok and rural areas of Amedya, Akre and Zakho. METHODS Nasal swabs were obtained from nostrils of 509 st...