BACKGROUND Timor-Leste's immunization coverage is among the poorest in Asia. The 2009/2010 Demographic and Health Survey found that complete vaccination coverage in urban areas, at 47.7%, was lower than in rural areas, at 54.1%. The city of Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, had even lower coverage (43.4%) than the national urban average. OBJECTIVE To better understand the service- and user-re...

Urban vegetation provides ecological services that promote both the ecosystem integrity and human well-being of urban areas, and thus is critical to urban sustainability. As a key indicator of ecological health, net primary productivity (NPP) provides valuable information about the performance of urban ecosystem in response to the changes in urban climate and atmosphere in the 21st century. In ...

This article presents a literature review that explores the challenges for planning in urban regions in connection with the preservation of ecosystem services. It further presents some best practice examples for meeting these challenges. The demand for the provision of ecosystem services within urban regions changed during the transition from a largely agrarian society to an industrial society ...

Never before humans had access to so much data so easily; however, this scenario disappears as we move away from a computer. In our cities, urban services are provided via supports, which practically have not changed in a century: bus-stop shelters, metro-stations panels and screens, maps or urban furniture 1 . This scenario brings up the opportunity to refresh the idea of services that a city ...

Urban development can impact environmental quality and ecosystem services well beyond urban extent. Many methods to map urban areas have been developed and used in the past, but most have simply tried to map existing extent of urban development, and all have been single-scale techniques. The method presented here uses a clustering approach to look beyond the extant urban area at multiple scales...