Rapid urbanization and rapid urban growth present great challenges to the sustainable utilization of land resources. This paper discusses the on-going process of construction-to-ecological land conversion (CELC) in terms of three aspects: land use, environmental effects, and system responses. CELC is compared to other current land conversion strategies in China. Taking Shenzhen City as an examp...

The quality of people's knowledge of nature has always had a significant influence on their approach to wildlife and nature conservation. However, direct interactions of people with nature are greatly limited nowadays, especially because of urbanization and modern lifestyles. As a result, our isolation from the natural world has been growing. Here, we present an example of a state-of-the-art Ci...

PURPOSE To analyze whether income inequality and other social determinants are associated with suicide rate in Brazil. METHOD This study used panel data from all 5,507 Brazilian municipalities from 2000 to 2011. Suicide rates were calculated by sex and standardized by age for each municipality and year. The independent variables of the regression model included the Gini Index, per capita inco...

As human populations expand and land-use change intensifies, terrestrial ecosystems experience concurrent disturbances (e.g., urbanization fire) that may interact compound their effects on biodiversity. In the urbanizing landscapes of southern Appalachian region United States America (US), fires in mesic forests have become more frequent recent years. However, 80 years forest management practic...

As the capital of China, Beijing has experienced a continued and rapid urbanization process in the past few decades. One of the key environmental impacts of rapid urbanization is the effect of urban heat island (UHI). The objective of this study was to estimate the urbanization indexes of Beijing from 1992 to 2013 based on the stable nighttime light (NTL) data derived from the Defense Meteorolo...

Understanding the spatial pattern of soil lead (Pb) levels is essential to protecting human health. Most previous studies have examined soil Pb distributions by either urbanization gradient or land-use type. Few studies, however, have examined both factors together. It remains unclear whether the impacts of land use on soil Pb levels are consistent along the urbanization gradient. To fill this ...

Urbanization results in habitat loss and habitat fragmentation concurrently, both influencing biodiversity and ecological processes. To evaluate these impacts, it is important to understand the relationships between habitat loss and habitat fragmentation per se (HLHF) during urbanization. The objectives of this study were two-fold: 1) to quantify the different forms of the HLHF relationship dur...