Residential abandonment is on the rise in many urban areas, with unknown implications for ecosystem structure and function on land slated for partial or full restoration to native habitat. Partial decoupling of human and natural systems could reduce disturbance (e.g., trampling, recreational traffic) and modify vegetation structure in a way that alters soil carbon storage, an ecosystem function...

The neighbourhood is recognized as an important unit of analysis in research on the relation between obesogenic environments and development of obesity. One important challenge is to define the limits of the residential neighbourhood, as perceived by study participants themselves, in order to improve our understanding of the interaction between contextual features and patterns of obesity. An in...

Standard intuition suggests that residential segregation in the United States will decline when racial inequality narrows. In this paper, we hypothesize that the opposite will occur. We note that middle-class black neighborhoods are in short supply in many U.S. metropolitan areas, forcing highly educated blacks either to live in predominantly white high-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods ...

We used California's Pesticide Use Report (PUR) and land-use survey data to conduct a simulation study evaluating the potential consequences of misclassifying residential exposure from proximity to agricultural pesticide application in health effect studies. We developed a geographic model linking the PUR with crop location data from land-use surveys to assess the impact of exposure misclassifi...

Background: About 80% of deaths in 350 million cases of diabetes in the world occur in low and middle income countries. The aim of this study was to determine the status of diabetes socioeconomic inequality and the share of determinants of inequalities in Kurdistan Province, West of Iran, using two surveys in 2005 and 2009.   Methods: Data were collected from non-communicable disease su...

In perinatal epidemiology, transgenerational risk factors are defined as conditions experienced by one generation that affect the pregnancy outcomes of the next generation. The authors investigated the transgenerational effect of neighborhood poverty on infant birth weight among African Americans. Stratified and multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed on an Illinois transgenerati...