With tree planting initiatives being undertaken in different cities, careful thought needs to be put into the placement of trees, beneficiaries ecosystem services from these and potential impacts alternative schemes. Using a spatially explicit methodology within biophysical service models, this research develops multi-objective decision support framework guide future greening towards prioritizi...

Although hardly noticed or formally recognised, urban foraging by humans probably occurs in all urban settings around the world. We draw from research in India, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States to demonstrate the ubiquity and varied nature of urban foraging in different contexts. Across these different contexts, we distil seven themes that characterise and thereby advance thinking ab...

Urban runoff has been reported as the second most frequent cause of surface water pollution in the United States. Due to the incidence of runoff in urban areas, it was of interest to estimate the impact runoff may have to recent sediment quality within the lower reaches of the Passaic River. Study objectives included i) review of recent urban runoff studies to determine the occurrence and patte...

While numerous studies have examined the magnitude of the urban heat island, no large-scale study has yet analyzed its variability using an air-mass based methodology. The air-mass approach can provide unique insight by discerning how large-scale weather patterns may impact the magnitude of the heat island effect. This study utilizes the Spatial Synoptic Classification (SSC) scheme, a recently-...

This research develops innovative approaches for urban studies, applying the theories of evolutionary physics and ecosystems to urban systems and defining a theoretical interdisciplinary approach. A new social positioning method for monitoring urban mobility, named Mobile Landscapes, studies the space–time behaviour of urban society. This project uses location-based data from cell phones to rev...

BACKGROUND Each year an estimated 390 million dengue infections occur worldwide. In Malaysia, dengue is a growing public health concern but estimate of its disease burden remains uncertain. We compared the urban-rural difference of dengue seroprevalence and determined age-specific dengue seroprevalence in Malaysia. METHODS We undertook analysis on 11,821 subjects from six seroprevalence surve...

Observations from the 2007 Border Air Quality and Meteorology Study (BAQS-Met 2007) in Southern Ontario, Canada, were used to evaluate predictions of primary organic aerosol (POA) and two other carbonaceous species, black carbon (BC) and carbon monoxide (CO), made for this summertime period by Environment Canada’s AURAMS regional chemical transport model. Particle component-based factor analysi...

In this study a photoacoustic spectrometer (PA), a laser-induced incandescence instrument system (LII) and an Aerosol Mass Spectrometer were operated in parallel for in-situ measurements of black carbon (BC) light absorption enhancement. Results of a thermodenuder experiment using ambient particles in Toronto are presented first to show that LII measurements of BC are not influenced by the pres...

In rural health settings, patients with trauma who initially are transported to a community hospital often require transfer to a designated trauma center. Rural hospitals typically are not equipped or properly staffed to treat severely injured patients. When trauma occurs, transport time longer than 60 minutes from an accident scene to a place of definitive care can have detrimental effects on ...

Atmospheric CO2, CH4, and CO are measured in a variety of locations across Canada. The wavelet transform is used to find points of interest, such as the daily carbon cycle, as well as longer term oscillations. Wavelet coherence finds patterns linking the sequences around 7 to 10 day oscillations, mostly during the summer. The daily CO2 cycle is stronger in more southern and urban locales, indic...