BACKGROUND Air pollution from road traffic has been associated to an increased risk of lung cancer. Herein, we investigated the association between lung cancer mortality and residence near Italian highways or national major roads. METHODS Information on deaths for lung cancer registered from 1990 to 2010 and stratified by age, gender, and urban or rural municipality of residence at death were...

Protected areas' chief conservation objectives are to include species within their boundaries and protect them from negative external pressures. Many protected areas are not achieving these goals, perhaps in part due to land development inside and outside protected areas. We conducted spatial analyses to evaluate the ability of Canadian protected areas to mitigate the effects of nearby land dev...

Urbanization continues to accelerate and profoundly transform the surface of the earth, resulting in devastating effects on the structure and functioning of ecosystems throughout the world. In the Phoenix metropolitan region, urbanization has dramatically changed the Sonoran Desert landscape in the past several decades. To understand how urban ecosystems work and to achieve ecological sustainab...

Taking Harare metropolitan province in Zimbabwe as an example, we classified Landsat imagery (1984, 2002, 2008 and 2013) by using support vector machines (SVMs) and analyzed built-up and non-built-up changes. The overall classification accuracy for the four dates ranged from 89% to 95%, while the overall kappa varied from 86% to 93%. The results demonstrate that SVMs provide a cost-effective te...

BACKGROUND It is currently not clear whether individuals living in metropolitan areas differ from individuals living in rural and urban areas with respect to smoking behaviours. Therefore, we sought to explore the relation between residential area and smoking behaviours in Germany. METHODS We used a nationwide German census representative for the general population of Germany. A number of 181...

Metropolitan Adelaide in Australia is dominated by low-density suburbs with an extensive and large road supply, which brings with it car-dependent lifestyles that are ultimately unsustainable in the longer term. Changes are needed to make a city such as Adelaide less car-dependent towards a city that relies on more sustainable transport modes for its day to day urban travel needs. This paper pr...

Housing developments in Lagos State peri-urban settlements have contributed immensely to the alleviation of the challenges of housing deficits in central Lagos. This research aims at examining the characteristics of housing development in the peri-urban settlements of Lagos State, Nigeria. Using a case study approach, housing developments in peri-urban settlements in Ibeju-Lekki Local Governmen...