this paper argues that the geovisualization research should go beyond the development of geovisual analytic toolbox, and pay attention to supporting human work in broad activity scale. Future generations of virtual geographic environments are expected to be capable of monitoring and recognizing context changes, reasoning about implications, and adjusting its service behavior accordingly. This w...

Geosimulation aims at modeling systems at the scale of individuals and entity-level units of the built environment and provides a new way to simulate how geographic spaces can be used by their future users, particularly in urban environments. In the MAGS Project we are developing a generic software platform for the creation of Multi-Agent Geo-Simulations involving several thousand agents intera...

Phlebotomines (Diptera: Psychodidae) are vectors of several etiological agents of human and animal diseases, including protozoans of the gender Leishmania. Precarious socioeconomic conditions and uncontrolled population growth directly influence the transmission risk of parasites and the urbanization of vector species, previously restricted to wild environments. The Marajó Archipelago is consid...

Cultural adequacy has been largely neglected in urban food environment research. In times of multiculturalism, this is an obvious shortcoming. To address questions cultural adequacy, research needs to broaden its theoretical scope. The conventional approach environments as constituted through the presence or absence specific foods particular neighborhoods especially insufficient. This argument ...

Lane detection in urban environments is a challenging task. That is mainly due to the non existence of unique models, poor quality of lane markings due to wear, occlusions due to the presence of traffic and complex road geometry. In this work we present a novel lane detection and tracking algorithm for urban road scenarios based on weak models, which is implemented by a particle filter. The alg...

The ecodesign of urban environments at different spatial scales6 is an emerging topic fostered by the research on ecodesign and urban sustainability. Urban areas and environments are expanding worldwide. Statistics of urban population share reach figures of 70% in Europe, America and Oceania and 50% globally1. This ever-increasing urban population is likely to grow even more2. With this unprece...

The environmental determinants of public health and social equity present many challenges to a sustainable urbanism-climate change, water shortages and oil dependency to name a few. There are many pathways from urban environments to human health. Numerous links have been described but some underlying mechanisms behind these relationships are less understood. Combining theory and methods is a wa...

Tree leaf-associated microbiota have been studied in natural ecosystems but less so in urban settings, where anthropogenic pressures on trees could impact microbial communities and modify their interaction with their hosts. Additionally, trees act as vectors spreading bacterial cells in the air in urban environments due to the density of microbial cells on aerial plant surfaces. Characterizing ...