The proliferation of artificial lighting at night is one of the key anthropogenic changes associated with urbanised areas as well as some non-urban areas. Disruption to natural light/dark regimes can have considerable effects on the timing of different behaviours of birds, particularly during the breeding season. However, the effect of artificial lights on the timing of behaviours during winter has received relatively little attention, despite the fact that time partitioning of foraging can have implications for avian winter survival.

Woodland fragments, in small historical cities, are commonly regarded as temporary voids in an urban matrix, yet to be allocated a land-use, under city planning regulations. However, they could display relevant plant diversity, and contribute to urban ecosystem services. This study combined surveys at 100 m², and at patch level, with the aim to investigate how patch size, stand and urbanization, affected the structure of plant communities in thirty woodland fragments (0.1–2 ha), spontaneously developing in the small, historical city of Padova (Northern Italy).

Previous studies at the scale of a city have shown that surface soil nutrients, pH, and soil organic matter (SOM) can vary by land cover, land use, and management. This study was conducted in Baltimore County, Maryland, to quantify the differences in characteristics of soil in a residential neighborhood and adjacent forest patch sampling at a fine scale. The first objective was to compare soil characteristics in a residential neighborhood among ecotope types of forest, lawn, and planting beds that were underlain by the same parent material and thus only differed in plant cover.

Research increasingly suggests that moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) is essential to children's health. However, little is known about the extent to which and when different urban environments influence the extent to which children engage in MVPA. To this end, this study explores the relationship between children's MVPA and urban land use and land cover (LULC) for several temporal subdivisions of children's weekly routines (before school, after school and weekends).

Hollow-bearing trees provide habitat for diverse taxonomic groups and as such they are recognised for their importance globally. There is, however scant reference to this resource relative within urban forest patches. The functional ecology of habitat remnants along an urbanisation gradient plays an important ecological, social and economic role within urban landscapes. Here we quantify the impacts of urbanisation, landscape, environmental, disturbance (past and present) and stand variables on hollow-bearing tree density within urban forest patches.

Based on an extensive survey of woodland visitors in Wallonia, south Belgium, we examined a wide range of individual-, residential- and destination-level variables for their associations with the distance travelled for woodland leisure on foot, by bicycle and by car. For each transport mode, explanatory bivariate analyses were conducted firstly to identify potential correlates of the distances travelled. Then, cross-classified multilevel analysis was performed to build estimation models for the trip distance.

In this study, we have considered the relationship between the spatial configuration of land use and water quality in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area. Using land use types, landscape metrics, and long-term water quality data, as well as statistical and spatial analysis, we determined that most water quality parameters were negatively correlated with non-wood forest and urban areas but were strongly positively correlated with the proportion of forest area.

The concept of Ecosystem Services has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. Among the different categories, typical Ecosystem Services categories such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban contexts.

Landscape connectivity is of paramount importance not only in maintaining both functionality and resilience of social-ecological systems, but also in providing Ecosystem Services (ESs). Despite recent efforts, several issues still need to be faced to fully integrate ESs evaluation relating to landscape connectivity into effective plans and environmental assessment procedures. Choosing an appropriate scale of analysis is one of the most problematic topics, since it can profoundly affect the evaluation of single patch contribution to global connectivity.

There are both semantic and technical differences between land use (LU) and land cover (LC) measurements. In cartographic approaches, these differences are often neglected, giving rise to a hybrid classification. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding and characterization of the two classification schemes using a comparison that allows maximization of the informative power of both. The analysis was carried out in the Molise region (Central Italy) using sample information from the Italian Land Use Inventory (IUTI).

Understanding how landscape, host, and pathogen traits contribute to disease exposure requires systematic evaluations of pathogens within and among host species and geographic regions. The relative importance of these attributes is critical for management of wildlife and mitigating domestic animal and human disease, particularly given rapid ecological changes, such as urbanization.

Urbanization is becoming increasingly important in terms of climate change and ecosystem functionality worldwide. We are only beginning to understand how the processes of urbanization influence ecosystem dynamics and how peri-urban environments contribute to climate change. Brisbane in South East Queensland (SEQ) currently has the most extensive urban sprawl of all Australian cities. This leads to substantial land use changes in urban and peri-urban environments and the subsequent gaseous emissions from soils are to date neglected for IPCC climate change estimations.