Shorter Viewing Distance Reduces Contrast in Man-Made Environments

Anthropogenic activities contribute to changes in the range and distribution of species. Globalization is resulting in human‐mediated dispersal that is causing a breakdown in normal biogeographic barriers. But the impact of anthropogenic activities on plant pathogen communities is still poorly understood. We conducted an eDNA metabarcoding study to compare communities of oomycetes, a group of eukaryotic microorganisms that comprises important crop and tree pathogens, in urban, natural, and interface environments. Oomycete diversity and abundance were highest in human impacted urban environments and lowest in natural environments, while the interface environments were intermediate. Urban environments had the highest proportion of sites where species of the plant pathogenic genus Phytophthora were found, as well as the largest number of unknown or undescribed Phytophthora species. The taxa overlap between urban and interface environments was one order of magnitude larger than the overlap between urban and natural environments. Our analyses show that urban/natural interface areas likely act as a bridge for invasion into natural environments. This could impact both the natural biota and natural ecosystem processes. Our study serves as a warning that some Phytophthora species introduced from nurseries or spread by human movement could pose a threat to natural ecosystems. Shifting patterns in oomycete communities could interfere with natural ecosystem processes and result in increases in disease and ecosystem declines.

Towards a systematic understanding of the dynamic fate of polychlorinated biphenyls in indoor, urban and rural environments

Effects of blue space exposure in urban and natural environments on psychological and physiological responses: A within-subject experiment

Antimicrobial resistance and virulence factors profile of Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli isolated from different environments exposed to anthropogenic activity

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to analyze brain region activity when viewing landscapes

Bertiella sp., a cestode known to infect a variety of hosts, including nonhuman primates and humans, was identified in Paraguay as early as 1895, but no systematic analysis of wild primates' gastrointestinal parasites has ever been carried out in Paraguay. Increased urbanization in southwest Paraguay has pushed the Paraguayan howler monkey (Alouatta caraya) into anthropogenic habitats, particularly in the city of Pilar (Ñeembucú department), giving rise to greater potential for zoonotic transmission between wild primates and humans. From July to December 2018, fecal samples were noninvasively collected from 48 howlers inside Pilar (urban environment), the Pilar Military Base (intermediate environment), and a ranch 27 km outside Pilar in the humid Chaco (natural environment) and analyzed for Bertiella eggs and proglottids using macro-analysis and formol-ether sedimentation. Howlers living in the urban environment had the highest rates of Bertiella infection (50% prevalence), with considerably lower infection rates in the intermediate environment (6.25% prevalence) and natural habitats (0% prevalence). A χ2 goodness-of-fit test indicated a significant difference between the three habitat types (p = .007, χ2 = 10.005, df = 2). Whilethe habitat seems to impact the frequency of infection, Bertiella was not observed to select for other factors such as age or sex of the primate host. Here we identified a significant increase in the frequency of Bertiella infection in an urban environment, which can then be further transmitted to new hosts with more direct primate contact. Bertiella infection has already been documented in humans in Paraguay, all of which were associated with close primate contact. As howlers move into more urban habitats due to urbanization and habitat fragmentation, Bertiella could be introduced into this new ecosystem and has the potential to cause further infections in humans.

In China, with the acceleration of urbanization, people pay more attention to the quality of urban environment. Air pollution, vegetation destruction, water waste and pollution, and waste sorting have restricted the sustainable development of urban environment. It is important to evaluate the impact of these environmental concerns as a prerequisite to implement an effective urban environmental sustainability policy. The aim of this paper is to establish a system for evaluating sustainable urban environmental quality in China. We extracted six dimensions and 29 criteria for assessing urban sustainable environment. Then, a fuzzy technique and the best worst method were applied to obtain the weights for the dimensions and criteria. Next, grey possibility values were applied to evaluate the sustainable environmental quality of five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou in China. A sensitivity analysis was performed to identify how the ranking of these five cities changed when varying the weights of each criterion. The results show that pollution control, the natural environment, and water management are the three most important dimensions for urban environmental quality evaluation. We suggest that controlling pollutant emissions, strengthening food waste management, improving clean production processes, and utilizing heat energy are the effective measures to improve the urban environment and achieve sustainable urban environmental development.

Long-term evolution (LTE) signals are potential signals-of-opportunity for position and navigation, especially in challenging urban and indoor environments. A major challenge is that the LTE signal time-of-arrival (TOA) estimations are susceptible to the multipath propagation effects. In this paper, the multipath estimating delay lock loop (MEDLL), which is originally designed for global positioning system receivers, is applied to LTE signal TOA estimation in multipath environments. We derive the analytical expression of the correlation function for LTE signals and present the procedure for estimating parameters of the detected multipath components. Two initialization methods without and with super-resolution algorithm (SRA) are developed for the MEDLL. Our analyses show that the MEDLL with SRA-based initialization can achieve better multipath resolution, while the one without SRA has less complexity. Extensive simulations involving static multipath scenarios are conducted to examine the statistical TOA estimation performance of the proposed MEDLL with LTE cell-specific reference signal. The simulation results and computational complexity analysis indicate that the proposed MEDLL outperforms the conventional delay lock loop and SRA in term of multipath mitigation performance and computational complexity. Experimental results using real collected LTE signals in urban environments are also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique for realistic scenarios.

It is not all bad for the grey city – A crossover study on physiological and psychological restoration in a forest and an urban environment

Poetic city, which is based on traditional Chinese spiritscape1 aesthetics, is an important aesthetic aim of a modern city environmental construction. A poetic city has not only the beautiful natural environment of the mountains and water, but also the regional tradition of shanshui culture, which is an organic combination of a city natural and cultrual environment. Creating a poetic modern city needs to show the poetic environment of the city natural mountains and water, to create the cultural life with poetry and pictures, and to choose a model of the city environmental development with distinctive regional characteristics.

Processing natural scenes requires the visual system to integrate local features into global object descriptions. To achieve coherent representations, the human brain uses statistical dependencies to guide weighting of local feature conjunctions. Pairwise interactions among feature detectors in early visual areas may form the early substrate of these local feature bindings. To investigate local interaction structures in visual cortex, we combined psychophysical experiments with computational modeling and natural scene analysis. We first measured contrast thresholds for 2 × 2 grating patch arrangements (plaids), which differed in spatial frequency composition (low, high, or mixed), number of grating patch co-alignments (0, 1, or 2), and inter-patch distances (1° and 2° of visual angle). Contrast thresholds for the different configurations were compared to the prediction of probability summation (PS) among detector families tuned to the four retinal positions. For 1° distance the thresholds for all configurations were larger than predicted by PS, indicating inhibitory interactions. For 2° distance, thresholds were significantly lower compared to PS when the plaids were homogeneous in spatial frequency and orientation, but not when spatial frequencies were mixed or there was at least one misalignment. Next, we constructed a neural population model with horizontal laminar structure, which reproduced the detection thresholds after adaptation of connection weights. Consistent with prior work, contextual interactions were medium-range inhibition and long-range, orientation-specific excitation. However, inclusion of orientation-specific, inhibitory interactions between populations with different spatial frequency preferences were crucial for explaining detection thresholds. Finally, for all plaid configurations we computed their likelihood of occurrence in natural images. The likelihoods turned out to be inversely related to the detection thresholds obtained at larger inter-patch distances. However, likelihoods were almost independent of inter-patch distance, implying that natural image statistics could not explain the crowding-like results at short distances. This failure of natural image statistics to resolve the patch distance modulation of plaid visibility remains a challenge to the approach.

Research methods For substantiation of the research results, the following methods of scientific analysis were used: systemic, situational, historic, logical, and typological; methods of structural and functional, descriptive expertise, statistical, graphical, and table analysis, economic and mathematical modeling. Introduction Swiftness of changes, which take place in the biosphere, their direct interconnection and interdependence with the results of human activities make local city authorities implement modern and safe technological solutions. The ecological doctrine of Russia, which was passed over the recent years, formed legal foundations for ecological management of urban environment and offered to use the mechanism of public-private partnership and organization of small and medium business for these purposes. Contemporary urban management includes the following spheres of activities: provision of population with main services (safe drinking water, high-quality services in healthcare and education); effective use of local resources; formation of ecological frame and innovational infrastructure. During evaluation of urban economy, it is important to provide correct accounting of the level of human influence on the environment [2,3]. Types of human influence on nature include: industrial influence according to sectorial peculiarities; communal and transport influence; influence on nature and landscape environment. The Green Bridge initiative, which appeared in 2012 at the Summit Rio+20, became a practical mechanism of international transition to the "green economy" with focus at technological progress and increase of experience of environment management. Another relevant example is strategic approach to development of cities, established by the European Commission. The documents clearly determined top-priority directions, formulates goals and indicators for each of them (Fig.1). A rather large circle of studies confirms that economy, based on knowledge, became a reality. Knowledge becomes a source of well-being, so it is important to determine which knowledge and management are able to provide competitive advantage for cities. The achieved level of science, education, and production in cities is rather important for solving this issue. A new view at cities management was developed due to the EU's passing the concept of technological platforms which are to concentrate efforts of authorities, scientists, and entrepreneurs in the sphere of promotion of nature-like and resource renewable technologies [11, 12]. Axiomatical statement that nature can take a lot ceased to be a reality. Load on nature environment became so huge that many cities ceased to be safe for living. A lot of time passed before this was realized, but not amended. It is necessary to change approaches to organization of ecology management in a city: creation of single base of legal and normative regulation; conduct of wide propaganda and explanatory work among population for saving attitude towards urban resources and natural environment; application of modern integral methodologies of calculations and methods of ecology management; use of mechanisms of public-private and municipal-state partnership during realization of infrastructural projects; stimulation of small enterprises' constructing complexes for separate collection of communal waste [8,9]. Table 1 systematizes main factors and indicators of socio-economic development of middle-sized cities. The most perspective concept of city development in the XXI century, in view of ecological limitations (environment's possibility to accept and absorb various types of waste and pollution of human activities; level of non-return of natural resources, spent by human)--green cities. Main approaches to provision of development of green cities to their ecological balance could be formulated in the following way: urban planning should be started from analysis of plans of development of the country and region and have full analysis of ecological indicators of the city development [9]. …

Previous research has shown that interacting with natural environments vs. more urban or built environments can have salubrious psychological effects, such as improvements in attention and memory. Even viewing pictures of nature vs. pictures of built environments can produce similar effects. A major question is: What is it about natural environments that produces these benefits? Problematically, there are many differing qualities between natural and urban environments, making it difficult to narrow down the dimensions of nature that may lead to these benefits. In this study, we set out to uncover visual features that related to individuals' perceptions of naturalness in images. We quantified naturalness in two ways: first, implicitly using a multidimensional scaling analysis and second, explicitly with direct naturalness ratings. Features that seemed most related to perceptions of naturalness were related to the density of contrast changes in the scene, the density of straight lines in the scene, the average color saturation in the scene and the average hue diversity in the scene. We then trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict whether a scene was perceived as being natural or not based on these low-level visual features and we could do so with 81% accuracy. As such we were able to reliably predict subjective perceptions of naturalness with objective low-level visual features. Our results can be used in future studies to determine if these features, which are related to naturalness, may also lead to the benefits attained from interacting with nature.

Immersion in nature has been linked to wide-ranging benefits on mental health and cognitive functions, from reducing stress to enhancing creativity. However, a walk in nature is not always feasible, and whether a proxy for nature immersion via a mental walk in nature can elicit the same benefits as a physical walk remains largely unknown. Accordingly, the current study utilized guided imagery to examine whether a mental walk in nature would improve creativity in general and when compared to a mental walk in an urban environment. We implemented a within-subjects design, wherein participants completed both mental walk conditions (in a nature and urban environment) at least five days apart in counterbalanced order on an online platform. During each session, participants (N = 97) completed two pre-walk tasks assessing convergent (measured by the Remote Associates Test) and divergent creative thinking (measured by the Alternate Uses Test), followed by a mental walk in either a nature or urban environment, then finally the identical two post-walk creativity tasks. After five days, they repeated the same procedure with a mental walk in the other environment. While comparisons of post-walk creativity scores between the nature and urban environment did not significantly differ from each other, the comparisons between the pre- and post-walk creativity scores revealed a significant improvement in convergent creative thinking in the nature environment condition, but not the urban environment condition. Our results suggest that taking a mental walk in nature can enhance at least one aspect of creativity, therefore providing preliminary evidence for the potential to access the creative benefits of mentally immersing ourselves in nature. These findings have important implications for those who wish to enjoy the benefits of nature but are unable to readily access nature physically.

In the case of road routes in natural and urban environments, a problem arises with a weak foundation at the boundaries of the easement of the facilities. The weak foundation is in the form of landslides, unstable varieties and ravines on which an embankment is built. In an urban environment, the weak base usually covers a much wider area than the easement of the roadways and streets to be strengthened. In order to avoid stabilization of the entire affected city infrastructure and to limit the strengthening activities only to the extent of the reconstructed road or street, it is necessary to implement an innovative technical solution of the "ground bridge" type. When in a natural environment it is possible to repair the drainage facilities that caused the accident, a temporary stabilization of the earth's foundation is reached. Due to the lack of support, the strengthening facilities should provide options for additional stabilization of the slopes, which would create conditions to be included in a "land bridge" type facility. The current study is devoted to the technical possibilities for mastering the problems related to a weak earth foundation.