scholarly journals Ecosystem Services and Disservices of Vegetation in Recreational Urban Blue-Green Spaces—Some Recommendations for Greenery Shaping

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1077
Author(s):  
Agata Ćwik ◽  
Tomasz Wójcik ◽  
Maria Ziaja ◽  
Magdalena Wójcik ◽  
Katarzyna Kluska ◽  
...  

Urban water bodies are an important asset in terms of climate change. The accompanying vegetation is an integral part of the waterside space system and a source of ecosystem services and disservices. The composition of greenery in waterside spaces should therefore be preceded by detailed research. This research would be the basis for the development of recommendations for enhancement of the positive impact of vegetation on humans and minimisation of its negative effect. The aim of the study was to identify ecosystem services and disservices of vegetation in the four most important waterside recreation spaces in the city of Rzeszów, Poland, and to develop plant composition guidelines. A detailed inventory of vegetation and aerobiological monitoring of the presence of airborne allergenic pollen grains and fungal spores were carried out. Next, the ecosystem services and disservices of the vegetation were determined based on literature data and on our expert judgement. Additionally, a counting of the number of visitors to waterside areas was conducted. All these steps were used to develop recommendations for shaping the vegetation of study areas. The results of the investigations show that the boulevards along the artificial lake function completely differently than other investigated places as the area resembles an urban park, and the water is not the main attraction in this space. The vegetation of the boulevards and the nearby gravel-pit bathing area has mostly a spontaneous character and offers the widest range of ecosystem services and disservices. The management of the vegetation should focus on its health-enhancing values. The vegetation growing near the outdoor swimming pools has been designed by man. Nevertheless, it requires recomposing and is targeted specifically at the enhancement of the visual attractiveness. Additionally, there is a need for planting compact deciduous trees that will provide shade at the multi-media fountain.

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Ariusni Ariusni

The purpose of this study is to determine (a). The value of the cost and the revenue, (b). The added value and (c). Employment elasticity value of the fish processing industry in the city of Padang. The analysis tool used is multiple linear regression and also use Hayami method. Our research found that there is significant and positive production capacity to value added in industrial dryingband processing fish in Padang. Variable value raw materials to value added in industrial drying and processing fish in Padang significant and positive impact. The variable amount of labor to value added in industrial drying and processing fish in the city of Padang was not significant and positive impact. Variable selling price to value added in industrial drying and processing fish in Padang positive and significant effect. Variable labor costs to value added in industrial drying and processing fish in the city of Padang was not significant and negative effect. Other variable costs to value added in industrial drying and processing fish in Padang significant and negative effect. While the average yield added value there at 30 industrial drying and processing fish in Padang is very large, amounting to Rp. 78,445,203 and an average elasticity of labor in fish drying and processing industry in the city of Padang is inelastic at 0.2093.Keywords : value added, Elasticity, Industry, employment


Author(s):  
Mariana Brito de Oliveira ◽  
Alinne Silva Simões de Oliveira ◽  
Ana Paula Procopio de Azevedo ◽  
Jessica Rossi da Silva ◽  
Thaylane Rodrigues Neves de Medeiros ◽  
...  

The human species has an emotional connection with nature called “biophilia” (or, love for life). This connection goes from generation to generation, being one of the reasons why green spaces are present in large cities. Quinta da Boa Vista is a municipal park in Rio de Janeiro located in the São Cristóvão neighborhood in the northern part of the city. Its main attraction is the artificial lake system, a leisure attraction for the local community. This article reports the presence of Biomphalaria glabrata and Physa acuta snails around the main lake in the Quinta da Boa Vista Municipal Park in Rio de Janeiro, RJ. Seventy-one B. glabrata and twenty-seven P. acuta snails were collected. The snails were measured and examined for the presence of trematode larvae according to standardized procedures. The prevalence rate of B. glabrata was estimated at 15.5%. Rediae and cercariae resembling those of the species Typhlocoelum cucumerinum (Typhlocoelidae, Digenea) which parasitizes aquatic birds of the order Anseriformes were found. This study reinforces the importance of monitoring park lakes and ponds to better understand the risk of helminth transmission by molluscan vectors.KEY WORDS: Snails; Schistosomiasis; Digenea; Quinta da Boa Vista; Rio de Janeiro.


1998 ◽  
Vol 38 (10) ◽  
pp. 309-316
Author(s):  
William F. Garber

Past evaluations of the success of wastewater treatment and submarine outfall placement and operation have considered only a limited number of parameters affecting the marine and onshore environments. Important questions regarding the best allocation of available funds have not been adequately addressed. The relative contamination of the sea from airborne and landwash contaminants has not been considered. Neither has the increased air pollution deriving from the energy required for advanced treatment. Similarly, regular epidemiological studies to evaluate actual changes in morbidity arising from drastic changes in treatment and disposal have not been made prior to very large committments of funds. Most importantly, little attention has been given to the relative ranking of all environmental risks within a catchment area. The net result is that, when all factors are considered, the very large expenditures and increased energy use for sanitary wastewater treatment and outfall disposal will have a net negative effect on the physical and societal environment. The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Metropolitan area can be used to illustrate this probability.


Economies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Nguyen Ngoc Thach ◽  
Bui Hoang Ngoc

Conceptual and applied studies assessing the linkage between economic freedom and corruption expect that economic freedom boosts economic growth, improves income, and reduces levels of corruption. However, most of them have concentrated on developed and developing groups, while Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries have drawn much less attention. Empirical findings are most often conflicting. Moreover, previous studies performed rather simple frequentist techniques regressing one or some freedom indices on corruption that do not allow for grasping all the aspects of economic freedom as well as capturing variations across countries. The study aims to investigate the effects of ten components of economic freedom index on the level of corruption in ten ASEAN countries from 1999 to 2018. By applying a Bayesian hierarchical mixed-effects regression via a Monte Carlo technique combined with the Gibbs sampler, the obtained results suggest several findings as follows: (i) In view of probability, the predictors property rights, government integrity, tax burden, business freedom, labor freedom, and investment freedom have a strongly positive impact on the response perceived corruption index; (ii) Government spending, trade freedom, and financial freedom exert a strongly negative effect, while the influence of monetary freedom is ambiguous; (iii) There is an existence of not only random intercepts but also random coefficients at the country level impacting the model outcome. The empirical outcome could be of major importance for more efficient corruption controlling in emerging countries, including ASEAN nations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110360
Author(s):  
Imran Ur Rahman ◽  
Mohsin Shafi ◽  
Liu Junrong ◽  
Enitilina Tatiani M.K. Fetuu ◽  
Shah Fahad ◽  
...  

We empirically determine the role of different forms of infrastructure on a country’s trade. We use an augmented gravity model that incorporates infrastructure in the estimation of merchandise trade flows. We take panel data, including China and 21 selected Asian economies, from 1999 to 2018. We find that the panel ordinary least squares (OLS) and poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) model estimations prove to be significant. Proxies for Transport Infrastructure including roads, railways, and sea transport, and Proxies for information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure consisting of mobile, electricity, and internet connections show a strong and positive impact on trade while air transport and landline phone connection have an unexpected negative effect on trade. The positive estimates for quality of infrastructure signify that high standards of Transport and ICT infrastructures lead to increased trade flows of the exporting and importing countries. Results also show that cultural similarity leads to increased trade flows between China and its trading partners in Asia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Francesco Piccialli ◽  
Fabio Giampaolo ◽  
Edoardo Prezioso ◽  
Danilo Crisci ◽  
Salvatore Cuomo

Nowadays, a sustainable and smart city focuses on energy efficiency and the reduction of polluting emissions through smart mobility projects and initiatives to “sensitize” infrastructure. Smart parking is one of the building blocks of intelligent mobility, innovative mobility that aims to be flexible, integrated, and sustainable and consequently integrated into a Smart City. By using the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors located in the parking areas or the underground car parks in combination with a mobile application, which indicates to citizens the free places in the different areas of the city and guides them toward the chosen parking, it is possible to reduce air pollution and fluidifying noise traffic. In this article, we present and discuss an innovative Deep Learning-based ensemble technique in forecasting the parking space occupancy to reduce the search time for parking and to optimize the flow of cars in particularly congested areas, with an overall positive impact on traffic in urban centres. A genetic algorithm has also been used to optimize predictors parameters. The main goal is to design an intelligent IoT-based service that can predict, in the next few hours, the parking spaces occupancy of a street. The proposed approach has been assessed on a real IoT dataset composed by over than 15M of collected sensor records. Obtained results demonstrate that our method outperforms both single predictors and the widely used strategy of the mean providing inherently robust predictions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 232948842110323
Author(s):  
Rebecca Van Herck ◽  
Sofie Decock ◽  
Bernard De Clerck ◽  
Liselot Hudders

This study investigates the effect of linguistic realizations of employee empathy (LREE) on brand trust in email responses to customer complaints. We explore possible mediating effects of perceived empathy and perceived complaint handling quality and we look into moderation effects of compensation (Study 1) or customer’s acceptance of blame (Study 2). Our aim is to find out if LREE have a negative or positive impact on the customer in cases of partial refunds, either because LREE are being perceived as insincere or as genuine expressions of concern. The results of two experiments show that LREE positively influence brand trust through higher perceived empathy and perceived complaint handling quality. However, the expected negative effect is not found, as LREE are more effective in a low versus high compensation condition. The effectiveness itself is not influenced by the acceptance of blame when a partial refund is offered.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1341
Author(s):  
Tinggui Chen ◽  
Lijuan Peng ◽  
Jianjun Yang ◽  
Guodong Cong

With highly developed social media, English learning Applications have become a new type of mobile learning resources, and online comments posted by users after using them have not only become an important source of intellectual competition for enterprises, but can also help understand customers’ requirements, thereby improving product functionalities and service quality, and solve the pain points of product iteration and innovation. Based on this, this paper crawled the online user comments of three typical APPs (BaiCiZhan, MoMoBeiDanCi and BuBeiDanCi), through emotion analysis and hotspot mining technology, to obtain user requirements and then the K-means clustering method was used to analyze user requirements. Finally, quantile regression is used to find out which user needs have an impact on the downloads of English vocabulary APPs. The results show that: (1) Positive comments have a more significant impact on users’ downloads behavior than negative online comments. (2) English vocabulary APPs with higher downloads, both the 5-star user ratings and the increase of emotional requirement have a negative effect on the increase in APP downloads, while the enterprise’s service requirement improvement has a positive effect on the increase of APP downloads. (3) Regarding English vocabulary APPs with average or high downloads, improving the adaptability and Appearance requirements have significant negative impact on downloads. (4) The functional requirements to improve products will have a significant positive impact on the increase in downloads of English vocabulary APPs.


Author(s):  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Xiao-zhong Huang ◽  
Jia-le Wang ◽  
Richard HW Bradshaw ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
...  

Precipitation has been suggested as a crucial influencing factor in the primary productivity in arid and semi-arid regions, yet how moisture fluctuation in an arid mountain-basin system of the north Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau has affected human activities is poorly understood. Here, we reconstruct the variations of grazing intensity in high elevations and regional humidity based on independent and high-resolution records of Sporormiella-type coprophilous fungal spores and pollen grains in the same well-dated sediment core from Lake Tian’E in the western Qilian Mountains over the past 3500 years. We find that stronger grazing activity was associated with low regional effective moisture, and propose that the drier regional climate pushed people and their livestock into the mountainous areas. A notable exception was a reduction of human and grazing activities in arid region with high mountains during 380–580 CE caused by centennial-length dry and cold conditions. In addition, it is also noteworthy that intensified grazing activity occurred during 580–720 CE and after ∼1920 CE, corresponding to a warmer and wetter climate and diverse subsistence strategies with social developments in the lowlands of the Hexi Corridor. Our findings potentially provide a historical reference for understanding how ancient people adapted to the climate change in arid region with high mountains.


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