Treesearch

Changing built environment conditions to impact health mindsets and health equity may be a promising target for public health interventions. The present study was a cluster randomized controlled trial to test the impact of remediating vacant and abandoned properties on factors related to health mindset—including well-being, health interconnectedness, social capital markers, neighborhood disorder, and worry—as well as direct and indirect violence experiences and the moderating role of racial and income segregation on outcomes. A residential cohort of 405 participants from 194 randomly...

Rates of family violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV) and child maltreatment, remain high in the USA and contribute to substantial health and economic costs. How neighborhood environment may influence family violence remains poorly understood. We examine the association between neighborhood vacant and abandoned properties and family violence, and the role collective efficacy may play in that relationship. Data were used from a longitudinal cohort of 218 maternal-child dyads in a southern US city known for elevated rates of violence. Women were matched on their propensity...

Context: As land-use change and climate change transform landscapes globally, increases in habitat fragmentation and shifts in habitat composition present challenges for the conservation of wildlife. Behavioral approaches to landscape ecology can explore how animal movement across complex landscapes can drive ecological processes like functional connectivity. By integrating mechanisms that link landscape change to animal behavior, simulation models can project how individuals and populations will respond to novel landscapes. Objectives: To understand how dispersal behavior and functional...

In recent years, wildfires in the western United States have become more challenging to manage, with extreme wildfire behavior, larger fires, and longer fire seasons contributing to rising losses. Community and government leaders are realizing that suppression alone is untenable for future wildfire prevention and seek a wider range of risk reduction strategies from the community to the household levels. Simultaneously, these leaders are faced with the challenge of expeditiously rebuilding communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), sometimes after multiple fires that have occurred...

The interplay between tectonic rock uplift and climatically modulated erosion governs landscape evolution and influences how mountain ranges affect climate, biogeochemical cycling, ecology, and biodiversity. The Himalayas, Earth’s highest mountain range, have inspired a large body of work suggesting that Himalayan topography is primarily governed by southward-propagating tectonic deformation. Here, we use a new coupled surface process and orographic precipitation model to test this hypothesis, and to assess the extent to which orographic precipitation effects have modulated the influence...

As ecosystem disturbances increase due to human induced global change, accurately quantifying ecosystem resilience has never been more critical. This study introduces a spatially explicit Ecosystem Resilience Index (ERI), that integrates vegetation function, structure, and composition recovery metrics. We provide proof-of-concept for this index by applying it to a wildfire in northwestern Montana by leveraging novel and existing remote sensing datasets to evaluate ecosystem resilience and environmental drivers. First, we independently assessed each metric of ecosystem recovery, and...

The way a city or neighborhood is designed plays a significant but often overlooked role in the prevalence of firearm violence within communities and a growing body of research demonstrates that improving built environment conditions may have a profound impact on social interactions, crime rates, and ultimately, the occurrence of firearm-related incidents. In this chapter, we present an overview of select environmental factors, including the potential roles of green, blue, building and housing, commercial, situational, transportation, education and healthcare, and social infrastructure in...

Mortality risk is a critical and complex component of individual fitness and individual-based ecology, especially when risk-avoidance behaviors are considered. Organisms are subject to multiple kinds of risk that can vary with habitat, time, individual state, individual activity and behavior, and population status. Yet risk is often represented very simply in models and there is little literature on practical ways to model its variation. In our experience, desirable characteristics of risk models include: (a) survival probability can vary with multiple variables of individuals, habitat,...

Stream-dwelling salmonids in the low-latitude and -altitude margins of their range are particularly threatened by climate change. However, they possess a variety of evolutionary, plastic, and behavioural mechanisms that provide resistance against rapid changes in their environment. Behavioural plasticity can be important under rapid environmental change because it is relatively fast and flexible. In particular, salmonids can exhibit flexible diel activity patterns in response to new environmental conditions, but the consequences of this capability for long-term population persistence in...

Alley cropping consists of growing crops between rows of woody perennials and can involve many types of crops, including grapevines. In vineyard alley cropping systems, vines can sometimes be considered the overstory component, with understory crops grown between vine rows. Alternatively, vines can be considered the understory component, grown between rows of overstory trees or shrubs. This technical guide discusses the latter option:vineyard alley cropping systems in which rows of grapes are interspersed with widely spaced rows of trees or shrubs, to create an integrated system with...