Linking ecosystem services, urban form and green space configuration using multivariate landscape metric analysis

Context: Landscape metrics represent powerful tools for quantifying landscape structure, but uncertainties persist around their interpretation. Urban settings add unique considerations, containing habitat structures driven by the surrounding built-up environment. Understanding urban ecosystems, however, should focus on the habitats rather than the matrix. Objectives: We coupled a multivariate approach with landscape metric analysis to overcome existing shortcomings in interpretation. We then explored relationships between landscape characteristics and modelled ecosystem service provision. Methods: We used principal component analysis and cluster analysis to isolate the most effective measures of landscape variability and then grouped habitat patches according to their attributes, independent of the surrounding urban form. We compared results to the modelled provision of three ecosystem services. Seven classes resulting from cluster analysis were separated primarily on patch area, and secondarily by measures of shape complexity and inter-patch distance. Results: When compared to modelled ecosystem services, larger patches up to 10 ha in size consistently stored more carbon per area and supported more pollinators, while exhibiting a greater risk of soil erosion. Smaller, isolated patches showed the opposite, and patches larger than 10 ha exhibited no additional areal benefit. Conclusions: Multivariate landscape metric analysis offers greater confidence and consistency than analysing landscape metrics individually. Independent classification avoids the influence of the urban matrix surrounding habitats of interest, and allows patches to be grouped according to their own attributes. Such a grouping is useful as it may correlate more strongly with the characteristics of landscape structure that directly affect ecosystem function

Smart Technologies for the Environmental Design of Smaller Urban Centres

The present study focuses on welfare measures and specifically on healthcare. The challenge we would like to accept is to provide efficient healthcare to residents in an isolated area without health services, maintaining the same level of healthcare ensured by hospitals. The innovative design, that we want to experience, is closely linked to the use of ICT, information and communication technologies, because these technologies would be able to perform autonomously multiple functions, using remote control. Telemedicine or “virtual health” is a particular branch of ICT that can improve future quality of living in a marginal urban center as a tool to ensure prompt access to expert advice, as well as patient monitoring, wherever patients and medical centers may currently be located. Mobile technology applied to healthcare could stimulate advances in telemedicine: handheld and mobile phones, equipped with specific software with advanced diagnostic instruments, being small and user friendly, could enhance medical services if integrated in houses and if the users might have a direct access to them. The research consists, in a first step, the analysis of the main technologies for active and healthy ageing and then re-designed an healthcare system structure in a case study (a small town near Palermo), in terms of usability and accessibility for health authorities and, most of all, patients. We chose as a case study a little mountain town, which because of its location, is forced to wallow in a condition of marginality, far from fundamental services for citizens

Internet of Things: An Opportunity for Advancing Universal Access

IoT enables the worldwide connection of heterogeneous things or objects, which can hence interact with each other and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals, by using different communication technologies and communication protocol standards. IoT and related technologies can increase or reduce the gap among people. In this respect, this chapter aims to highlight the virtuose use of the IoT paradigm by providing examples of its application for enhancing universal access in different fields