17 research outputs found
Xi Sigma Pi
The Department of Forestry at Iowa State University provides students with countless opportunities, acknowledgments, and awards. The opportunity to gain membership into the national forestry honor society, xi sigma pi, is one such benefit
Urban redevelopment of contaminated sites: a review of scientific evidence and practical knowledge on environmental and health issues:Annex 3 – Working Paper: Case study compilation: lessons learned from redeveloping contaminated sites
Acoustic Quality and Health in Urban Environments – The SALVE Project
Background sounds of urban regions have been a concern of architecture and construction engineering for years. In the context of health research however, sound has been restricted to the health risk factor noise, thus reduced to sound decibel levels. Accordingly, noise mitigation measures aim exclusively at the reduction of noise level below a certain threshold. Soundscapes on the other hand, comprise all acoustic events of the natural, physical and human environment, which are determined by sound level, frequency, time and space. Soundscape Ecology which includes the study of spatio-temporal heterogeneity of sounds in different landscapes, provides a suitable methodical approach to analyse the relationships between soundscapes, the built environment and human health. This paper presents SALVE (Acoustic Quality and Health in Urban Environments), a two year interdisciplinary pilot project that started in October 2018 and involves the disciplines of public health and spatial planning. The project aims at the identification of criteria for health-promoting soundscapes in cities. By making year long direct and automated auditory measurements of a robust landuse sample in the city of Bochum, located in the highly urbanized Ruhr Area of Germany, one of the largest multi-seasonal urban soundscape datasets will be generated. These data will be merged with health data from the longitudinal, population-based Heinz Nixdorf Recall (HNR) study. Spatio-statistical models will be further developed to analyse health effects of different types of soundscapes in urban neighborhoods. The project serves as a starting point for an innovative and comprehensive approach to understanding the effects of sound quality on urban public health beyond noise protection. Additionally, knowledge will be gained for the development of solution based health-promoting strategies in spatial planning
Analysing Interlinked Frequency Dynamics of the Urban Acoustic Environment
As sustainable metropolitan regions require more densely built-up areas, a comprehensive understanding of the urban acoustic environment (AE) is needed. However, comprehensive datasets of the urban AE and well-established research methods for the AE are scarce. Datasets of audio recordings tend to be large and require a lot of storage space as well as computationally expensive analyses. Thus, knowledge about the long-term urban AE is limited. In recent years, however, these limitations have been steadily overcome, allowing a more comprehensive analysis of the urban AE. In this respect, the objective of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the time-frequency domain of the urban AE, analysing automatic audio recordings from nine urban settings over ten months. We compute median power spectra as well as normalised spectrograms for all settings. Additionally, we demonstrate the use of frequency correlation matrices (FCMs) as a novel approach to access large audio datasets. Our results show site-dependent patterns in frequency dynamics. Normalised spectrograms reveal that frequency bins with low power hold relevant information and that the AE changes considerably over a year. We demonstrate that this information can be captured by using FCMs, which also unravel communities of interlinked frequency dynamics for all settings
Hydraulic modeling of irrigation-induced furrow erosion
In the experimental Version 4.xx series, erosion
science is introduced into the surface-irrigation
simulation model, SRFR. The hydraulics of water flow in
furrows for individual irrigation events is predicted by
numerical solution of the unsteady equations of mass and
momentum conservation coupled to generally applicable
empirical equations describing infiltration and soil
roughness and to a known furrow configuration and
inflow hydrograph. Selection of appropriate field values
for the infiltration and roughness coefficients yields
infiltration distributions and surface flows (including
runoff) in reasonable agreement with measurements. The
erosion component consists in applying the simulated
hydraulic flow characteristics to site-specific empirical
determinations of soil erodibility, to general empirical
sediment-transport relations, and to general physically
based deposition theory to provide estimates of soil
erosion, flux, and deposition at various points along the
furrow as functions of time. Total soil loss off the field
and ultimate net erosion and deposition along the furrow
follow. At this initial stage of the investigations, a single
representative aggregate size is assumed adequate for the
analysis. Results are compared to measurements of
sediment concentrations in the furrow quarter points
and in the tailwater. For a given representative aggregate
size, the results are heavily dependent on the choice of
transport formula. The Laursen (1958), Yang (1973), and
Yalin (1963) formulas are programmed for investigation,
as are a variety of computational options. Preliminary
comparisons suggest the superiority of the Laursen
formulation, with the Yang and Yalin formulas
significantly over-predicting transport