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

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

Neighbourhood Environmental Contribution and Health. A novel indicator integrating urban form and urban green

The relationship between urban green, urban form and health remains unclear. This research explores health and urban green as well as urban structure as constituents of urban form. The objective was to develop a novel indicator (Neighbourhood Environmental Contribution, NEC) to analyse the spatial relationship between urban green and health (diabetes, mental health and self-rated health) on the neighbourhood scale. NEC performs more stably when regression models are adjusted for confounders. This suggests that better representations of urban form including the built-up structure of urban areas are promising