Article describes how environmental air pollution remains a major contributor to negative health outcomes and mortality, but the relationship between socially vulnerable populations and air pollution is not well understood. This paper seeks to understand how air pollution monitor placement strategies and policy may neglect social vulnerabilities and therefore potentially underestimate exposure burdens in vulnerable populations.

Article describes how forests are generally extracted from remotely sensed images based on the spectral features, ignoring other important auxiliary information, and the techniques of precise extraction need to be further improved. By using the Sentinel–2 image and auxiliary factors (AFs) including site conditions (SCs) and vegetation indices (VIs), the random forest model with AFs (RF–AFs) was adopted for the extraction of the economic forests in Lancang County.

Article asserts that individual tree structure mapping in cities is important for urban environmental studies. The authors produced an individual tree dataset including tree locations, height, crown area, crown volume, and biomass over the entire New York City, USA for 6,005,690 trees, which enables the evaluation of urban forest ecosystem services.

Article describes how the soil moisture daily diagnostic equation (SMDE) evaluates the relationship between the loss function coefficient and the summation of the weighted average of precipitation. The study has confirmed that using actual solar radiation data in the soil moisture daily diagnostic equation can improve its accuracy.

Article identifies inter-city transportation routes in complex terrains using quantitative methods in GIS.

This article identifies the key urban form determinants of decadal-long fine particulate matter (PM2.5) trends in all 626 Chinese cities at the county level and above. As the first study of its kind, this study comprehensively examines the urban form effects on air quality in cities of different population sizes, at different development levels, and in different spatial-autocorrelation positions.

Article describes how airborne hyperspectral data has high spectral-spatial information, but mining and using this information effectively is still a great challenge. Therefore, a 3D-1D-CNN model was proposed for feature extraction in complex urban with hyperspectral images affected by cloud shadows.

This article studies atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition in urban areas on two native prairie grass species, Schizachyrium scoparium and Nasella leucotricha. Findings indicate that while native prairie grasses may exhibit a positive biomass response to increased N deposition up to ~18 kg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹, total inorganic N deposition is well above the estimated critical load for herbaceous plant species richness in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains ecoregion and thus may negatively affect these plant communities.

This article presents a study of urban expansion in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei plain based on ALOS Global Digital Surface Model “ALOS World 3D-30 m” (AW3D30 DSM), Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DSM, and Landsat 7 ETM+ images. The method proposed in this paper can provide rapid and large-scale statistics to study urban construction expansion in the world.

Article studying the change characteristics of soil moisture and temperature under different water level treatments in Wuchuan County, Inner Mongolia, China.

This article develops and tests a constrained stochastic weather generator (CSWG) for producing daily mean air temperature and precipitation based on annual mean air temperature and precipitation from tree-ring records. It presents a unique method that can be used to explore historic (e.g., archeological questions) or future (e.g., climate change) daily weather conditions based upon specified annual values.

Article describes survey identifying opportunities for hydrologic modeling and monitoring to support overlapping management contexts.

This article proposes a toe line tracking (TLT) method for the automated measurement of dune migration rate and direction using multi-temporal digital elevation models (DEM) derived from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to overcome a major limitation of the existing method of pairs of source and target points (PSTP).

This article uses three common open-access satellite image datasets (Sentinel-2B, Landsat-8, and Gaofen-6) for extracting information on rocky desertification in a typical karst region (Guangnan County, Yunnan) of southwest China, using three machine-learning algorithms implemented in the Python programming language: random forest (RF), bagged decision tree (BDT), and extremely randomized trees (ERT).

Article focusing on West Nile Virus (WNV), a mosquito borne pathogen, as a case study for spatial data visualization of environmental characteristics of a vector’s habitat alongside human demographic composition for understanding potential public health risks of infectious disease.

This article considers positional shift and rotation angle deviation of the laser scanner and the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and presents a new method for calculating the incident angle based on the rigorous geometric measurement model for airborne light detection and range (LiDAR).

This article evaluates the effects of orchard development on deep soil water content (SWC) by using a meta-analysis of 162 sampling sites on the loess tableland from 44 peer-reviewed publications. The results showed that the deep SWC in orchards depended on stand age, planting density and annual precipitation.

This article proposes a three-dimensional (3D) vegetation extraction workflow to extract urban grasses and trees at individual tree level in urban areas using airborne LiDAR and hyperspectral data. Results suggest that two- and three-dimensional urban vegetation extraction could play a significant role in spatial layout optimization and scientific management of urban vegetation.

Authors of the article state that airborne particulate matter (PM) can accumulate on feather surfaces and alter feather appearance, so they quantified PM accumulation on Rock Pigeon feathers and analyzed the spectral properties of extracted particulates. Their findings suggest that wild birds could incur an urban pollution penalty as PM accumulation has the potential to alter feather properties.

Article describes how the low-cost sensor has changed the air quality monitoring paradigm with the capacity for efficient network expansion and community engagement. This study comprehensively assessed ten widely used data techniques, namely AdaBoost, Bayesian ridge, gradient tree boosting, K-nearest neighbors, Lasso, multivariable linear regression, neural network, random forest, ridge regression, and support vector machine.

Article discusses how China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Authors recommend aligning the Healthy Cities initiative in China with strategic national and global level agendas such as Healthy China 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing an integrative governance framework to facilitate a coherent intersectoral program to systemically improve population health.

Article describes the efficient and accurate identification of canopy gaps is the basis of forest ecosystem research, which is of great significance to further forest monitoring and management. One major limitation of the traditional methods of remote sensing to map canopy gaps is that they cannot finely extract the complex edges of canopy gaps in mountainous areas. The authors proposed an object-oriented classification method that integrates multi-source information.

Article describes how soil moisture (SM) and atmospheric humidity (AH) are crucial climatic variables that significantly affect the climate system. However, the combined influencing mechanisms of SM and AH on the land surface temperature (LST) under global warming are still unclear. The authors systematically analyzed the interrelationships among annual mean values of SM, AH, and LST using ERA5-Land reanalysis data and revealed the role of SM and AH on the spatiotemporal variations of LST through mechanism analysis and regression methods.

Article describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented losses for small businesses in cities across the globe. The authors' study examines the spatial distribution of PPP loans at the neighborhood level.