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There is an urgent need for holistic tools to assess the health impacts of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies relating to increasing public green spaces. Urban vegetation provides numerous ecosystem services on a local scale and is therefore a potential adaptation strategy that can be used in an era of global warming to offset the increasing impacts of human activity on urban environments. In this study, we propose a set of urban green ecological metrics that can be used to evaluate urban green ecosystem services. The metrics were derived from two complementary surveys: a traditional remote sensing survey of multispectral images and Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data, and a survey using proximate sensing through images made available by the Google Street View database. In accordance with previous studies, two classes of metrics were calculated: greenery at lower and higher elevations than building facades. In the last phase of the work, the metrics were applied to city blocks, and a spatially constrained clustering methodology was employed. Homogeneous areas were identified in relation to the urban greenery characteristics. The proposed methodology represents the development of a geographic information system that can be used by public administrators and urban green designers to create and maintain urban public forests.

In the current Information Age, it is usual to access our personal and professional information, such as bank account data or private documents, in a telematic manner. To ensure the privacy of this information, user authentication systems should be accurately developed. In this work, we focus on biometric authentication, as it depends on the user’s inherent characteristics and, therefore, offers personalized authentication systems. Specifically, we propose an electrocardiogram (EEG)-based user authentication system by employing One-Class and Multi-Class Machine Learning classifiers. In this sense, the main novelty of this article is the introduction of Isolation Forest and Local Outlier Factor classifiers as new tools for user authentication and the investigation of their suitability with EEG data. Additionally, we identify the EEG channels and brainwaves with greater contribution to the authentication and compare them with the traditional dimensionality reduction techniques, Principal Component Analysis, and χ2 statistical test. In our final proposal, we elaborate on a hybrid system resistant to random forgery attacks using an Isolation Forest and a Random Forest classifiers, obtaining a final accuracy of 82.3%, a precision of 91.1% and a recall of 75.3%.

The climate of a city influences the ways in which its outdoor spaces are used. Especially, public spaces intended for use by pedestrians and cyclists, such as parks, squares, residential and commercial streets, and foot and cycle paths will be used and enjoyed more frequently if they have a comfortable and healthy climate. Due to the predicted global temperature increase, urban climate is likely to become more uncomfortable, especially in summer when an increase in heat stress is expected. Urban forestry has been proposed as one approach for mitigating the human health consequences of increased temperature resulting from climate change. The aims of the current research were to (a) provide a transferable methodology useful for analyzing the effect of urban trees on surface temperature reduction, particularly in public spaces, and (b) provide high-resolution urban mapping for adaptation strategies to climate change based on green space projects. To achieve the established aims, we developed a methodology that uses multisource data: LiDAR data, high-resolution Landsat imagery, global climate model data from CMIP5 (IPPC Fifth Assessment), and data from meteorological stations. The proposed model can be a useful tool for validating the efficiency of design simulations of new green spaces for temperature mitigation.

The purpose of this work is to study the issues of service quality and service failure during visits to cellar doors in the five regions where wine tourism is most developed: Hunter Valley (AU), Mendoza (AR), Napa Valley (the USA), Stellenbosch (ZA), and Tuscany (IT). We propose a methodology based on a combination of sentiment analysis and natural language processing applied to 89,672 TripAdvisor reviews. The results indicate that the issues most linked to service quality and service failure are as follows (in the order of importance): the quality of the main wine product, the experience in the tasting room, the organized tours, the empathy of the staff, the reliability of the staff, and the setting of the cellar and landscape. These themes are common to all five wine tourism regions, but each region treats them differently. The results obtained confirm and expand the results of previous studies and may prove useful both to professionals (wineries, tour operators, and travel agents) and for the design of a product that meets the needs of wine tourists. The main limitation of the study concerns the application of the methodology to the five most developed wine regions in the world; therefore, the results obtained may not be immediately applicable to the wine regions that are starting to develop wine tourism.

Over the last decade, the scientific community has increasingly focused on forest-based practices for human well-being (FBPW), a term that includes all forest activities (e.g., forest bathing, forest therapy, social outdoor initiatives) important for improving people’s health and emotional status. This paper aims to develop a quantitative literature review on FBPW based on big data analysis (text mining on Scopus title and abstract) and PRISMA evaluation. The two techniques facilitate investigations across different geographic areas (major areas and geographical regions) and allow a focus on various topics. The results of text mining highlight the prominence of publications on FBPW for the improvement of human health in East Asia (e.g., Japan and South Korea). Furthermore, some specific themes developed by the literature for each geographical area emerge: urban green areas, cities, and parks in Africa; sustainable forest management and planning in the Americas; empirical studies on physiological and psychological effects of FBPW in Asia; and forest management and FBPW in Europe. PRISMA indicates a gap in studies focused on the reciprocal influences of forest variables and well-being responses. An investigation of the main physiological indicators applied in the scientific literature for the theme is also developed. The main strengths and weaknesses of the method are discussed, with suggestions for potential future lines of research.

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) has proven to be a technology that can benefit the dissemination of cultural content. In 2019 was the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci. Given the few works that develop IVR technologies to explain the genius of the master, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to learn about the master through the use of new technologies. To build an IVR application that aims to spread knowledge, it is necessary to define an educational paradigm and the type of application. Given the domain of the application and the need to convey complex/novel topics, the IVR application developed in this study is based on the constructivist framework and creates a serious game (SG). In order to explain Leonardo Da Vinci’s thinking and design approach, we decided to focus on urban planning and architecture studies by explaining the projects envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci. This paper investigates whether an IVR-SG application maintains the fundamental characteristics underlying disclosure processes, such as immersivity and a sense of presence. Two secondary school classes experienced this by evaluating the application through a psychometric questionnaire. The results show that immersivity and a sense of presence were evaluated positively.

Human well-being is affected by the design quality of the city in which they live and walk. This depends primarily on specific physical characteristics and how they are aggregated together. Many studies have highlighted the great potential of photographic data shared on the Flickr platform for analyzing environmental perceptions in landscape and urban planning. Other researchers have used panoramic images from the Google Street View (GSV) web service to extract data on urban quality. However, at the urban level, there are no studies correlating quality perceptions detected by social media platforms with spatial geographic characteristics through geostatistical models. This work proposes the analysis of urban quality in different areas of the Livorno city through a methodological approach based on Geographical Random Forest regression. The result offers important insights into the physical characteristics of a street environment that contribute to the more abstract qualities of urban design.

The phenomenon of urban heat waves are becoming a significant public health problem in the summer season. Global warming is therefore not only an environmental problem, but also an ethical and political issue of climate justice. The research was based on the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. The aim of the study is to (1) identify a set of indicators that allows to estimate the risk of decreased individual well-being; (2) implement these indicators in a probabilistic model that allows to explicitly consider the lack of certain knowledge on the effects of climate change; (3) provide high resolution urban mapping for climate change adaptation strategies.The research focused on the vulnerable people (elderly people and children) in the city of Rosignano Solvay.The combination of the results, obtained through the aggregation Dempster’s rule, allows to identify the most critical areas on which it is necessary to intervene or through mitigation or urban regeneration.

Renewable energies are fundamental to future development. Such technologies reduce air pollution and improve air quality; however, they can generate other types of environmental problems, which must be investigated. The  location of structures is one of these problems, which involves visual impacts and is a primary factor affecting public reaction. Our work was concerned with the visual impact and the alterations to the landscape made by wind turbines. The main goal was to establish the factors and attributes of a wind farm that determine the perception and aesthetic preferences of people, with a particular emphasis on representatives of Generation Y. This group was chosen because they represent the most dynamic, innovative, and creative social group. Thus, we proposed some design strategies to reduce the visual impact of wind turbines.

The use of geo-tagged photographs seems to be a promising alternative to assess Cultural Ecosystem Services CESs in respect to the traditional investigation when focusing on the study of the aesthetic appreciation of a protected area or natural landscape. The aim of this study is integrating the cumulative viewshed calculated from geotagged photo metadata publicly shared on Flickr with raster data on infrastructure, historical sites, and the natural environment, using landscape ecology metrics and RandomForest modelling. Crowdsourced data provided empirical assessments of the covariates associated with visitor distribution, highlighting how changes in infrastructure, crops and environmental factors can affect visitor’s use. These data can help researchers, managers, and public planners to develop projects, and guidelines in the rural landscape for incresing the supply for CESs.