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Monitoring soil quality index (SQI) and soil organic carbon (SOC) stock status of the Western Ghats (WG) forests in India is crucial for providing vital ecosystem services alongside sustainable forest management practices. However, comprehensive profile data on SQI and SOC stock across different forest types under WG forests are limited. The study evaluated SQI and SOC stock under three forest types, i.e. tropical wet evergreen (TWE), tropical semi-evergreen (TSE), and tropical moist deciduous (TMD) across WG in Karnataka. SQI was assessed using principal component analysis with two indexing approaches and scoring methodologies, with weightage indexing through nonlinear scoring functions (NLSF) showing superiority over other methodologies. TMD forests exhibited the highest SQI, followed by TWE and TSE, while the lowest was observed in Rippon Pet RF (0.36 surface, 0.28 control section), primarily due to limitations in organic carbon and clay content. SOC stock mirrored SQI trends (TMD > TWE > TSE), with the highest values in Kollegal RF (339.3 MG ha -1 ) and lowest in Rippon Pet RF (102.5 MG ha -1 ). Although SOC and SQI were established to be ideal indicators for dynamic ecosystem services (ESs), high OC content in surface soils of Poomale NF induces pedogenic acidification and Al toxicities, indicating potential forest soil degradation. Significant correlation with control section SQI and SOC (p < 0.05) emphasises monitoring subsurface soil status to identify soil degradation, sustainable forestry practices, and complex ESs in forest systems., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

Understanding healthcare system resilience has become paramount, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which imposed unprecedented burdens on healthcare services and severely impacted public health. Resilience is defined as the system's ability to absorb, recover from and adapt to disruptions; however, despite extensive studies on this subject, we still lack empirical evidence and mathematical tools to quantify its adaptability (the ability of the system to adjust to and learn from disruptions). By analyzing millions of patients' electronic medical records across US states, we find that the COVID-19 pandemic caused two successive waves of disruptions within the healthcare systems, enabling natural experiment analysis of the adaptive capacity of each system to adapt to past disruptions. We generalized the quantification framework and found that the US healthcare systems exhibit substantial adaptability (ρ = 0.58) but only a moderate level of resilience (r = 0.70). When considering system responses across racial groups, Black and Hispanic groups were more severely impacted by pandemic disruptions than white and Asian groups. Physician abundance was the key characteristic for determining healthcare system resilience. Our results offer vital guidance in designing resilient and sustainable healthcare systems to prepare for future waves of disruptions akin to COVID-19 pandemics., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.)

With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and a deepening understanding of disasters, resilience has received widespread attention in urban drainage systems. The studies on the resilience assessment of urban drainage systems are mostly indirect assessments that did not simulate human behavior affected by rainfall or semi-quantitative assessments that did not build simulation models, but few research characterizes the processes between people and infrastructure to assess resilience directly. Our study developed a dynamic model that integrates urban mobility, flood inundation, and sewer hydrodynamics processes. The model can simulate the impact of rainfall on people's mobility behavior and the full process including runoff generation, runoff entering pipes, node overflow, flood migration, urban mobility, and residential water usage. Then, we assessed the resilience of the urban drainage system under rainfall events from the perspectives of property loss and urban mobility. The study found that the average percentage increase in commuting time under different return periods of rainfall ranged from 6.4 to 203.9%. Calculating the annual expectation of property loss and traffic obstruction, the study found that the annual expectation loss in urban mobility is 9.1% of the annual expectation of property loss if the rainfall is near the morning commuting peak., Competing Interests: The authors declare there is no conflict., (© 2024 The Authors This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits copying, adaptation and redistribution, provided the original work is properly cited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).)

Accessible urban nature is a key component of creating sustainable urban communities and promoting human health and well-being. To balance the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, the United Nations adopted several sustainable developmental goals (SDGs), such as SDG 11 for sustainable cities and communities, which aims to improve urban planning and management, including equitable access to urban nature. However, more information is still needed regarding how planners and managers can promote urban nature visitation and equitable access during health and environmental crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to examine trends in urban nature visitation during the pandemic and then to determine if the effect of the pandemic on the frequency of urban nature site visitation varied by distance to home, using an innovative approach of analyzing both publicly available large-scale mobility data and a web-based survey of urban residents of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. The mobility data results showed that there was a negative mean % difference in park visits compared to baseline during the first and third lockdowns, but an increase compared to baseline between lockdowns and even during the second lockdown. This suggests that urban residents had greater need to reconnect with urban nature during and after periods of intense stress. In addition, the survey results showed an increasing negative effect of distance on urban nature site visitation during the pandemic, specifically for urban nature sites located more than 1 km from home. Altogether, the mobility data and survey results suggest that people who lived within 1 km of their preferred urban nature site had disproportionate access to the benefits of urban nature during and after lockdowns than others. To effectively make social and ecological transitions toward urban sustainability, it is vital that cities promote urban nature accessibility during current and future environmental and health crises. Cities should collaborate with diverse stakeholders to create/maintain accessible urban nature sites nearby all sociodemographic groups, provide sustainability education and training to convey the benefits of urban nature, and pursue participatory solutions for understanding urban nature needs and preferences. In this manner, it will be possible to address the growing influence of proximity/travel distance and additional factors that affect urban nature visitation and ultimately, human health and urban sustainability., (© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.)

The Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region (north of Italy) is characterized by the presence of high-quality freshwater resources which benefit local citizens, animals, environmental habitats, and also agriculture and production activities. Waters from wells, canal, and wastewater selected in the Fiume Veneto area, through a detailed lithological modeling, were sampled and analyzed to characterize them from a geochemical point of view. The chemical and isotopic characterization made it possible to establish provenance, and the average age of water used, making available the estimation of the relationships between recharge capacity and water use in the Fiume Vento area. The focus of this study is to define the average age of the resources based on the time required for the recharge contributions to compensate the losses induced by exploitation. The results made it possible to support the plans for a water balance using the provenance and average age of water sources for the protection of water reserves formed by the multi-aquifer system of the high and medium Friuli plain. The methodology applied has followed the legislation of the water directive considering the overexploitation due to unauthorized withdrawals of the sampling area., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

A minimum of basic water supply service is pertinent to improving living standards and water-dependent quality of life indices. In Nigeria, 14% have access to safely managed drinking water services, though approximately 30% of water pumps and schemes are likely to fail within 12 months of construction. This study aims to determine household water security and its predictors in Osun State, Nigeria. The cross-sectional study recruited 548 households through a five-stage sampling technique and used a semi-structured questionnaire for data collection. Results were presented by descriptive and inferential statistics, while binary logistic regression identified water-security predictors at P ά 0.05. Hand-dug wells (27.7%) and motorized boreholes (21.2%) were the predominant household drinking water sources. A total of 43.7% of households were water-secured while 35.2% of water sources were within residential settlements. A total of 25.1% of households experienced water scarcity, and 27.2% of households treat drinking water mainly by chlorination (56.7%) and boiling (14.7%). A total of 21.2%, 64.2%, and 9% of households, respectively, have safely managed basic and limited water supply services. Drinking water sources were associated with house ownership (p = 0.001) and residence period (p = 0.025) while water treatment was associated with gender (p = 0.010) and wealth (p = 0.0001). Age (p = 0.002) and wealth (p = 0.0001) are predictors of household water security. Two-fifths of households were water-secured, highlighting the dearth of potable water supply services and the need to incorporate strategic predictors of household water security in the existing national and state-level water resources regulations., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

In this study, we analyzed the concentration distributions of 20 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in 41 water samples which were collected from the northern part of Taihu Lake during 4 field campaigns (201511, 201606, 201702 and 201709). The concentrations were determined with GC-MS, and their spatial and seasonal distribution characteristics were interpreted. The results show that 2-ring PAHs present considerably higher concentrations in warm seasons than cold seasons, but the concentrations of the other higher-ring PAHs are rather stable in warm and cold seasons. The distribution patterns of these PAHs might be mainly attributed to ambient temperature effects on the PAH solubility in the water body. Meanwhile, the spatial distributions of the PAH concentrations in cold seasons were rather various in the sampling area, while the distributions in the warm seasons were homogeneous. The different distributions could result from the water recharge from the Yangtze River during cold seasons, which diluted PAH concentrations in the northeastern part of the lake. Furthermore, via literature review on PAH concentrations in water body, PAHs are in a wide range of levels and their patterns are different among the studies, which should be more effected by local factors instead of general PAH properties. The results from this study also present special characteristics of PAHs in Taihu Lake, which exhibit more insight on PAHs existence in water bodies., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The incidental or malicious release of toxic gases in the atmosphere is one of the most critical scenarios for cities. The impact of these releases varies with the ventilation potential of the urban environment. To disentangle this crucial aspect, vulnerability to airborne releases is here traced back to essential properties of the urban fabric. To this aim, pollutant dispersion is disassembled in its fundamental bricks and the main drivers of the process are captured. The analysis is based on four cities with emblematic architectures: Paris, Firenze, Lyon and New York. Results show that vulnerability is driven by the topology of the city and by its interaction with the approaching wind. In this sense, fragility to toxic releases is written in the layout of the urban fabric and results from its historical evolution. This study paves the way to the assessment of air pollution-related issues from a morphological point of view., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

This paper presents a new methodology for characterising the evolving behaviour of the time-varying causality between multivariate time series, from the perspective of change in the structure of the causality pattern. We propose that such evolutionary behaviour should be tracked by means of a complex network whose nodes are causality patterns and edges are transitions between those patterns of causality. In our new methodology each edge has a weight that includes the frequency of the given transition and two metrics relating to the gross and net structural change in causality pattern, which we call [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. To characterise aspects of the behaviour within this network, five approaches are presented and motivated. To act as a demonstration of this methodology an application of sample data from the international oil market is presented. This example illustrates how our new methodology is able to extract information about evolving causality behaviour. For example, it reveals non-random time-varying behaviour that favours transitions resulting in predominantly similar causality patterns, and it discovers clustering of similar causality patterns and some transitional behaviour between these clusters. The example illustrates how our new methodology supports the inference that the evolution of causality in the system is related to the addition or removal of a few causality links, primarily keeping a similar causality pattern, and that the evolution is not related to some other measure such as the overall number of causality links., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

A major challenge in maize (Zea mays) production is to achieve high grain yield (yield hereafter) by improving resource use efficiency. Using a dataset synthesized from 83 peer-reviewed articles, this study mainly investigated the effects of water and/or nitrogen (N) input on maize yield, water productivity (WP), and N use efficiency (NUE); and evaluated the effects caused by planting density, environmental (temperature, soil texture), and managerial factors (water and/or N input). The input of water increased maize yield, WP, and NUE only when the input was less than 314, 709, and 311 mm, respectively; input of N increased maize yield, WP, and NUE until input was greater than 250, 128, and 196 kg ha -1 , respectively. Additionally, results of the mixed-effects model and random forest analysis suggested that mean annual temperature (MAT) was the most critical factor for narrowing gaps (between the actual and attainable variable, which was indicated as response ratio of the treatment relative to the control) of yield (RR Y ), WP (RR WP ), and NUE (RR NUE ), respectively. Specifically, RR Y , RR WP , or RR NUE were negatively correlated to MAT when MAT was higher than 15 °C. Additionally, the structural equation model showed that water input and RR WP with the higher coefficient were more important than N input and RR NUE in improving RR Y . These findings provide new insights into the causes and limitations of global maize production and offer some guidances for water and/or N managements.