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Cultural institutions hold a unique position of influence, serving as hubs of education and knowledge dissemination for the people they serve. Embracing sustainable energy use in buildings in zoos and botanical gardens is a commitment to environmental responsibility that reinforces these institutions as trusted sources of information and community leaders on climate change, one of the most vital issues of our time. Sustainable energy solutions can synergize operations with educational missions, allowing zoos and botanical gardens to lead by example and inspire visitors to adopt eco-friendly practices in their own lives. In this opinion paper, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens President and CEO Richard Piacentini discusses key elements in developing a sustainable building energy plan, reviews potential barriers to implementation, and makes a case for adopting regenerative thinking and new metrics for measuring success—citing example cases from Phipps' Center for Sustainable Landscapes (CSL) project. Additionally, the paper demonstrates how green building certification systems and peer-based resource networks like The Climate Toolkit can help guide institutions in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the use of digital technology for the protection and research of cultural heritage has become a trend in this field. Rockeries in Chinese classical gardens have become an important cultural heritage type because of their unique shape, ingenious skills and rich connotations. Based on relevant historical information and 3D digital technology, this paper puts forward a multi-level quantitative analysis method on the scale, shape and quantity of rockeries in Chinese classical gardens, aiming at exploring the objective description and quantitative analysis path of rockeries at different levels. This method develops four levels: overall, regional, hierarchical, and individual and their corresponding quantitative contents, which in turn enable data extraction and analysis of the rockery through the different levels. The proposed method was applied to seven different Chinese classical garden rockeries, and taking Wanfang Anhe Rockery in the Old Summer Palace as an example for objective and comprehensive quantitative analysis and verification. The results show that this method is feasible and effective for quantitative analysis of the scale, shape and quantity of rockeries, which can help understand the basic background of stone rockeries and enhance a refined understanding of stone rockery construction, thereby providing data for preventive protection and informatization management of stone rockeries. The 3D rockery model database based on the overall, regional, hierarchical and individual quantitative analysis and numbering method brings a good application prospect for preventive protection and informatization management of the rockery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analytical framework for evaluating the impact of the two main processes identified in Madrid timber-framed courtyard buildings reinforcing the courtyard's crucial role in architectural heritage sustainability: their development caused dwellings to darken (1737–1950), and the existing challenge is to open new patios according to the listed buildings' protection policy. Critical findings in archival research and existing building assessments led to completed data collection and analysis. When exploring construction expansion, from the house towards the collective prototype around a gradually reduced patio and dwelling darkening (1737–1786), buildings resulted in open, semiopen, underlighted and closed designs. Study area on-site assessment uncovered the transition from the older low-rise type (1–3) floors to the modern closed model of up to (4–6) storeys. Construction enlargements, consequently reducing original green areas and courtyards, call for reversing that process or formulating a new strategy. It debates the partial demolition of listed buildings in upgrades and its agreement with the needed "blue courtyard" strategy (PGOUM), resulting from joining new rear individual patios to create a communal building block courtyard. The uncovered "in-between" type (1864), which integrates two open-air collective spaces, an inner courtyard and a back garden, appears challenging to explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensible or expandable garden hoses have become popular. However, their behavior may be surprising to physicists. In this paper, the stress–strain equations that explain this behavior are derived and compared with experiments. The results clearly demonstrate that, since deformation is very large, conventional definitions of strain and stress are not useful and so-called real definitions are needed instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting and controlling tea pests promptly are crucial for safeguarding tea production quality. Due to the insufficient feature extraction ability of traditional CNN-based methods, they face challenges such as inaccuracy and inefficiency of detecting pests in dense and mimicry scenarios. This study proposes an end-to-end tea pest detection and segmentation framework, TeaPest-Transfiner (TP-Transfiner), based on Mask Transfiner to address the challenge of detecting and segmenting pests in mimicry and dense scenarios. In order to improve the feature extraction inability and weak accuracy of traditional convolution modules, this study proposes three strategies. Firstly, a deformable attention block is integrated into the model, which consists of deformable convolution and self-attention using the key content only term. Secondly, the FPN architecture in the backbone network is improved with a more effective feature-aligned pyramid network (FaPN). Lastly, focal loss is employed to balance positive and negative samples during the training period, and parameters are adapted to the dataset distribution. Furthermore, to address the lack of tea pest images, a dataset called TeaPestDataset is constructed, which contains 1,752 images and 29 species of tea pests. Experimental results on the TeaPestDataset show that the proposed TP-Transfiner model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other models, attaining a detection precision (AP50) of 87.211% and segmentation performance of 87.381%. Notably, the model shows a significant improvement in segmentation average precision (mAP) by 9.4% and a reduction in model size by 30% compared to the state-of-the-art CNN-based model Mask R-CNN. Simultaneously, TP-Transfiner's lightweight module fusion maintains fast inference speeds and a compact model size, demonstrating practical potential for pest control in tea gardens, especially in dense and mimicry scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provenance trials provide a valuable opportunity to evaluate the impact of extreme events on growth and wood properties. In this study, we have evaluated 81 Norway spruce provenances, tested in three provenance trials established in the Romanian Carpathians in 1972. The response to drought of the Norway spruce provenances has been examined using the following tree resilience indices: resistance, recovery, resilience, and relative resilience. The relationship between climate and growth, the correlations between wood traits, and the coordinates of the origin and tree resilience indices were also analysed. In each provenance trial, there were significant differences between provenances and years regarding wood widths and latewood percentage (LWP). Regarding drought extreme events, the years when they occurred in all three provenance trials were 2000 and 2003. Significant differences between provenances for at least one tree resilience index have been found in all provenance trials, for the year 2000. By using subperiods of 25 years, changes in the relationship between climate and growth have been observed. Several provenances with high radial growth and good resistance and/or recovery have been identified. Provenances that performed better in common garden experiments could be used in assisted migration, even in the proximity of the current natural range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A warmer climate with drier summers will affect the suitability of tree species in their current range in most of Europe. To preserve ecosystem services in the future, many European countries are looking for tree species adapted to the expected future climate and are setting up trials to test them in different environments. In collaboration with forest practitioners and federal and regional authorities, we have established a network of 57 common gardens across large environmental gradients in Switzerland. Over a period of 30 to 50 years, the vitality, growth and survival of 18 tree species from 117 seed sources will be monitored to develop tree species recommendations for forest managers. In this article, we outline the considerations, challenges and trade-offs involved in designing this experiment, as well as the participatory process with a variety of stakeholders, from local foresters to the Federal Office for the Environment. Further, we list experiments testing multiple species on multiple sites in Europe and compare experimental designs, tree species and environmental gradients. The Swiss common garden network complements other European experiments and broadens the potential network by extending the covered environmental gradients to colder and moister conditions. Such targeted assisted migration trials are key to promoting tree species that can cope with the future climate and can help us to foster forest ecosystems that can adapt to rapidly changing climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the efficiency of fine segmentation and obstacle removal in the road of tea plantation in hilly areas, a lightweight and high-precision DR-YOLO instance segmentation algorithm is proposed to realize environment awareness. Firstly, the road data of tea gardens in hilly areas were collected under different road conditions and light conditions, and data sets were generated. YOLOv8n-seg, which has the highest operating efficiency, was selected as the basic model. The MSDA-CBAM and DR-Neck feature fusion network were added to the YOLOv8-seg model to improve the feature extraction capability of the network and the feature fusion capability and efficiency of the model. Experimental results show that, compared with the YOLOv8-seg model, the DR-YOLO model proposed in this study has 2.0% improvement in AP@0.5 and 1.1% improvement in Precision. In this study, the DR-YOLO model is pruned and quantitatively compressed, which greatly improves the model inference speed with little reduction in AP. After deploying on Jetson, compared with the YOLOv8n-seg model, the Precision of DR-YOLO is increased by 0.6%, the AP@0.5 is increased by 1.6%, and the inference time is reduced by 17.1%, which can effectively improve the level of agricultural intelligent automation and realize the efficient operation of the instance segmentation model at the edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human cultivation facilitates the naturalization and subsequent invasion of non-native plant species through, for example, protection from predators or reducing environmental stochasticity. With the development of tourism, non-native plant species have been increasingly introduced into rural home gardens for landscape greening and amenity planting. However, few studies have examined non-native flora in rural home gardens, and in particular the importance of tourism in determining changes of garden non-native flora has not been scrutinized. In this study, we investigated non-native plant species in 135 home gardens across five rural tourism villages in tropical China. Attributes related to garden or household characteristics were also collected through interviews and questionnaires. A distance-based redundancy analysis was then performed to reveal the relationships between the non-native species composition and garden attributes. A total of 338 non-native plant species were recorded in the surveyed gardens. Among them, the majority (63%) were ornamentals, whereas 19% were for nutritional uses and 12% were spontaneous weeds. Gardening preference and distance to tourist attractions governed the non-native compositions, with gardens preferring cultural (ornamental) cultivation or gardens close to tourist attractions having more non-native species. These results highlight an increasing role of tourism in promoting non-native cultivation in rural gardens. Recommendations for species risk assessment, trade and supply regulation, and proper garden management are provided to help harness plant invasion along tourism development in rural China and other regions around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Given the benefits of gardening for physical and psychological health, we explored whether gardening was associated with lower risks of subjective cognitive decline (SCD), a precursor of dementia, and SCD-related functional limitations. Methods: Included in this cross-sectional study were 136,748 participants aged 45 + years old from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2019 survey, who were then categorized into three groups according to self-reported exercise status: non-exercisers, gardeners, and other exercisers. SCD was assessed via a questionnaire, and SCD-related functional limitations were referred to as having difficulties in engaging in household or social activities due to SCD. The odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated to assess the associations of gardening with SCD and SCD-related functional limitations, adjusted for age, sex, socioeconomic status, lifestyle factors, and health status. Mediation analyses were conducted to examine whether the observed association between gardening and SCD was mediated by energy expenditure (MET-hours/week), depression status, and consumption of fruits and vegetables. Results: Overall, 11.1% and 5.4% of participants self-reported experiencing SCD and SCD-related functional limitations, respectively. The adjusted OR for gardeners vs. non-exercisers, was 0.72 (95% CI 0.62–0.83) for SCD and 0.57 (95% CI 0.44–0.73) for SCD-related functional limitations. The observed association between gardening and SCD was explained by higher energy expenditure (39.0%), lower likelihood of having depression (21.5%), and higher consumption of fruits and vegetables (3.4%) (P<0.05 for all). Similar patterns were observed for SCD-related functional limitations. Conclusion: In this nationally representative sample, gardening was associated with better cognitive status, which may be mainly attributed to better depression status and energy expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of landscape space directly influences public health behaviors, making public assessments of the qualities of the sky garden landscape crucial for optimizing it. This article focuses on three types of typical high-rise building sky garden (plaza-park, rest-stay, and move-pass type) and establishes an evaluation framework for their health promotion characteristics (24 indicators in 7 dimensions) based on existing restorative environment research. Then, questionnaires (354 valid responses) and quantitative calculations were employed to assess the public's perception of demand in health behaviors and the spatial supply of different sky garden types. Ultimately, the data were processed to propose targeted interventions and recommendations to enhance health benefits using the comprehensive importance-performance analysis method. The results show the following: (1) The public seems to have widely accepted sky gardens in the context of high-density urban environments (near 6.92, below the mean of 7.09). They place greater emphasis on spatial indicators that cater to relaxation activities and show heightened sensitivity toward public facilities (7.32–8.00) that contribute to physical and mental health-related activities. (2) The health promotion performance of different types of sky garden shows significant variation, with the rest-stay sky gardens at the embodied scale demonstrating the greatest competitive advantage. (3) The development of sky gardens has significant potential, and different types of sky garden need to specifically lever-age their characteristics as complementary public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite numerous studies conducted on Iranian gardens, the analytical investigation of the role of gardens in the shaping of pavilions has not received significant attention. In this study, utilizing fractal geometry, we can observe and analyze architectural qualities with mathematical precision and greater detail. This approach aids in re-examining the visual perceptions of the pavilion structure and identifying the missing geometrical value of the garden. This article delves into the relationship between a pavilion and a garden through fractal geometry. The findings are discussed and explored to uncover the architectural complexities of pavilions, which are influenced by the garden and its natural surroundings. A historical garden named Fathabad in the city of Kerman was selected as the case of our study. Fractal dimension analysis is employed to analyze the two pavilions' facades. The box-counting method was applied to measure the fractal dimensions of the facades at three scales. The results would reveal the relationship between each of the two pavilion facades and the garden. The findings indicate that while different facades share similar architectural elements, they exhibit diverse fractal dimensions. These dimensions reveal the position of each facade relative to the garden's geometry, and the variable fractal dimension within each level signifies distinct relationships between the levels and the garden axes. Additionally, facades parallel to the main garden pond or those without a direct view exhibit a lower fractal dimension. Although facade openness can serve as a measure of its connection to nature, fractal analysis demonstrates that facades with multiple openings have varied relationships with the garden. Furthermore, the analysis of decorative elements reveals that in parts of the facade with fewer openings, ornamentation may be influenced by the garden's natural features. In summary, fractal geometry elucidates how the garden and its elements impact different parts of the facades of the two pavilions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional cold alleys have the ability to adapt to hot climates with cooling and insulation, which is a traditional design method that conforms to sustainable development. Due to the limited depth of space and the adoption of mechanical ventilation in most contemporary architectural design, this passive energy-saving method is gradually being ignored. In this study, we use ventilation measurement and simulation to explore the characteristics of ventilation performance in the cold alleys of the renovation and expansion project of Shixiangyuan Garden. The research, using anemometers and thermometers for measurement, aims to explore how Shixiangyuan Garden can utilize its existing environment and improve it to adapt to local conditions, and also discusses the methods of increasing the number of air vents to improve the overall ventilation performance of the alleys, as well as the effects of form changes caused by utilizing water and plants to supplement the soft interface. Although many studies have explored the mechanisms of cold alleys in traditional architecture, few have discussed the variance of cold alley forms that could adapt to the limited depths of newly constructed buildings. This study attempts to explore the potential for this through simulation. The purpose is to find new ways to inherit the sustainable advantages of cold alleys in new projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coordination between leaf and root traits is conducive to an integrated understanding of whole-plant ecological strategies and reveals how community composition and diversity contribute to defining the functions and services of ecosystems. However, there is limited understanding regarding the impact of species richness and trait categories on the coordination between leaf and root traits. Based on a 9-year common garden experiment, we investigated the leaf and fine root traits of 56 plots (25.8 m × 25.8 m) encompassing various trait categories (trait categories were defined according to the root depth, leaf habit, and mycorrhizal type) and different levels of species richness (1, 2, 4, 8) in the context of a forest biodiversity and ecosystem functioning experiment conducted in subtropical China (BEF-China). We found the following: (1) Our findings indicate that there was generally a significant difference in leaf traits, occasionally in absorptive root traits, and no difference in transport root traits between different trait categories. (2) Conversely, species richness significantly influenced all transport root traits except root nitrogen and most leaf and absorptive root traits. (3) The results demonstrated that trait categories played a crucial role in the coordination between leaf and fine root traits. Additionally, the coordination between leaf and fine root traits increased with higher species richness, particularly in deep-rooted, evergreen, and ectomycorrhizal fungi species. Furthermore, the coordination between leaf and fine root traits was significantly lower in monocultures compared to four- and eight-species mixtures. These results suggest that a significant mixture effect exists in the coordination between leaf and fine root traits due to the comprehensive and divergent capture of above- and belowground resources and reduced intraspecific competition. Therefore, compared to monocultures, mixed-species stands can enhance the coordination of leaf and fine root traits, and it is advisable to establish forests with mixtures of more than four species, dominated by deep-rooted, evergreen, and ectomycorrhizal fungi species, to maintain ecosystem stability and functional integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourists' visual preferences are of paramount importance for the local garden environment assessment. However, the diversity of garden elements presents challenges in achieving uniform assessments. This study focuses on 65 modern gardens around Taihu Lake (太湖), utilizing image semantic segmentation and the Semantic Differential (SD) method to evaluate tourists' visual perceptions, identifying 16 perceptual indicators associated with garden elements. The research findings indicate the following: (1) Modern gardens in different cities (Wuxi, Suzhou, Huzhou) offer distinct visual experiences to tourists. (2) Through quantitative analysis of garden elements and tourists' visual perceptions, it is revealed that middle and high-rise vegetation, hydrology, architecture, and sketch elements enhance visual aesthetics, while main road and low-rise vegetation elements result in less pronounced perceptions. This study quantitatively explores the complexities in evaluating garden aesthetics and serves as a bridge between qualitative and quantitative aspects for future garden environmental impact assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) have undergone large scale population declines leading to multiple conservation organizations encouraging the creation of monarch butterfly habitat. Monarch Watch encourages volunteers to create and register monarch habitat as Monarch Waystations.During registration waystations can be named. Names reflect personal meanings, community attachments, and cultural insights and waystation names in particular can provide insights into what ideas and concepts volunteers associate with a habitat creation program.A total of 37,916 registered waystation names were examined to determine most commonly used names, words and word themes. The most common types of waystations were medium‐sized suburban gardens in the United States.The most common waystation names referenced yard placement with My Backyard the most frequently used. Place‐themed words were the most used followed by animal‐themed words. Within animal‐themed words, insect words were the most used followed by mammals and birds.Theological/mortality themed words were present with memorial the most common word, implying a permanence of waystations.The most common familial terms included mom and grandma suggesting inter‐generational gardening is occurring, which is known to strengthen communities and build well‐being.The frequency of positive emotion/feeling words implies that participating in habitat creation programs is a positive experience and participation may reduce conservation apathy.Further research into habitat creation programs and the longevity of habitat created as well as the motivations and demographics of participants can help tailor habitat volunteer programs to desired audiences and increase overall participation. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gardens emerge as powerful catalysts for enhancing the well-being of the older generation. The design of a garden plays a significant role in engagement with such an environment. The investigation aimed to determine features integral to the garden for older adults to be applied as design guidelines for therapeutic gardens serving the elderly. A mixed quantitative-qualitative approach was used with a questionnaire focused on eliciting insights into the garden experiences. The respondents comprised individuals from Care Homes and Senior Activity Centres. The results revealed the importance of childhood gardens and associated memories of the elderly. Consequently, the conceptualisation of a garden tailored to the needs of older adults highlights relaxation. A garden should facilitate passive engagement with nature and active involvement in the nurturing of plant life. Botanical preferences encompass a diverse array of flora: roses, tulips, and peonies in the floral domain; tomatoes, onions, and carrots within the vegetables; and apples, pears, and plums within the realm of fruits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schoolyards and school gardens present a rich context for students to engage with engineering and design. We describe the Designing Trellises unit, an example of a guided grade 3-5 engineering experience in the garden. In this unit, students work collaboratively toward a shared classroom design goal: creating 2-3 pea plant trellises for the school garden. They collaboratively design, research, prototype, build, and test their trellis designs. Students figure out disciplinary core ideas about balanced and unbalanced forces through engagement in asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, designing solutions and other science and engineering practices. At the end of the unit, teachers and students report that students feel a strong sense of agency and pride as they ask and answer questions and create designs that are important to them and their school community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript treats the acoustic analysis of a garden located in Rufolo's villa, south of Italy, which has already been studied to install some acoustic panels to improve the response across the seating area. After a campaign of acoustic measurements, acoustic simulations have been conducted based on three specific scenarios, highlighting the effectiveness of a new acoustic shell (project C) over the existing conditions (project A) and option A shell (project B). The results coming from the simulations show that the values of the main acoustic parameters are significantly improved with the installation of a scientifically designed acoustic shell, to be closer to the optimal ranges. The comparison among different projects highlights that the acoustic response of the existing conditions is not optimal, and that a marginal improvement was found with the addition of vertical panels mounted at the perimeter of the stage in combination with suspended ceiling above the stage. This research study is addressed to potentially auralize the voice or sound of famous artists that would be performing within the new acoustic shell; furthermore, the outputs could even implement the website of the Rufolo's villa for marketing purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crown diameter is one of the crucial indicators for evaluating the adaptability, growth quality, and ornamental value of garden chrysanthemums. To accurately obtain crown diameter, this study employed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a RGB camera to capture orthorectified canopy images of 64 varieties of garden chrysanthemums at different growth stages. Three methods, namely RGB color space, hue-saturation-value (HSV) color space, and the mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN), were employed to estimate the crown diameter of garden chrysanthemums. The results revealed that the Mask R-CNN exhibited the best performance in crown diameter estimation (sample number = 2409, R2 = 0.9629, RMSE = 2.2949 cm). Following closely, the HSV color space-based model exhibited strong performance (sample number = 2409, R2 = 0.9465, RMSE = 3.4073 cm). Both of the first two methods were efficient in estimating crown diameter throughout the entire growth stage. In contrast, the RGB color space-based model exhibited slightly lower performance (sample number = 1065, R2 = 0.9011, RMSE = 3.3418 cm) and was only applicable during periods when the entire plant was predominantly green. These findings provide theoretical and technical support for utilizing UAV-based imagery to estimate the crown diameter of garden chrysanthemums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a special garden unique to China, the front garden of multi-storey residential buildings has certain public attributes but is managed by a single owner. In this study, the front gardens of multi-storey residential buildings in Jiangsu province, China, were set as research object. Meanwhile, the size of garden, plant type, plant vertical structure, color number, plant coverage, and fence material were chosen as the landscape features to be explored. Then the experiments were conducted to reveal the visual impact assessment rendered by the public with different demographic attributes and the results obtained were analyzed. As is indicated by the statistical analysis, significant differences exist between the owners and the public in their visual impact assessments of the front gardens; the six landscape features are the main factors that influence the public's visual impact assessment; and the public with different demographic attributes would render different visual impact assessments of front gardens. This study offers valuable help for the design of front gardens of multi-storey residential buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Rock Garden is a new on-campus field skills training resource at Ghent University that was developed to increase the accessibility of geological field skills training and to provide students with more opportunities for such training. Developing specific field skills is integral to geoscience education and is typically concentrated into whole-day or longer field courses. These field courses have exceptional educational value, as they draw together multiple strands of classroom theory and practical laboratory learning. However, field courses are expensive and time-intensive to run, and they can present physical, financial, and cultural barriers to accessing geoscience education. Moreover, the relative infrequency of field courses over a degree programme means that key skills go unused for long intervals and that students can lose confidence in their application of these skills. To tackle the inaccessibility of field skills training, made more pronounced in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we built the Rock Garden: an artificial geological mapping training area that emulates a real-world mapping exercise in Belgium. We have integrated the Rock Garden into our geological mapping training courses and have used it to partially mitigate the disadvantages related to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Using the Rock Garden as a refresher exercise before a real-world geological mapping exercise increased students' confidence in their field skills, and students whose education was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic produced work of a similar quality to students from pre-pandemic cohorts. Developing a campus-based resource makes field training locally accessible, giving students more opportunities to practise their field skills and, consequently, more confidence in their abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]