Search

Pedestrian accessibility is an important factor in urban transport and land use policy and critical for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Developing and evaluating indicators measuring inequalities in pedestrian accessibility can help planners and policymakers benchmark and monitor the progress of city planning interventions. However, measuring and assessing indicators of urban design and transport features at high resolution worldwide to enable city comparisons is challenging due to limited availability of official, high‐quality, and comparable spatial data, as well as spatial analysis tools offering customizable frameworks for indicator construction and analysis. To address these challenges, this study develops an open source software framework to construct pedestrian accessibility indicators for cities using open and consistent data. It presents a generalized method to consistently measure pedestrian accessibility at high resolution and spatially aggregated scale, to allow for both within‐ and between‐city analyses. The open source and open data methods developed in this study can be extended to other cities worldwide to support local planning and policymaking. The software is made publicly available for reuse in an open repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that the density of feral honey bee colonies in Australia is sufficient to provide adequate pollination services to the many agricultural crops that require pollination. In contrast, there is concern that the density of feral colonies is sufficiently high to have inimical effects on Australian biota. For both these reasons, it is desirable to have robust estimates of the density of feral honey bee colonies in Australian landscapes. In this study, we mated four to five queens with wild drones at disturbed and undisturbed sites in three of the major ecosystems in Victoria Australia and examined the paternities of worker offspring to estimate the density of feral colonies within mating range of the test queens. We show that the density of feral colonies differs little with land use (cleared or uncleared) and is similar across the state. Our data suggest that the density of feral colonies is probably insufficient to provide adequate pollination of agricultural crops and that neither land use nor local climate variation is a major factor determining density. Finally, our data suggest that the mating range sampled by test queens is significantly greater than previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]