Exploring the effects of multi-dimensional geographic environment on daily sleep and physical activity based on the Actigraph data.

Understanding the interplay between people's daily sleep and physical activity and how geographic environment influences them are important for developing healthy cities. However, such research has been limited. This study aims to explore the bidirectional and nonlinear relationship between daily sleep and physical activity, and further investigate the comprehensive influences of multi-dimensional geographic environment on these health behaviors.

The relationship between extreme ambient temperature and small for gestational age: A cohort study of 1,436,480 singleton term births in China.

Studies have shown that exposure to extreme ambient temperature can contribute to adverse pregnancy outcomes, however, results across studies have been inconsistent. We aimed to evaluate the relationships between trimester-specific extreme temperature exposures and fetal growth restriction indicated by small for gestational age (SGA) in term pregnancies, and to assess whether and to what extent this relationship varies between different geographic regions. We linked 1,436,480 singleton term newborns (2014-2016) in Hubei Province, China, with a sub-district-level temperature exposures estimated by a generalized additive spatio-temporal model.

PM Concentrations Variability in North China Explored with a Multi-Scale Spatial Random Effect Model.

Compiling fine-resolution geospatial PM concentrations data is essential for precisely assessing the health risks of PM pollution exposure as well as for evaluating environmental policy effectiveness. In most previous studies, global and local spatial heterogeneity of PM is captured by the inclusion of multi-scale covariate effects, while the modelling of genuine pertaining to the spatial random process of PM has not yet been much studied. Consequently, this work proposed a multi-scale spatial random effect model (MSSREM), based a recently developed fixed-rank Kriging method, to capture both the and the spatial dependence effect simultaneously.

The Influence of Air Pollution on Happiness and Willingness to Pay for Clean Air in the Bohai Rim Area of China.

Air pollution imposes detrimental impacts on residents' health and the general quality of life. Quantifying the influential mechanism of air pollution on residents' happiness and the economic value brought by environmental quality improvement could provide a scientific basis for the construction of livable cities. This study estimated urban residents' willingness to pay for air pollution abatement by modeling the spatial relationship between air quality and self-rated happiness with a Bayesian multi-level ordinal categorical response model.

The Evolution Characteristics and Influence Mechanism of Chinese Venture Capital Spatial Agglomeration.

As an emerging financial entity, venture capital has a significant impact on regional development. However, the research on venture capital mainly focuses on the fields of finance, management, and economics, and fewer researchers study venture capital from the perspective of geography and space. This research explored the evolution characteristics and influence mechanism of Chinese venture capital spatial agglomeration.

A Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Urban Expansion and Pollutant Emissions in Fujian Province.

Urbanization processes at both global and regional scales are taking place at an unprecedent pace, leading to more than half of the global population living in urbanized areas. This process could exert grand challenges on the human living environment. With the proliferation of remote sensing and satellite data being used in social and environmental studies, fine spatial- and temporal-resolution measures of urban expansion and environmental quality are increasingly available.

The effect of natural and anthropogenic factors on PM: Empirical evidence from Chinese cities with different income levels.

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effects of natural conditions and anthropogenic factors on PM concentrations, taking into consideration differences in the income levels, and thus the development stages, of the cities studied. To achieve this goal, a balanced dataset of 287 Chinese cities was divided into different income-based panels for the period 1998-2015. The empirical estimation results indicated that meteorological conditions exerted varied effects on PM concentrations across different income-based panels.

Reconsidering the Relationship between Air Pollution and Deprivation.

This paper critically examines the relationship between air pollution and deprivation. We argue that focusing on a particular economic or social model of urban development might lead one to erroneously expect all cities to converge towards a particular universal norm. A naive market sorting model, for example, would predict that poor households will eventually be sorted into high pollution areas, leading to a positive relationship between air pollution and deprivation.

Multilevel Modelling with Spatial Interaction Effects with Application to an Emerging Land Market in Beijing, China.

This paper develops a methodology for extending multilevel modelling to incorporate spatial interaction effects. The motivation is that classic multilevel models are not specifically spatial. Lower level units may be nested into higher level ones based on a geographical hierarchy (or a membership structure--for example, census zones into regions) but the actual locations of the units and the distances between them are not directly considered: what matters is the groupings but not how close together any two units are within those groupings.

Impact assessment of recent climate change on rice yields in the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area of north-east China.

Background: Investigating the degree to which climate change may have impacted on rice yields can provide an insight into how to adapt to climate change in the future. Meteorological and rice yield data over the period 1960-2009 from the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area of north-east China (HRANC) were used to explore the possible impacts of climate change on rice yields at sub-regional scale.

Results: Results showed that a warming trend was obvious in the HRANC and discernible climate fluctuations and yield variations on inter-annual scale were detected to have occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.