Scenic Lands Research Articles

Assessment of Traffic Induced Noise Pollution Indices and its Impact on Students’ Health at Bangladesh Agricultural University

The Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) is a prime campus of agricultural study on 488 hectares of scenic land on the western array of the old Brahmaputra River. This study aimed to measure the prevailing levels of traffic induced noise pollution at the core academic points and to assess the impacts of noise pollution on students’ health at BAU. The recorded Lave ranges from 55–85 dB. The Lave ranges from 79–85 dB throughout the whole day at FoA and FoAH. The Lave at these two core academic points are almost the double than the permissible limit of 45 dB. The Lmax pressure (96 dB) at Jobber moor during the noon is the maximum inside the whole BAU campus. The movement of traffic vehicles is responsible as the main sources of these noise. The noise level indices and their degree of fluctuation as given by Leq, Lnp, and NC are higher in roadside locations namely at FoA, FoAH, FoAERS. In terms of noise pollution, three of the sampled areas namely FoA, FoAH, and KR market show ‘moderate risk’ (Lave: 81 dB) during the morning whilst, the FoAH possessed the ‘high risk’ with the Lave of 85 dB. The results show that the FoA, FoAH, KR market, Jobber moor, and administration building can be labelled as the highest zone of noise level intensity. Due to excessive noise, university students are facing disorders like irritation, headache, nervousness, insomnia, anxiety, hearing problem, and hypertension. Controlling noise pollution is an absolute necessity for BAU to ensure noise-less academic culture whilst the dwellers of BAU is in the risk of serious noise-related health hazards. The results would be very useful for BAU authority to monitor and formulate a structural noise management policy, and to control excessive noise at our beloved BAU.

Assessing Street Space Quality Using Street View Imagery and Function-Driven Method: The Case of Xiamen, China

Street space quality assessment refers to the extraction and appropriate evaluation of the space quality information of urban streets, which is usually employed to improve the quality of urban planning and management. Compared to traditional approaches relying on expert knowledge, the advances of big data collection and analysis technologies provide an alternative for assessing street space more precisely. With street view imagery (SVI), points of interest (POI) and comment data from social media, this study evaluates street space quality from the perspective of exploring and discussing the relationship among street vitality, service facilities and built environment. Firstly, a transfer-learning-based framework is employed for SVI semantic segmentation to quantify the street built environment. Then, we use POI data to identify different urban functions that streets serve, and comment data are utilized to investigate urban vitality composition and integrate it with different urban functions associated with streets. Finally, a function-driven street space quality assessment approach is established. To examine its applicability and performance, the proposed method is experimented with data from part area in Xiamen, China. The output is compared to results based on expert opinion using the correlation analysis method. Results show that the proposed assessment approach designed in this study is in accordance with the validation data, with the overall R2 value being greater than 0.6. In particular, the proposed method shows better performance in scenic land and mixed functional streets with R2 value being greater than 0.8. This method is expected to be an efficient tool for discovering problems and optimizing urban planning and management.

Scenic landscapes, visual accessibility and premium values in a single family housing market: A spatial hedonic approach

This article uses a hedonic modelling approach to assess the implicit willingness to pay for the visual accessibility of voluntarily protected, privately owned, scenic lands based on single family houses. These lands are perpetually protected to preserve natural, historic, and scenic characteristics. The capitalized house premium was captured using a visual accessibility variable, which was a combined weighted measure of ‘view’ and ‘proximity,’ referred to here as the Gravity Inspired Visibility Index. Both global ( adjusted R2 = 0.52, AICc = 29,828) and geographically weighted regression models ( adjusted R2 = 0.59, AICc = 29,729) estimated the price effect but the geographically weighted regression model outperformed the global model. The results from the geographically weighted regression model indicated an average 3.4% price premium on the mean value of homes in the study area. The paper offers a useful framework for evaluating the effect of land protection for planning and real estate purposes. It also offers useful insights for conservation agencies, local governments, professional planners, and real estate professionals for prioritizing land sites with scenic views.

Investigation of optimum working conditions of a micro cross flow turbine

Large‐scale hydropower plants have major impacts on surrounding environment. This is mostly because of flooding land for the reservoir which destroys forests, wildlife habitat, agricultural, and scenic lands (Union of Concern Scientists [2015]: Environmental impacts of hydroelectric power). Small‐scale hydropower systems, on the other hand, can be used as a much environmental choice especially for independent rural electrification. Dam or barrage requirements for mini and micro turbines are fairly small and water is stored in forebay tanks. However, financial considerations dictates utilisation of more efficient turbine technologies than currently available small‐scale turbines can offer. Cross flow turbines (CFT) of small‐scale hydropower plants are highly environmental considering their production and maintenance, but unfavoured due to their difficulty in achieving adequate and sustainable efficiency. Furthermore, maintaining power quality of micro hydropower stations with island operation setup is difficult. In this study, response surface methodology (RSM) is applied to investigate and identify the operating conditions of a micro cross flow turbine. A quadratic model is developed through RSM and an experimental setup of CFT is established to investigate the combined effects of flow rate, head and guide vane angle parameters on the turbine performance. RSM analyses are performed for 50 Hz constant frequency as optimal working condition. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 34: 1506–1511, 2015

“Typically American”

“Typically American”

Institutional boundaries and common‐pool resource management: A comparative analysis of water management programs in California

AbstractPolicymakers and academics often identify institutional boundaries as one of the factors that shape the capacity of jurisdictions to manage natural resources such as water, forests, and scenic lands. This article examines two key bodies of literature—common‐pool resource management theory and local public economy theory—to explain how the boundaries of political jurisdictions affect natural resource management. Two empirical methods were used to test hypotheses from the literature, using a study of water management programs in California. The results demonstrate that institutional boundaries that coincide with natural resources are likely to be associated with the implementation of more effective resource management programs. At the same time, where jurisdictions can control through coordination, they can also facilitate more effective resource management where jurisdictions do not match resource boundaries. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Wintergreen: Listening to the Land’s Heart by Robert Michael Pyle, and: The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland by Robert Michael Pyle

296 WesternAmerican Literature history. ‘The Greek Pioneers of 1902,”ostensibly about Barba, a patriarch, afolkhealer, an interpreter ofdreams, the father of the town mayor, and alawbreaking bootlegger of the 1930s (who is lionized as a pioneer by the local paper after his death in the late 1960s), brilliantly becomes the story of Barba’s wife, Efthimia, and all the other women forgotten by the public record. Real immigrant experience in the Westpresses hard against theAmerican Dream in these stories. The Melting Pot won’t melt Old-World tensions between factions of Cretans, Maniots, Peloponnesians, and central Greeks. Youngmen flee the povertyofthe old country in pursuit ofthe American Dream only to find themselves living lives ofexile in shacks made out of blasting-powder boxes, burdened with the need to supply dowries for their sisters and then their sisters’ children, crying for lost families and friends, mourning the loss oftheir language, vowingalwaysto return to their homeland, and then finally returning in old age only to wish they had remained in America. Women become old before their time, spiritually crippled bythe weight ofproverbs and family demands. They long for some cultural grace to lighten the drabness of their men’s economic struggles while living out their lives in old-fashioned black dresses and head-hugging cloches that their children later scream would be greatfor Halloween. The great imaginative truth of these stories is that documentable hardships are less significant to our experience than are the places of the soul where we live out our real lives amid memory and longing. In “Father Gregory and the Stranger,”a contemporary Greek priest, trying to negotiate a life between the pressures of a domineering mother and his own faded desire to be abishop, finds himselfimprisoned in his sense ofselfafter encountering a gay parishioner, “knowing, free,”who seeks expungement of his baptis­ mal record in protest of the Church’s position on homosexuality. A kind of freedom comes with such self-knowledge, as when Chris Stavros in another contemporary story, “My Son, the Monk,”recognizes in old age that he has become much like the old Greek uncle he once despised. ‘The FirstMeeting ofthe Group”beautifully reveals how Effie, a rich widow with a facelift, who apparently always got what she wanted even during the Depression, harbors in her heart the regret thatas a child she had to go to Greek school and unlike American girls couldn’t attend the senior hop. When reminded fifty years later how fortunate her long life has been and how grateful she should feel for having marriedawonderful man, Effie replies, “Well, I’m notgrateful! Thatdoesn’tmake up for not going to the senior hop!” These wonderful stories poignantly dramatize what fiction shows best: history that matters lives in the heart. FRANKBERGON VassarCollege Wintergreen: Listening to the Land’s Heart. By Robert Michael Pyle. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. 303 pages, $10.95.) The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. By Robert Michael Pyle. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. 220 pages, $19.95.) RobertFrost’s“The Oven Bird”posesaquestion that today’snature writersalso face: “what to make of a diminished thing?” Early American nature writers sang of the Reviews 297 marvelous abundance of the New World. Turn-of-the-century writers rhapsodized about the beauty of favorite, unspoiled places, insisting that these scenic lands be preserved. Later nature writers sought out pockets of remaining wilderness or rural farmsteads, describing their intimacy with some out-of-the-way place whose exact location they rarely divulged. At century’s end, nature writers have had to learn to sing of damaged lands, to discover wildness in urban settings, and to vise their words to heal wounds. Robert Michael Pyle is one of these nature writers of the wounded age. Pyle is trained in biology, having earned a doctorate degree in ecology and environmental studies from Yale University. His firstsix books are on butterflies, including TheAudubon SocietyHandbookfarButterfly Watchersand TheAudubon SocietyField Guide toNorthAmerican Butterflies. In Wintergreen and The Thunder Tree, Pyle stretches his literary repertoire to experiment with more personal, lyrical, and reflective essays on place. Wintergreen, which won theJohn Burroughs Medal for the best natural history book of 1987, describes the seasons, the ecology, the people, and...

Economics of Compensation in Development Rights Programs

Interest in land-use planning and control in the United States has recently shifted to a variety of non-conventional tools in an attempt to attain results that have eluded older techniques such as traditional zoning. A major land-use objective has been to continue certain existing land uses in the face of market pressures to convert to more intensive uses. This has been the case, for example, with ecologically fragile areas such as wetlands, or environmentally valuable areas such as scenic land, which are also economically attractive for development into housing or industrial property. In recent years interest has also turned to preservation of agricultural land, particularly in areas near urban concentrations that are feeling the effects of urban sprawl.