ALBERT

Description: The Chinese government started an important project “Geographical conditions monitoring (GCM)” in 2012, which aims at fully revealing the spatial pattern of natural resources, and economic and social development. Urban development assessment and analysis are an important topic of the comprehensive statistics in GCM project. This study quantitatively evaluates the sustainable development level of 287 cities at prefecture level and above in China and analyzes their spatial distribution. Both an index system of urban sustainable development (USI) constructed by three aspects, namely society, economy and environment, and the TOPSIS-Entropy method are adopted. The results show that the overall level of urban sustainable development in China is not high, and obvious differences in urban sustainable development among cities exist. The coordination of social, economic and environmental sustainable development in China is at a low level. In terms of spatial distribution, cities from eastern coastal areas of China are at relatively higher levels of sustainable development with central and northeastern cities ranking second and western ones lowest. Several spatial clusters of urban sustainable development can be found. The “High–High” clusters, in which cities have high levels of sustainable development, are distributed in urban agglomerations. Finally, some suggestions have been provided to achieve all-round sustainable development in China.

Description: On 16 March 2014, the State Council of China launched its first urbanization planning initiative dubbed “National New Urbanization Planning (2014–2020)” (NNUP). NNUP put forward 20 urban agglomerations and a sustainable development approach aiming to transform traditional Chinese urbanization to sustainable new urbanization. This study quantitatively evaluates the level of sustainability of the present new urbanization process in 20 Chinese urban agglomerations and provides some positive suggestions for the achievement of sustainable new urbanization. A three-level index system which is based on six fundamental elements in a city and a Full Permutation Polygon Synthetic Indicator evaluation method are adopted. The results show that China is undergoing a new urbanization process with a low level of sustainability and there are many problems remaining from traditional urbanization processes. There exists a polarized phenomenon in the urbanization of 20 urban agglomerations. Based on their own development patterns, the 20 urban agglomerations can be divided into seven categories. Every category has its own development characteristics. The analyses also show that waste of water resources, abuse of land resources, and air pollution are three big problems that are closely linked to traditional Chinese urbanization processes. To achieve sustainable new urbanization in China, four relevant suggestions and comments have been provided.

Description: Water, Vol. 10, Pages 115: Occurrence, Seasonal Variation and Risk Assessment of Antibiotics in Qingcaosha Reservoir Water doi: 10.3390/w10020115 Authors: Yue Jiang Cong Xu Xiaoyu Wu Yihan Chen Wei Han Karina Gin Yiliang He Qingcaosha Reservoir is an important drinking water source in Shanghai. The occurrence of five groups of antibiotics was investigated in the surface water of this reservoir over a one-year period. Seventeen antibiotics were selected in this study based on their significant usage in China. Of these antibiotics, 16 were detected, while oxytetracycline was not detected in any sampling site. The detected frequency of tylosin was only 47.92% while the other 15 antibiotics were above 81.25%. The dominant antibiotic was different in four seasons: norfloxacin was dominant in spring, and penicillinV was dominant in summer, autumn and winter, with medium concentrations of 124.10 ng/L, 89.91 ng/L, 180.28 ng/L, and 216.43 ng/L, respectively. The concentrations and detection frequencies of antibiotics were notably higher in winter than in other seasons, demonstrating that low temperature and low flow may result in the persistence of antibiotics in the aquatic environment. Risk assessment suggested that norfloxacin, ciprofloxacin, penicillinV, and doxycycline in the surface water presented high ecological risks.

Description: Forests, Vol. 8, Pages 487: Mapping Net Stocked Plantation Area for Small-Scale Forests in New Zealand Using Integrated RapidEye and LiDAR Sensors Forests doi: 10.3390/f8120487 Authors: Cong Xu Justin Morgenroth Bruce Manley In New Zealand, approximately 70% of plantation forests are large-scale (over 1000 ha) with accurate resource description. In contrast, the remaining 30% of plantation forests are small-scale (less than 1000 ha). It is forecasted that these small-scale forests will supply nearly 40% of the national wood production in the next decade. However, in-depth description of these forests, especially those under 100 ha, is very limited. This research evaluates the use of remote sensing datasets to map and estimate the net stocked plantation area for small-scale forests. We compared a factorial combination of two classification approaches (Nearest Neighbour (NN), Classification and Regression Tree (CART)) and two remote sensing datasets (RapidEye, RapidEye plus LiDAR) for their ability to accurately classify planted forest area. CART with a combination of RapidEye and LiDAR metrics outperformed the other three combinations producing the highest accuracy for mapping forest plantations (user’s accuracy = 90% and producer’s accuracy = 88%). This method was further examined by comparing the mapped plantations with manually digitised plantations based on aerial photography. The mapping approach overestimated the plantation area by 3%. It was also found that forest patches exceeding 10 ha achieved higher conformance with the digitised areas. Overall, the mapping approach in this research provided a proof of concept for deriving forest area and mapping boundaries using remote sensing data, and is especially relevant for small-scale forests where limited information is currently available.