Trees,ground vegetation,sidewalks, cycleways: users’ preferences and economic values for different elements of an urban street—a case study in Taipei

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - Streets are an essential element of cities, and their design has a profound impact on their functionality to the movement of people and their...     

The choice of system boundaries for effective long-term management of phosphorus

Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management - Material flow analysis (MFA) is a well-established tool for supporting decisions on nutrient management. This paper shows the importance of the...     

What matters for work engagement? A diary study on resources and the benefits of selective optimization with compensation for state work engagement

This diary study addresses the benefits of employees' daily use of selective optimization with compensation (SOC) for state work engagement. We hypothesized that day‐level SOC not only directly fosters work engagement but that SOC also reveals its beneficial effects for work engagement in interaction with both external and internal resources. Specifically, we proposed SOC substitutes for job control, role clarity, and state of being recovered, thus helping employees manage low daily levels of these resources. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 138 employees who completed two daily surveys over a total of 545 workdays. Results of multilevel analyses revealed that SOC benefits work engagement in both proposed ways. First, day‐level SOC was positively related to state work engagement. Additionally, day‐level role clarity and state of being recovered predicted state work engagement, but day‐level job control did not. Second, SOC benefitted state work engagement by offsetting low levels of role clarity and being recovered, and by boosting job control in their respective relationships with work engagement. The results suggest that by using SOC at work, employees can actively enhance their own work engagement on a given workday. This knowledge provides promising starting points for the development of interventions.     

COVID-19 effects on municipality waste collection services for households: statistical modelling of perspectives from Guyana and Nigeria

Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management - The novel COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the functioning of solid waste management globally as households experience an increase in their waste...     

Quantifying the impact of vegetation-based metrics on species persistence when choosing offsets for habitat destruction

Developers are often required by law to offset environmental impacts through targeted conservation actions. Most offset policies specify metrics for calculating offset requirements, usually by assessing vegetation condition. Despite widespread use, there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of vegetation-based metrics for ensuring biodiversity persistence. We compared long-term impacts of biodiversity offsetting based on area only; vegetation condition only; area × habitat suitability; and condition × habitat suitability in development and restoration simulations for the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia. We simulated development and subsequent offsetting through restoration within a virtual landscape, linking simulations to population viability models for 3 species. Habitat gains did not ensure species persistence. No net loss was achieved when performance of offsetting was assessed in terms of amount of habitat restored, but not when outcomes were assessed in terms of persistence. Maintenance of persistence occurred more often when impacts were avoided, giving further support to better enforce the avoidance stage of the mitigation hierarchy. When development affected areas of high habitat quality for species, persistence could not be guaranteed. Therefore, species must be more explicitly accounted for in offsets, rather than just vegetation or habitat alone. Declines due to a failure to account directly for species population dynamics and connectivity overshadowed the benefits delivered by producing large areas of high-quality habitat. Our modeling framework showed that the benefits delivered by offsets are species specific and that simple vegetation-based metrics can give misguided impressions on how well biodiversity offsets achieve no net loss.