Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of COVID-19 vaccination uptake in England.

BACKGROUND: Mass vaccination has been a key strategy in effectively containing global COVID-19 pandemic that posed unprecedented social and economic challenges to many countries. However, vaccination rates vary across space and socio-economic factors, and are likely to depend on the accessibility to vaccination services, which is under-researched in literature. This study aims to empirically identify the spatially heterogeneous relationship between COVID-19 vaccination rates and socio-economic factors in England. METHODS: We investigated the percentage of over-18 fully vaccinated people at the small-area level across England up to 18 November 2021. We used multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) to model the spatially heterogeneous relationship between vaccination rates and socio-economic determinants, including ethnic, age, economic, and accessibility factors. RESULTS: This study indicates that the selected MGWR model can explain 83.2% of the total variance of vaccination rates. The variables exhibiting a positive association with vaccination rates in most areas include proportion of population over 40, car ownership, average household income, and spatial accessibility to vaccination. In contrast, population under 40, less deprived population, and black or mixed ethnicity are negatively associated with the vaccination rates. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate the importance of improving the spatial accessibility to vaccinations in developing regions and among specific population groups in order to promote COVID-19 vaccination.

Understanding the interaction between human activities and physical health under extreme heat environment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Long-term community resilience, which privileges a long view look at chronic issues influencing communities, has begun to draw more attention from city planners, researchers and policymakers. In Phoenix, resilience to heat is both a necessity and a way of life. In this paper, we attempt to understand how residents living in Phoenix experience and behave in an extreme heat environment. To achieve this goal, we introduced a smartphone application (ActivityLog) to study spatio-temporal dynamics of human interaction with urban environments. Compared with traditional paper activity log results we have in this study, the smartphone-based activity log has higher data quality in terms of total number of logs, response rates, accuracy, and connection with GPS and temperature sensors. The research results show that low-income residents in Phoenix mostly stay home during the summer but experience a relatively high indoor temperature due to the lack/low efficiency of air-conditioning (AC) equipment or lack of funds to run AC frequently. Middle-class residents have a better living experience in Phoenix with better mobility with automobiles and good quality of AC. The research results help us better understand user behaviors for daily log activities and how human activities interact with the urban thermal environment, informing further planning policy development. The ActivityLog smartphone application is also presented as an open-source prototype to design a similar urban climate citizen science program in the future.

Drivers of prohibited natural resource collection in Chitwan National Park, Nepal.

Protected areas (PAs) are critical for achieving conservation, economic and development goals, but the factors that lead households to engage in prohibited resource collection in PAs are not well understood. We examine collection behaviours in community forests and the protected Chitwan National Park in Chitwan, Nepal. Our approach incorporates household and ecological data, including structured interviews, spatially explicit data on collection behaviours measured with computer tablets and a systematic field survey of invasive species. We pair our data with a framework that considers factors related to a household's demand for resources, barriers to prohibited resource collection, barriers to legal resource collection and alternatives to resource collection. The analysis identifies key drivers of prohibited collection, including sociodemographic variables and perceptions of an invasive plant (Mikania micrantha). The social-ecological systems approach reveals that household perceptions of the presence of M. micrantha were more strongly associated with resource collection decisions than the actual ecologically measured presence of the plant. We explore the policy implications of our findings for PAs and propose that employing a social-ecological systems approach leads to conservation policy and scientific insights that are not possible to achieve with social or ecological approaches alone.

Optimization of residential green space for environmental sustainability and property appreciation in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona.

Cities in arid and semi-arid regions have been exploring urban sustainability policies, such as lowering the vegetation coverage to reduce residential outdoor water use. Meanwhile, urban residents express concerns that such policies could potentially impact home prices regardless of the reduced water costs because studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between vegetation coverage and home values. On the other hand, lower vegetation coverage in arid and semi-arid desert regions could increase surface temperatures, and consequently increases energy costs. The question is therefore where the point in which residential outdoor water use can be minimized without overly increasing surface temperatures and negatively impacting home values. This study examines the impacts of spatial composition of different vegetation types on land surface temperature (LST), outdoor water use (OWU), and property sales value (PSV) in 302 local residential communities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, Arizona using remotely sensed data and regression analysis. In addition, the spatial composition of vegetation cover was optimized to achieve a relatively lower LST and OWU and maintain a relatively higher PSV at the same time. We found that drought-tolerant landscaping that is composed of mostly shrubs and trees adapted to the desert environment is the most water efficient way to reduce LST, but grass contributes to a higher PSV. Research findings suggest that different residential landscaping strategies may be better suited for different neighborhoods and goal sets can be used by urban planners and city managers to better design urban residential landscaping for more efficient water conservation and urban heat mitigation for desert cities.

Comparing Paper and Tablet Modes of Retrospective Activity Space Data Collection.

Individual actions are both constrained and facilitated by the social context in which individuals are embedded. But research to test specific hypotheses about the role of space on human behaviors and well-being is limited by the difficulty of collecting accurate and personally relevant social context data. We report on a project in Chitwan, Nepal, that directly addresses challenges to collect accurate activity space data. We test if a computer assisted interviewing (CAI) tablet-based approach to collecting activity space data was more accurate than a paper map-based approach; we also examine which subgroups of respondents provided more accurate data with the tablet mode compared to paper. Results show that the tablet approach yielded more accurate data when comparing respondent-indicated locations to the known locations as verified by on-the-ground staff. In addition, the accuracy of the data provided by older and less healthy respondents benefited more from the tablet mode.