There are concerns regarding high surface temperatures on synthetic grass sports surfaces influencing the surrounding thermal environment, potentially increasing heat stress and impacting athlete safety. As such, studies have investigated changes to the thermal environment surrounding synthetic grass surfaces in comparison to both natural grass, and synthetic surfaces with different features, but this body of research has not been systematically reviewed. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to (i) determine if there are differences in the thermal environment surrounding synthetic grass surfaces compared with natural grass surfaces, and (ii) determine if there are differences in the thermal environment between different types of synthetic grass surfaces. A systematic review adhering to the PRISMA guidelines was performed. The eligibility criteria required investigations to report at least one of the following environmental parameters on or directly above both a synthetic surface and a comparator group of either natural grass or an alternative synthetic grass surface used in sport: Air temperature, mean radiant temperature, humidity, wind velocity, unified heat stress indices (i.e. wet-bulb-globe temperature and heat index) and/or surface temperature. Twenty-three studies were identified. The only parameters that were consistently higher on synthetic grass compared to natural grass were the air temperature (range: 0.5-1.2 °C) and surface temperature (range: 9.4-33.7 °C), while the mean radiant temperature, humidity, wind velocity and wet-bulb-globe temperature remained similar or required more data to determine if any differences exist. Synthetic grass surfaces consisting of styrene butadiene rubber infill or a shock pad had increased surface temperatures, whereas surfaces with thermoplastic elastomer infill, Cool climate turf fibres or HydroChill had lower surface temperatures. This systematic review has demonstrated that air and surface temperatures can be increased on synthetic sports surfaces, compared to natural grass surfaces. However, it is uncertain whether the differences are enough to increase an individual\'s heat stress risk and cause concern for athlete safety. While modifications to the turf infill or fibres can reduce synthetic surface temperatures, the effect of these features on the thermal environment as a whole is unclear. This review was prospectively registered with the Open Science Framework (Open Science Framework registration   https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BTKGE ).

BACKGROUND: Pressure injuries are a preventable yet highly prevalent health concern. Wheelchair cushion prescription can have significant implications for wheelchair users\' risk of pressure injury development, which can impact functional abilities and quality of life. The efficacy of a wheelchair cushion to redistribute pressure has been well-researched, but the efficacy to manage the microclimate is less clear, particularly in warm-hot environments. The aim of this study was to systematically review studies examining the effect of wheelchair cushions on temperature, moisture and thermal perception to determine which cushions are superior to improve these responses.
METHODS: A systematic review with meta-analyses of randomised cross-over and randomised control trials of wheelchair cushion interventions on measures of temperature, moisture, and thermal perception was conducted.
RESULTS: Eight studies were identified that met the eligibility criteria and six meta-analyses were conducted. Pooled analyses identified a significantly lower temperature on foam-gel cushions compared to air cushions (MD = 0.80, 95% CI: 0.31, 1.29; p = 0.002) and a significantly lower temperature on foam-gel cushions compared to foam cushions (SMD = 0.76, 95%CI; 0.45, 1.06; p < 0.00001). Pooled analyses also demonstrated significantly lower relative humidity (i.e., moisture) on foam cushions compared to foam-gel cushions (p = 0.02). Differences in thermal perception were inconclusive due to limited data found.
CONCLUSIONS: It is clear that not one cushion is ideal in managing all aspects of microclimate, as foam-gel cushions were the superior cushion to manage temperature and foam cushions were the superior cushion to manage moisture. This article provides occupational therapists and other health professionals with evidence-based information to assist with wheelchair cushion prescription that minimises the temperature and moisture accumulation, and associated risk of pressure injury for wheelchair users.

Urban surfaces exert profound influences on local wind patterns, turbulence dynamics, and the dispersion of air pollutants, underscoring the critical need for a thorough understanding of these processes in the realms of urban planning, design, construction, and air quality management. The advent of advanced computational capabilities has propelled the computational fluid dynamics model (CFD) into becoming a mature and widely adopted tool to investigate microscale meteorological phenomena in urban settings. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of CFD-based microscale meteorological simulations, offering insights into their applications, influential factors, and challenges. Significant variables such as the aspect ratio of street canyons, building geometries, ambient wind directions, atmospheric boundary layer stabilities, and street tree configurations play crucial roles in influencing microscale physical processes and the dispersion of air pollutants. The integration of CFD with mesoscale meteorological models and cutting-edge machine learning techniques empowers high-resolution, precise simulations of urban meteorology, establishing a robust scientific basis for sustainable urban development, the mitigation of air pollution, and emergency response planning for hazardous substances. Nonetheless, the broader application of CFD in this domain introduces challenges in grid optimization, enhancing integration with mesoscale models, addressing data limitations, and simulating diverse weather conditions.

Urban microclimate has a direct impact on the quality of life of urban residents. Therefore, research on urban microclimates has received greater attention from contemporary scholars. At present, there is a lack of quantitative summary and review of the research in the field of urban microclimate, and it is urgent to sort out its research context and evolution. The Web of Science was used as the data source, and CiteSpace and VOSviewer software were used to analyze the urban microclimate research from 1980 to 2020. We discussed the annual trends, research countries, research institutions, key authors, highly cited publications, hot issues, and research fronts. The study found that: (1) the number of published articles on urban microclimate has experienced three stages: initial stage-slow growth period-rapid growth period; (2) European and American countries were the first to focus on urban microclimate research, while China started late but developed rapidly; (3) the research topics of urban microclimate are thermal comfort, improvement strategies, urban street canyons, and urban heat island effect; (4) the frontiers of urban microclimate include research on urban microclimate and building energy, ecosystem services, and urban parks.

Under the climate change scenario, the negative impacts of urban heat island (UHI) will exacerbate due to unsustainable urban planning and human activities. Thermal comfort has close relationships with UHI in urban areas. This paper is based on the studies of urban heat island, thermal comfort, microclimate, and urban planning in cities in the recent decade, combined with a method of research into design. The key topics include vegetation and water conditions, the albedo of materials, and urban morphology. By the comparative case studies in landscape projects, the results further reveal that the density of tree canopies, the natural structure and density of ground cover, the form of water features, the color and texture of materials, and the scale of shading structures have different cooling effect and performance in outdoor thermal comfort improvement with specific features in the landscape design. It is also found that there are some external conditions that can influence design determinations in real practices. The purpose of this study is to provide theoretical research methods and evaluation of thermal comfort landscape design elements and to provide guidance for future sustainable city research and landscape design.

Projections show that Earth\'s climate will continue to warm concurrent with increases in the percentage of the world\'s elderly population. With an understanding that the body\'s resilience to the heat degrades as it ages, these coupled phenomena point to serious concerns of heat-related mortality in growing elderly populations. As many of the people in this age cohort choose to live in managed long-term care facilities, it\'s imperative that outdoor spaces of these communities be made thermally comfortable so that connections with nature and the promotion of non-sedentary activities are maintained. Studies have shown that simply being outside has a positive impact on a broad range of the psychosocial well-being of older adults. However, these spaces must be designed to afford accessibility, safety, and aesthetically pleasing experiences so that they are taken full advantage of. Here, we employ an integrative review to link ideas from the disciplines of climate science, health and physiology, and landscape architecture to explain the connections between heat, increased morbidity and mortality in aging adults, existing gaps in thermal comfort models, and key strategies in the development of useable, comfortable outdoor spaces for older adults. Integrative reviews allow for new frameworks or perspectives on a subject to be introduced. Uncovering the synergy of these three knowledge bases can contribute to guiding microclimatic research, design practitioners, and care providers as they seek safe, comfortable and inviting outdoor spaces for aging adults.

The impact of ants, as consumer and decomposer in ecosystems, on soil organic carbon pool is a hotspot in soil fauna research. Recently, effects of ants on soil organic carbon pool dynamics have been mainly documented in terms of soil macro-elements storage, physical and chemical properties, and microbial community. We summarized the effects of ant disturbance on soil organic carbon cycle. Ant nesting alters microhabitat, microclimate, and physicochemical properties of ant nested soils. By re-shaping soil microbial community structure, regulating the succession process and pattern of vegetation, ant nesting directly or indirectly affects the source, allocation, stability, and microcosmic molecular characteristics of soil organic carbon, scaling from micro, local, to landscape scale. In the future, more attentions should be paid on quantifying the contribution of ant disturbance combined with the fluctuations in environmental factors to soil carbon flux dynamics, establishing quantitative model to link and unify ant-induced soil carbon cycle process, and clari-fying mechanisms underlying the impacts of ants on the stability of soil organic carbon pool, and finally revealing the \"ecological engineers\" role of ants in regulating soil organic carbon cycling.
蚂蚁作为生态系统的消费者和分解者,其对土壤有机碳库的影响一直是学术界研究的热点。目前研究主要从蚂蚁对土壤宏量元素储量、理化性质、微生物群落活动等方面探究蚂蚁对土壤有机碳库的影响。本文综述了蚂蚁扰动对土壤有机碳循环过程特征的影响。蚂蚁筑巢改变了蚁穴土壤的微生境、微气候与土壤理化性质,并通过重构土壤微生物群落结构特征、调控地表植被演替过程与格局等方式,直接或间接的影响蚁巢中土壤有机碳来源、碳库分配过程、有机碳库稳定性、有机质微观分子特征等,在微域、局地乃至景观尺度上影响土壤有机碳的循环过程。未来研究应着重从量化蚂蚁扰动及其导致的环境因子波动对土壤碳通量变化的贡献、建立定量模型联系并统一蚂蚁影响下土壤碳循环过程、厘清蚂蚁影响土壤有机碳库稳定性的机制等方面开展深入研究,揭示蚂蚁作为“生态工程师”在调控土壤碳循环过程中的作用机制。.

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon represents a major public health issue and has received great attention due to rapid urbanisation. Blue spaces have long been considered a possible mitigation strategy to ameliorate the UHI. However, our knowledge regarding the interaction of waterbodies with their urban surroundings is still limited. This review attempts through a comparative analysis of the available literature to examine the thermal effects of static blue spaces on the urban climate. Remote sensing studies are the most common approach analysed in this review but there is a clear disparity between the cooling potentials reported by remote sensing as opposed to field measurements or numerical simulations, likely due to a lack of nocturnal measurements, when warming due to thermal inertia can occur and consideration of the latent heat flux. The size and shape of blue spaces are shown to be important variables for the cooling achieved in urban settings but there is no consensus in the literature. This is likely due to the different locations and climates of the studies, it can be hypothesised that in locations with an even distribution of wind directions a rounder waterbody is more effective while in locations where wind direction is more uniform an elongated waterbody aligned to the wind is more effective due to the increased fetch. From the analysis of the literature, it is clear that there is still a distinct knowledge gap regarding the physical interpretation of waterbodies\' contribution to the urban climate. There is also a current lack of information about the diurnal and seasonal variability of the various structures and processes. There is evidence, however, that the comfort achieved by sensible cooling can be offset by the increased water vapour content and that during the night blue spaces may actually exacerbate the UHI, reducing urban thermal comfort.

No study has comprehensively reviewed the effects of indoor plants on air quality; therefore, this study systematically reviewed quantitative empirical research on these effects in both English and Chinese. The information sources were the Web of Science and WanFang Data Knowledge Service Platform electronic databases. Only journal articles reporting quantitative empirical research were selected. The eligibility criteria included studies with (1) interventions of any indoor plant, excluding biofilters that combine power facilities and vegetation, (2) comparators included within the same experimental treatment or between different experimental treatments, (3) air quality effects objectively measured using any instrument, and (4) any study design. Both authors screened 95 journal articles and compiled information according to (1) intervention (plant species, foliage, or medium), (2) scientific family name of each plant, (3) study design (experiment, field experiment, or survey), (4) air quality (e.g., temperature, humidity, negative ions, radiation, and dust), (5) pollutants, (6) research environment, (7) ventilation (types and rates), (8) climate (lighting, temperature, and humidity), (9) exposure duration, (10) sampling frequency or period, and (11) number of replications. The primary effects of the potential of the indoor plants on air quality were reduced pollutant levels (particularly formaldehyde, benzene, and toluene removal), followed by increase in humidity and decrease in temperature. In addition, including various plant species could improve the effects of indoor vegetation on ameliorating air quality and microclimate conditions.

Indoor air quality is one the main issues in which governments are focusing. In healing spaces, several research studies are reporting a growing number of data analysis and research works in order to guarantee and prevent health of users and workers. Currently the main investigations are about biological and physical risks; otherwise chemical ones are less investigated. Several countries are carrying out indoor air quality monitoring in those professional workplaces in which chemicals are used but also in some typically indoor (generic) spaces for the building hygiene assessment. The indoor air is affected by several factors that currently are analyzed punctually, without a whole scenario of all the variable performances. The authors have done a systematic review on the current state of the art and knowledge related to chemical pollution in healing spaces and the emerging strategies, supported by scientific literature, for healthy inpatient rooms and their indoor air.
The systematic review has been done through the analysis of papers from SCOPUS, DOAJ, and PubMed databases. The survey sample considered 483 scientific articles, between 1989 and 2017, and starting the systematic reading and analysis of the abstracts, only 187 scientific papers were selected, and only 96 were accessible.
Since scientific literature reports very different outputs and results, the resulting work from the survey is divided into specific fields of interest related to construction and finishing materials, installations, components, ventilation systems, processes, etc. Starting from the systematic reading, the paper classifies the factors of indoor air in four macroareas: outdoor air and microclimatic factors (temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, air change, etc.); management activities (management and maintenance activities, ventilation systems, HVAC, cleaning and disinfectant activities, etc.); design factors (room dimensions, furniture, finishing materials, etc.); and human presence and medical activities (users\' presence, their health status, and medical activities carried out in inpatient rooms).
The systematic review gives rise to a broad scenario on the existing knowledge regarding the indoor air pollution, design, and management strategies for healthy spaces and several emerging topics. Although the aim of the investigation is strictly related to chemical pollution, several considerations from the biological point of view have been listed. The systematic review, supported by the existing scientific literature, becomes a starting point for considering the importance of the topic and to stimulate the knowledge around this field of interest for improving studies, analysis, and simulations.