Scopus İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / Scopus Indexed Publications Collection
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/7148
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Article Citation - Scopus: 2The Uncertain Certainty of a Nightmare: What If Another Destructive Earthquake Strikes Izmir (türkiye)?(Mdpi, 2024) Salata, Stefano; Uzelli, TaygunOn 6 February 2023, near Kahramanmaras in south-central Turkiye, an event underscored the vulnerability of cities to seismic activity, revealing a lack of preparedness for substantial shocks. The contributing factors are manifold, yet fundamentally, the collapse of buildings and infrastructure can be attributed to an underestimated capacity for meticulous settlement planning (location) and the adoption of advanced techniques for resilient construction (structure). Regrettably, as has been investigated by many research works, ordinary urban planning in Turkiye hardly finds ways to integrate the vulnerability analysis for settlement expansion, which includes the full integration of geological characteristics with the analysis of building sensitivity. With this work, we wanted to build a composite risk index based on earthquake vulnerability, hazard amplification map, and exposure. We designed the composite index in Izmir's basin, Turkiye's third most populated city, to answer the question: What if a destructive earthquake strikes this densely settled area? The results illustrates how the coupled integration of digital data on geology with settlements and infrastructure in a Geographic Information System environment can be used to produce risk maps and plan the anthropic system's adaptation carefully. Findings demonstrate the city is highly vulnerable to earthquakes and identify priority areas for planning intervention, relocation, and renovation of buildings.Conference Object Preventing Urban Floods by Optimized Modeling: a Comparative Evaluation of Alternatives in İzmir (türkiye)(Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2023) Arslan, Bertan; Salata, StefanoIt is widely acknowledged that coastal cities will be heavily threatened by climate change globally. Among these cities, the Mediterranean suffers from a coupled dynamic of sea level rise and pluvial flooding due to their landform and soil characteristics. In this situation, analyzing the morphological and hydrological characteristics to define vulnerable areas is a prerequisite to designing performance-based solutions. But how does the flood vulnerability change with the different configurations of pervious and impervious surfaces? How do soil and landform characteristics affect flood vulnerability? This study assumes the possibility of re-naturing the coastal neighborhood of Karsiyaka, Izmir (Türkiye) while using fifteen alternative scenarios. We modeled the Urban Flood Risk Mitigation using InVEST (Natural Capital Project) and integrated the results with an analysis of the flow accumulation. According to our results, when the de-sealing process occurs in soils with low hydraulic conductibility, the results in terms of run-off containment can be dramatically limited or non-perceptible. The findings demonstrate that modeling with scenarios can guide the decision-makers while understanding exactly where the de-permeabilization can achieve its maximum efficiency. Therefore, performance-based solutions designed to increase water infiltration should carefully consider ex-ante empirical modeling to prevent urban flooding. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.Book Part Citation - Scopus: 6Insights for the Enhancement of Urban Biodiversity Using Nature-Based Solutions: the Role of Urban Spaces in Green Infrastructures Design(Springer, 2022) Ronchi, Silvia; Salata, StefanoNature-Based Solutions (NBS) increase their efficacy if included in an overall framework such as Green Infrastructures (GI), maximising ecosystem benefits and avoiding possible negative externalities and trade-offs. Urban green spaces and NBS are components of GI that increase the quality of urban settings, enhancing territorial resilience, and improving the health and well-being of citizens. The research proposes a methodology, tested in the municipality of Settimo Torinese (North-west of Italy), for selecting urban green spaces with high performance in terms of biodiversity conservation, which can involve a GI strategy as a multifunctional structure that combines different Ecosystem Services (ES). The enhancement of natural capital and ES provision is reached identifying suitable NBS to protect and improve biodiversity based on the Habitat Quality (HQ) assessment, considered a key supporting service. HQ was derived testing two different sensitivity data: the first based on Land Use/Land Cover, while the second uses the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index. The latter was functional to overcome limits in representing the ecologic integrity of urban areas highlighting an important variety of green spaces and related ES, especially in compact cities. The results are useful for defining effective environmental policies and strategies in urban areas and addressing the decision-making process towards sustainable development goals. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.Article Citation - WoS: 2Citation - Scopus: 2Monitoring Soil Degradation Processes for Ecological Compensation in the Izmir Institute of Technology Campus (turkey)(Mdpi, 2022) Salata, Stefano; Couch, Virginia ThompsonMonitoring changing environmental conditions for short-term periods is a key aspect of adaptive urban planning. Unfortunately, the official environmental datasets are often produced at too large time intervals, and sometimes the speed of urban transformation requires real-time monitoring data. In this work we employed ESRI ArcGIS (ver. 10.8.1) to process two normalized difference vegetation indices for the campus area of the Izmir Institute of Technology (Turkey). The area of this campus constitutes an optimal site for testing whether alterations to the soil due to excavation and new construction can be monitored in small areas of land. We downloaded two different Sentinel acquisitions from the Copernicus ONDA DIAS platform: one taken on 28 March 2021 and the second taken on 13 March 2022. We processed the images while elaborating the normalized difference vegetation index for both years and compared them. Results demonstrate that all major and minor soil degradations on the campus during the intervening year were detected and empirically quantified in terms of NDVI reduction (abrupt changes). These findings confirm that detailed seasonal environmental monitoring of every part of the world is now possible using semi-automatic procedures to process original Sentinel data and recommend site-specific ecological compensation measures.Article Citation - WoS: 5Citation - Scopus: 5De-Sealing Reverses Habitat Decay More Than Increasing Groundcover Vegetation(MDPI, 2023) Couch, Virginia; Salata, Stefano; Saygın, Nicel; Frary, Anne; Arslan, BertanModeling ecosystem services is a growing trend in scientific research, and Nature-based Solutions (NbSs) are increasingly used by land-use planners and environmental designers to achieve improved adaptation to climate change and mitigation of the negative effects of climate change. Predictions of ecological benefits of NbSs are needed early in design to support decision making. In this study, we used ecological analysis to predict the benefits of two NbSs applied to a university masterplan and adjusted our preliminary design strategy according to the first modeling results. Our Area of Interest was the IZTECH campus, which is located in a rural area of the eastern Mediterranean region (Izmir/Turkey). A primary design goal was to improve habitat quality by revitalizing soil. Customized analysis of the Baseline Condition and two NbSs scenarios was achieved by using local values obtained from a high-resolution photogrammetric scan of the catchment to produce flow accumulation and habitat quality indexes. Results indicate that anthropogenic features are the primary cause of habitat decay and that decreasing imperviousness reduces habitat decay significantly more than adding vegetation. This study creates a method of supporting sustainability goals by quickly testing alternative NbSs. The main innovation is demonstrating that early approximation of the ecological benefits of NbSs can inform preliminary design strategy. The proposed model may be calibrated to address specific environmental challenges of a given location and test other forms of NbSs.Article Citation - WoS: 5Citation - Scopus: 5Are Soil and Geology Characteristics Considered in Urban Planning? an Empirical Study in Izmir (turkiye)(MDPI, 2023) Salata, Stefano; Uzelli, TaygunIt is well acknowledged that sustainable soil management can play a crucial role in reducing the vulnerability of urban areas, but are soil characteristics properly evaluated in the decision-making process concerning urbanization? Within this work, we conducted an analysis of the land-use change trends in the city of Izmir (Turkey). We made an extended and detailed analysis of the urbanization processes between 2012 and 2018 in a geographic information system environment (Esri ArcGIS 10.8.1 and ArcGIS Pro 3.0). Then, we superimposed by spatial overlay different soil characteristics: land capability, hydraulic conductibility, soil groups, and fault lines. We discovered that although there is a joint agreement on soil and its geological importance in reducing urban vulnerabilities to flooding, urban heat islands, agricultural production, or earthquakes, there is scarce knowledge of its characteristics to inform land-use planning. This work sheds some light on how newly developed areas are planned without proper consideration of soil properties, following a fuzzy and irrational logic in their distribution. Results encourage the utilization and inclusion of soil knowledge to support the decision-making process concerning urban transformation to achieve more resilient and less vulnerable urban systems.Article Citation - WoS: 11Citation - Scopus: 11Adapting Cities To Pluvial Flooding: the Case of Izmir (türkiye)(MDPI, 2022) Salata, Stefano; Couch, Virginia Thompson; Velibeyoğlu, Koray; Baba, Alper; Saygın, Nicel; Uzelli, TaygunIn the coming decades, climate change will be one of the most significant challenges for urban areas. The quantity, duration and intensity of events, such as flash rains and heat waves, will increase the vulnerability of urban regions while exposing citizens to potentially dangerous conditions. According to the current literature, mainstreaming resilience in urban planning means designing rules that strengthen urban systems’ adaptive and self-regulating functions by reducing their vulnerability. In this work, we aimed to build knowledge for the application of the sponge district concept to Izmir (Türkiye), one of Europe’s most vulnerable areas to pluvial flooding. To do this, we first analyzed the runoff in each urban sub-watershed, then employed a composite index to determine potential areas of intervention for nature-based solutions. Results show that 10% of Izmir’s urban areas are extremely vulnerable to cloudbursts, which means that 40% of the urban population is exposed to this phenomenon. Moreover, the runoff calculation in the sub-watershed demonstrated that the potential flood volume is underestimated, especially in the upslope areas. The results can be used as a template to suggest a stepwise approach to mainstream the resilience of densely-inhabited coastal urban catchments.Article Citation - WoS: 4Citation - Scopus: 4Designing Urban Green İnfrastructures Using Open-source Data-an Example İn Çiğli, Izmir (turkey)(MDPI, 2022) Salata, Stefano; Erdoğan, Bensu; Ayruş, BersuThe city of Izmir (Turkey) has experienced one of the most rapid and fastest urbanization processes in the last thirty years; more than 33 thousand hectares of agricultural and seminatural land have been transformed into urban areas, leading to a drastic reduction of biodiversity and hard deployments of the ecosystem service supply. In this perspective, the potential definition of methodologies to design multifunctional green infrastructures is extremely important to challenge the effects of climate change. The aim of this study is to propose an easy and replicable methodology to design a Green Infrastructure at the neighbourhood level in one of the most important districts of Izmir: Çiğli. To this end, we combined historical land-use change analysis (based on Urban Atlas, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service) with environmental and ecosystem mapping in a Geographic Information System environment (ESRI ArcMap 10.8.1) while creating a composite layer based on unweighted overlays of Imperviousness, Tree Cover Density, and Habitat Quality. Results were used to design the Green Infrastructure of Çiğli and suggest context-based strategies for urban adaptation, including Nature-Based Solutions for core, edge, and urban links.Article Citation - WoS: 16Citation - Scopus: 17Integrating Ecosystem Vulnerability in the Environmental Regulation Plan of Izmir (turkey)-What Are the Limits and Potentialities?(MDPI, 2022) Salata, Stefano; Özkavaf Şenalp, Sıla; Velibeyoğlu, KorayThe land-use regulatory framework in Turkey is composed of several hierarchical plans. The Environmental Regulation Plan pursues comprehensive planning management, which ranges between 1/100,000 and 1/25,000 and defines the framework for local master plans. Unfortunately, there is scarce knowledge of how these plans effectively protect the environment. Besides, these plans have poor consideration of socio-economic dynamics and the ecosystem vulnerability, while evaluating the actual conflicts or synergies within the localization of ecological conservation and settlement expansion areas. In this work, an ecosystem-based geodatabase was created for the western Izmir area (Turkey). The dataset has been created by employing a supervised classification sampling of Sentinel-2 images acquired on 28 March 2021, while accessing ONDA-DIAS services to L2C products. Then, the InVEST software was used to map the Habitat Quality and the Habitat Decay, while the ArcMap raster analysis tool was employed to generate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The results were used to classify the ecosystem vulnerability of the western metropolitan area of Izmir and then superimposed to the Environmental Regulation Plan of the city of Izmir (2021), thus evaluating synergies and conflicts. Although integration of the ecosystem services approach into spatial planning is lacking in the planning practice of Turkey, the paper provides an operative methodology to integrate ecosystem evaluation in environmental planning as a basic strategy to support sustainable development.Book Part Designing Healthier Cities. an Empirical Study of the Ecosystem Functioning and Mortality in the Districts of Turin (italy)(Springer, 2022) Salata, StefanoThe twenty-first century is called “the age of the metropolises and cities” as they become the predominant living environments of human beings. Nonetheless, metropolitan areas are more vulnerable, for their intrinsic nature is dense and interconnected. The experience from the COVID-19 crisis teaches us how an epidemic outburst has been generated by reducing habitat at the planetary scale, and how the quality of the environment even affects the diffusion of the virus. But what is the relation between Health and Nature in urban areas? Is this relation so evident? Within this study, a preliminary assessment of the relations between urban environment and health will be evaluated by modelling the spatial distribution of the Habitat Quality in Turin and the mortality rates in the same areas. Data will be gathered at their maximum spatial precision, thus obtaining a reliable map of the distribution between the two indicators at the district level. Habitat Quality will be composed by the value of the supporting biophysical function and anthropic threats. Health will be evaluated using the death number in the statistical units and the accessibility of citizens to green areas. An overall assessment will be finally presented considering the simultaneous evaluation of spatial clusters and delineating how conservation and valorization measures can benefit from a site-specific evaluation of Ecosystem Services, while revealing their effects on human health.
