SUN Lab is among the organizers of the international conference “InterCarto. InterGIS 27. Geoinformation support of sustainable development of territories”. The conference will be held at Apatity (Murmansk region, Russia) and Nur-Sultan (Kazakhstan), August 21-27, 2021.
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Airborne fine dust particles (FD) are recognized as one of the most harmful pollutants to human health. The size of fine dust determines their ability to penetrate the human body, and particles less than 10 microns in size are recognized as the most dangerous. At the same time, the causes of FD toxicity are still insufficiently studied. For example, the relationship between mortality from COVID-19 and the concentration of FD in the air was shown. However, it is still not clear whether fine dust is a direct vector carrier of the virus or only exacerbates the susceptibility of the human body to the virus.
Prof. Riccardo Valentini, the head of Smart Urban Nature Lab opened the Module 6: Urban ecology of an educational program Master of Public Administration by giving a lecture “Urban Health and Green Infrastructures”.
Participants of this program, organized by SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management, are 500 managers from 100 largest cities in Russia: mayors, deputy mayors, deputy heads of the region, chief architects. The main objective of the program is to to form leaders who will act as drivers of the development of Russian cities.
Smart Urban Nature laboratory congratulates its employees, foreign colleagues and the entire scientific and expert community with the coming New Year. 2020 has become a serious challenge for everyone without exception – the pandemic, the global lockdown, the cessation of flights between countries, and much more have hit not only the economy and many other areas, but also limited the capabilities of the scientific world. The usual format of conferences, seminars, field research was forced to change and go online. Nevertheless, we managed to adapt to the needs of the time and maintain the quality level of work, the atmosphere of cooperation and ambitious plans.
By Dr. Diana Dushkova and Prof. Maria Ignatieva
On December 17, an online webinar of the LAWN 2020 project partners was organized by Dr. Diana Dushkova, Helmholtz Center for environmental research – UFZ Leipzig, Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology; Geography Department of Humboldt University Berlin, Germany and Prof. Dr. Maria Ignatieva, School of Design, University of Western Australia.
Yakov Kuzyakov, a well-known soil scientist, a leading scientist at the Agricultural and Technological Institute in RUDN University (Russia) and a professor at King Saud University (Saudi Arabia), was awarded the title of highly cited researcher in the field of agricultural sciences (by Clarivate™).
The Highly Cited Researchers list includes scientists with the highest number of articles in the top 1% cited Web of Science citation in a particular field in the past year. In the field of Agricultural Sciences, 111 researchers have been awarded this title. And Yakov Kuzyakov turned out to be the only one scientist from a Russian university.
Experts of the Smart Urban Nature laboratory Vyacheslav Vasenev and Maria Korneikova made presentations in two different sessions of the 5th Annual Urban Soil Symposium “Soils: The Living Fabric of Health, 2020”. The event was organized by the Institute of Urban Soils of New York, RUDN University and TreePeople. Traditionally, the symposium is held in New York (USA) on the basis of the Institute of Urban Soils, but this year, amid the pandemic, the event took the format of a virtual meeting using a number of interactive video conferencing platforms.
The SUN Lab’s team in collaboration with experts from Wood expertise center “Zdorovy Les” set up new devices in Gorky Park, one of the biggest and most attended parks in Moscow city center.
Before installation, experts from Zdorovy Les conducted a local research in the park. They found out 16 poplars of the same age and size but quite different in trunk condition – most of them were strongly decayed. Visually the state of the trees was rather different from their potential sustainability and trunk health. So these trees came up as the spots for 16 Tree Talkers set up.
XV Russian Science Festival NAUKA0+ took place from October, 9-21 in Moscow and many other regions of Russia. The largest Russian popular science project designed to establish a dialogue between science and society, educating schoolchildren, students and adults about the latest achievements of science in the field of physics, biology and medicine, ecology, humanities, etc. SUN Lab is an active participant in this event. Every year our scientists take part in lectures and workshops, both at the RUDN University and in the external events of the festival.
On September 30, 2020, an international scientific seminar “Monitoring urban green infrastructures” was organized under the umbrella of the Department of Landscape Design and Sustainable Ecosystems of ATI RUDN University. The event was held in an online format and was devoted to a number of issues in the field of monitoring green infrastructure in cities using IoT technologies.
Experts and participants discussed topics such as express methods for assessing the physiological state of green spaces, the influence of environmental factors on the state of plants, timely diagnosis of plant diseases and the development of methods for plant protection. Among the participants of the seminar are experts from the Smart Urban Nature laboratory Vyacheslav Vasenev, Alexey Yaroslavtsev, Vasily Brykov, Yuri Dvornikov and Viktor Matasov as well as partners from the Russian Research Institute of Phytopathology, N.V. Tsitsin Main Botanical Garden of RAS and other organizations.
