Tobia Lakes

• Prof. Dr.
• Head of Department at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The triad of host, agent, and environment has become a widely accepted framework for understanding infectious diseases and human health. While modern medicine has traditionally focused on the individual, there is a renewed interest in the role of the environment. Recent studies have shifted from an early-twentieth-century emphasis on individual fac...

Adaptation to an increasingly dry regional climate requires spatially explicit information about current and future risks. Existing drought risk studies often rely on expert-weighted composite indicators, while empirical evidence on impact-relevant factors is still scarce. The aim of this study is to investigate to what extent hazard and vulnerabil...

Objectives Traffic noise can cause stress and disturb sleep, impacting health in many ways. However, few large studies on this topic exist. We investigated the association between traffic noise and self-rated health (SRH) within the German National Cohort (NAKO). Methods NAKO enrolled >200,000 adults ages 20-74 at 18 sites in Germany. We used logi...

Understanding agricultural land systems is paramount to preparing for future transitions under climate change. Systematic quantitative, multi-context analyses of agricultural land systems are a promising way of increasing our understanding but rely on the availability of large-scale and commensurable data. The available data, however, are outcomes...

CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit and det...

Higher crop diversity can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services; however, it remains unclear to what extent and where crop diversity can be increased. We use spatially explicit multiscale optimization to determine potential and attainable crop diversity with field-level land use data for case studies in Brandenburg, Germany. Our model maximiz...

1. CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with the environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit...

Adaptation to an increasingly dry regional climate requires spatially explicit information about current and future risks. Existing drought risk studies often rely on expert-weighted composite indicators, while empirical evidence on impact-relevant factors is still scarce. The aim of this study is to investigate to what extent hazard and vulnerabil...

There have been increasing calls in gentrification studies to examine the geography of gentrification in slums, as little is known about the patterns and processes of slum gentrification, especially in sub-Saharan African cities where slums house over 50% of the urban population. This study explored the spatiotemporal changes in slums in Lagos, Nig...

Land-use changes are the result of individuals' interactive decisions and are directly affected by stakeholders' preferences. For a better understanding of land-use change processes and to support the development of an adequate land-use plan, simulating stakeholders' interactions is a key challenge. This study aims to develop a Game-Theoretic Inter...

In recent years, land use data from the EU’s Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) have become increasingly available for research purposes. IACS data contain annual plot-level information on cultivation and location of the land farmed by agricultural beneficiaries, covering the majority of farmland in the EU. The data thus provide in...

Background The environment plays a major role in human health and wellbeing. Air pollution, non-optimal temperatures, noise and lack of greenspace have been identified as the main external drivers, but their interplay is not well understood. Moreover, negative impacts are expected to increase in the coming decades due to population growth and clima...

Zusammenfassung Die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) hat aufgrund wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse die Richtwerte zur Luftqualität 2021 verschärft. Es wurde eine deutliche Absenkung der Jahresmittelwerte von Feinstaub (Partikelgröße 2,5 µm oder kleiner, PM 2,5 ) sowie der Langzeitbelastung gegenüber Stickstoffdioxid (NO 2 ) und Ozon (O 3 ) empfohlen....

Identifying areas with high and low infection rates can provide important etiological clues. Usually, areas with high and low infection rates are identified by aggregating epidemiological data into geographical units, such as administrative areas. This assumes that the distribution of population numbers, infection rates, and resulting risks is cons...

In this research, we analyzed the delivery service areas of restaurants, customer satisfaction, and restaurant sales of urban restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic. We obtained the datasets on food ordering options and restaurant rankings based on Google Maps, Open Street Map, and widely known online food order applications in Iran. Based on thi...

Climate change and its respective environmental impacts, such as dying lakes, is widely acknowledged. Studies on the impact of shrinking hyper-saline lakes suggest severe negative consequences for the health of the affected population. The primary aim was to investigate the relationship between changes in the water level of the hyper-saline Lake Ur...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a worldwide threat to health. Since its onset in 2019, the pandemic has proceeded in different phases, which have been shaped by a complex set of influencing factors, including public health and social measures, the emergence of new virus variants, and seasonality. Understanding the development of COVID-19 incidence...

Global farmland biodiversity has declined rapidly in recent decades due to the homogenization of agricultural landscapes, including an increase in field sizes and decrease in woody features, such as hedgerows. Restructuring landscapes by (re)introducing woody features and decreasing field sizes can support biodiversity but at the cost of lower retu...

The growing and multiple interests in land as a resource has led to an increase in locally or regionally clashing land use interests on agricultural land which may result in conflicts or open up possibilities for synergies. Urbanization, food production, renewable energy production, environmental protection, and climate protection are known as key...

Climate change and its respective environmental impacts, such as dying lakes, is widely acknowledged. Studies on the impact of shrinking hyper-saline lakes suggest severe negative consequences for the health of the affected population. The primary aim was to investigate the relationship between changes in the water level of the hyper-saline Lake Ur...

In many parts of the world, lake drying is caused by water management failures, while the phenomenon is exacerbated by climate change. Lake Urmia in Northern Iran is drying up at such an alarming rate that it is considered to be a dying lake, which has dire consequences for the whole region. While salinization caused by a dying lake is well underst...

Crop cultivation intensifies globally, which can jeopardize biodiversity and the resilience of cropping systems. We investigate changes in crop rotations as one intensification metric for half of the croplands in Germany with annual field-level land-use data from 2005 to 2018. We proxy crop rotations with crop sequences and compare how these sequen...

Information about the spatial patterns of residents is essential, especially when elderly people are involved, as their action range is confined to their residential location. Since knowledge about patterns of elderly people in cities is limited, this paper formulates steps for the initialisation of an agent-based model, combined with different dat...

International sind sowohl personenbezogene als auch räumliche und statistische Analysen zu COVID-19 durchgeführt worden, welche wichtige Erkenntnisse über die Lokalisierung von besonders vulnerablen Gruppen durch COVID-19 lieferten. Forschungsarbeiten in Deutschland sind jedoch häufig begrenzt, da die meisten zur Verfügung stehenden COVID-19-Daten...

Cycling has gained increasing interest in Germany in recent years due to its manifold environmental, societal, and economic benefits. However, the number of cyclist collisions resulting in injury or death remains high and little is known about regional variations in frequency, severity of injury, and type of collision. This study investigates spati...

The main aim of the present study was to investigate the spatiotemporal trends of urban traffic accident hotspots during the COVID-19 pandemic. The severity index was used to determine high-risk areas, and the kernel density estimation method was used to identify the risk of traffic accident hotspots. Accident data for the time period of April 2018...

Environmental health inequalities (EHI), understood as differences in environmental health factors and in health outcomes caused by environmental conditions, are studied by a wide range of disciplines. This results in challenges to both synthesizing key knowledge domains of the field. This study aims to uncover the global research status and trends...

Classification is a very common image processing task. The accuracy of the classified map is typically assessed through a comparison with real-world situations or with available reference data to estimate the reliability of the classification results. Common accuracy assessment approaches are based on an error matrix and provide a measure for the o...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

Since land-use planning has become more participatory, there is a need to develop collective decision-making (CDM) frameworks to support the development of adequate land-use plans. However, in CDM processes the action of a decision-maker affects and is affected by the decisions of others. Therefore, this study aims to develop a game-theoretic colle...

Natural and man-made disasters caused by global climate change affect inhabitant health and well-being in the urban environments. One of the main issues in environmental planning in any form of residential area is monitoring the resilience of such disasters. This challenge has become more complicated when considering socio-ecological aspects of hum...

Three-dimensional urban vegetation data provide crucial ecological information, but generally feature poor coverage and availability. The spaceborne radar interferometer TanDEM-X delivers a digital elevation model that can be processed to produce urban Canopy Height Models (CHMs), including vegetation height and area per 12-metre cell. To date, the...

In many parts of the world, lake drying is caused by water management failures, while the phenomenon is exacerbated by climate change. Lake Urmia in Northern Iran is drying up at such an alarming rate that it is considered to be a dying lake, which has dire consequences for the whole region. While salinization caused by a dying lake is well underst...

Keywords: Karst zones and landforms Object-based image analysis Spatial and spectral features A semi-automated approach a b s t r a c t This study presents a novel, semi-automated approach for integrating decision rules and object-based image analysis (OBIA) methods for identifying and mapping karst zones and landforms. We developed a multi-resolut...

In modern societies, noise is ubiquitous. It is an annoyance and can have a negative impact on human health as well as on the environment. Despite increasing evidence of its negative impacts, spatial knowledge about noise distribution remains limited. Up to now, noise mapping is frequently inhibited by the necessary resources and therefore limited...

Information about the spatial patterns of residents is essential, especially when elderly people are involved, as their action range is confined to their residential location. Since knowledge about patterns of elderly people in cities is limited, this paper formulates steps for the initialisation of an agent-based model, combined with different dat...

Urban growth can take different forms, such as infill, expansion and leapfrog development. Here we focus on leapfrogging, which is characterised as new urban development bypassing vacant land. Analysing a sample of 100 global locations, we study the probability that land cover is converted from non-urban to urban as a function of the minimum distan...

The awareness that noise exposure is critical for human health is growing around the globe, and land-use regressions (LURs) are becoming a popular tool for producing noise exposure maps. One important factor for noise emissions is road traffic. The propagation in this regard is determined by the spatial layout of road infrastructure and the surroun...

Urmia Lake in Northern Iran is drying up, which is causing significant environmental problems in the region, including saline storms that devastate agricultural land. We developed a remote sensing-based monitoring application to detect and map the location of saline flow sources with a novel automated deep learning convolutional neural network (DL-...

Recent improvements in the spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of satellite images necessitate (semi-)automated classification and information extraction approaches. Therefore, we developed an integrated fuzzy object-based image analysis and deep learning (FOBIA-DL) approach for monitoring the land use/cover (LULC) and respective changes and...

With the recent advances in earth observation technologies, the increasing availability of data from more and more different satellite sensors as well as progress in semi-automated and automated classification techniques enable the (semi-) automated remote monitoring and analysis of large areas. Online platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) br...

With the recent advances in earth observation technologies, the increasing availability of data from more and more different satellite sensors as well as progress in semi-automated and automated classification techniques enable the (semi-) automated remote monitoring and analysis of large areas. Online platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) br...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

In many parts of the world, lake drying is caused by water management failures, while the phenomenon is exacerbated by climate change. Lake Urmia in Northern Iran is drying up at such an alarming rate that it is considered to be a dying lake, which has dire consequences for the whole region. While salinization caused by a dying lake is well underst...

Over the past decades, solar panels have been widely used to harvest solar energy owing to the decreased cost of silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) modules, and therefore it is essential to remotely map and monitor the presence of solar PV modules. Many studies have explored on PV module detection based on color aerial photography and manual photo int...

Urmia Lake in Northern Iran is drying up, which is causing significant environmental problems in the region, including saline storms that devastate agricultural land. We developed a remote sensing-based monitoring application to detect and map the location of saline flow sources with a novel automated deep learning convolutional neural network (DL-...

The aim of urban development strategies to make cities safe, resilient and sustainable is directly intertwined with mobility concepts. While benefits of active mobility (walking and cycling) as well as access to public transport are generally well-recognised, in planning practise and concepts, urban development is frequently taking place without co...

Notable noise mapping obligations exist in the European Union. However, they are limited to designated areas such as large agglomerations and main traffic infrastructures and therefore exclude certain populations from exposure assessments and consecutive noise action planning. Existing maps are not spatially congruent to epidemiological cohorts lik...

The world's poorest countries were hit hardest by COVID-19 due to their limited capacities to combat the pandemic. The urban water supply and water consumption are affected by the pandemic because it intensified the existing deficits in the urban water supply and sanitation services. In this study, we develop an integrated spatial analysis approach...

Children’s active school travel can provide a daily source of physical activity, yet the number of children walking or biking to school is decreasing worldwide. This study analyses children’s active school travel, its individual, family, socioeconomic and environmental determinants and spatial pattern in Leipzig, Germany. We evaluated the school tr...

Urban areas contain a complex mixture of surface materials resulting in mixed pixels that are challenging to handle with conventional mapping approaches. In particular, for spaceborne hyperspectral images (HSIs) with sufficient spectral resolution to differentiate urban surface materials, the spatial resolution of 30 m (e.g. EnMAP HSIs) makes it di...

Land use planning as strategic instruments to guide urban dynamics faces particular challenges in the Global South, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where urgent interventions are required to improve urban and environmental sustainability. This study investigated and identified key challenges of land use planning and its environmental assessments to i...

Different slums exhibit different levels of resilience against the threat of eviction. However, little is known about the role of the social capital of the slum community in this context. This study investigates the factors contributing to slum resilience in the Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria, through a social capital lens. This study first investigates...

The increasing demand for agricultural commodities for food and energy purposes has led to intensified agricultural land management, along with the homogenization of landscapes, adverse biodiversity effects and robustness of landscapes regarding the provision of ecosystem services. At the same time, subsidized organic agriculture and extensive gras...

Machine learning (ML) and data-driven approaches are increasingly used in many research areas. Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is a tree boosting method that has evolved into a state-of-the-art approach for many ML challenges. However, it has rarely been used in simulations of land use change so far. Xilingol, a typical region for research on s...

Highly dynamic peri-urban areas, particularly in the Global South, face many challenges including a lack of infrastructure, ownership conflicts, land degradation, and sustainable food production. This study aims to assess spatial land use characteristics and processes in peri-urban areas using the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A mixed-method app...

The importance of freshwater for human societies and sustainable urban development is paramount. This study presents a new approach and framework for spatial modelling of urban drinking water consumption patterns (UDWCP) in light of a drinking water sustainability assessment. The approach was developed based on the GIS multi-criteria decision analy...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

Mega-droughts can cause disruption to the affected society sparking a transition. We explore the causes and effects of the 2015−2016 mega-drought in Colombia. Using the multi-level perspective as a framework, we found that the mega-drought sparked an energy transition in Colombia whose dynamics were impacted both by the institutionalization of nich...

Forest fires are considered one of the most highly damaging and devastating of natural disasters, causing considerable casualties and financial losses every year. Hence, it is important to produce susceptibility maps for the management of forest fires so as to reduce their harmful effects. The purpose of this study is to map the susceptibility to f...

An increasing demand for agricultural products within the past years has led to increasing agricultural intensification. Various agricultural compositions and landscape configurations can have different impacts on the provision of ecosystem services. The EU follows the aim of supporting and developing sustainable food production systems. We use the...

Machine learning (ML) and data-driven approaches are increasingly used in many research areas. XGBoost is a tree boosting method that has evolved into a state-of-the-art approach for many ML challenges. However, it has rarely been used in simulations of land use change so far. Xilingol, a typical region for research on serious grassland degradation...

The increasing demand for agricultural commodities for food and energy purposes has led to intensified agricultural production. This trend may manifest in agricultural compositions and landscape configurations that can have mixed and adverse impacts on the provision of ecosystem services. We rely on the EU’s plot-based data from the Integrated Admi...

Background Noise annoyance is associated with adverse health-related conditions and reduced wellbeing. Thereby, subjective noise annoyance depends on the objective noise exposure and is modified by personal and regional factors. Objective How many participants of the German National Cohort Study (GNC; NAKO Gesundheitsstudie) were annoyed by transp...

With ongoing growth and continuous development of cities, the world is turning into an urban society. In this context, urbanization, population growth and migration towards urban areas are global trends. These processes are highly dynamic especially in China, with highest rates of urbanization worldwide. In contrast to these well-known trends, a re...

Despite international conservation efforts1, deforestation in the Amazon continues apace. While the current focus is on immediate responses to the crisis, the roots of deforestation are deep, institutional and societal. Institutional incentives for land speculation coupled with extreme inequality in tenure are the main engine of deforestation. With...

The viability of the climate pledges made by Brazil at the COP21 in Paris, 2015, heavily depends on the success of the country policies related to forest governance. Particularly, there are high expectations that the enforcement of the Brazilian Forest Code (BFC) will drive large-scale forest recovery and carbon mitigation. In this study, we quanti...

Two of the dominant processes shaping today's European cities are the ageing and diversification of the population. Given that the range of action usually decreases in later life, the living environment around the place of residence plays an important role in the social integration of the older generation. Hence, spatial patterns of residence indic...

Two of the dominant processes shaping today's European cities are the ageing and diversification of the population. Given that the range of action usually decreases in later life, the living environment around the place of residence plays an important role in the social integration of the older generation. Hence, spatial patterns of residence indic...

Dar es Salaam is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa facing many challenges due to highly dynamic and rapid changes. Particularly the peri-urban areas are regions of interest but are, however, still lacking a consistent definition, especially in the Global South. The study aims to define characteristics and processes for the peri-urban area...

Rapid urban expansion is a significant contributor to land cover change and poses a challenge to environmental sustainability, particularly in less developed countries. Insufficient data about urban expansion hinders effective land use planning. Therefore, a high need to collect, process, and disseminate land cover data exists. This study focuses o...

Land degradation occurs in all kinds of landscapes over the world, but the drivers of land degradation vary from region to region. Identifying these drivers at the appropriate spatial scale is an essential prerequisite for developing and implementing appropriate area-specific policies. In this study, we investigate nine different driving factors in...

Mit dem Prozess der Urbanisierung gehen nicht nur extensives Flächenwachstum und steigende Bevölkerungsdichten, sondern in der Konsequenz auch zunehmender Verkehr einher. Im Zuge dessen steigen die Lärmpegel in unseren Städten und damit die Belastungen für Mensch und Umwelt. Bisher angewandte Verfahren, um den Umgebungslärmpegel zu erheben, basiere...

Dengue fever is expanding rapidly in many tropical and subtropical countries since the last few decades. However, due to limited research, little is known about the spatial patterns and associated risk factors on a local scale particularly in the newly emerged areas. In this study, we explored spatial patterns and evaluated associated potential env...

Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the urban heart of a region that has been characterized by protracted violent conflict since the early 1990s. While several studies on Goma focus on sociodemographic and political processes or on areal development, our study unravels the effects of protr...

An urban heat island is one of the most vital environmental risks in urban areas. The aim of this study was to assess the spatial-temporal patterns of land use changes and heat island intensity for the city of Babol, Iran, between 1985 and 2015 and to predict likely future heat island intensity variations. Multi-temporal Landsat images were acquire...