Wanglin Yan

• Doctor of Engineering
• Professor at Keio University

As an island ecosystem, Djerba, a region of Tunisia located on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, is characterized by limited natural resources and threatened by land degradation due to rapid socio-economic development and heavy human-induced changes to the landscape. The objective of this study is to build a system based on computer visi...

This study presents measurement of changes using image processing techniques, Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) and Landsat images along the coast of the island of Djerba, Tunisia. Three regions of this island were selected: Rass Errmall, El Kastil and Aghir. Accretions as well as erosion processes were observed in the study areas between 19...

Modern cities are commonly seen as places where one can find a better life. At the same time, they face challenges in achieving sustainability, a goal crucial to the fundamental changes called for globally and locally. Food, energy, and water (FEW) resources are indispensable for human survival in general, while the importance of their conservation...

The term “green infrastructure” refers to the aspects of land use and planning that utilize the diverse functions of natural ecosystems to bring social, ecological, and economic benefits to human society. People hike and jog in green spaces and obtain fresh vegetables grown on the land. Freshwater springs up from the ground. Whether or not people n...

Japan, one of the most developed countries in Asia, is recognized for having well-managed infrastructure and for its living environment. This apparent utopia is collapsing amid the ever-growing risks posed by climatic disasters and the unsustainability of natural resources. This chapter looks back at the development path of urbanization in Tokyo, r...

In this chapter, the authors describe the Next-Generation Suburban Community Development Project, implemented collaboratively with Yokohama City and Tokyu Corporation, and activities at the WISE Living Lab, a space for experimenting with new ideas to address challenges and issues facing communities and to create value in Yokohama, Japan. The study...

Tokyo has witnessed rapid growth and dramatic socio-economic transformation in the last half-century. The most remarkable changes in land use have taken place in suburban municipalities, where agricultural and natural land continue to be converted to residential and industrial uses, often without comprehensive planning. This chapter qualitatively e...

Metropolitan areas typically experience urban sprawl, but some are actually beginning to face population declines, at the same time as planners have also been promoting the transition to compact cities with the goal of creating healthy cities. With all these changes, gaps in food supply and demand can emerge, as evidenced in Japan by the withdrawal...

Diverse spatial patterns of cities, to a large extent, reflect the quality of life of an area’s inhabitants and the correspondent environmental load their lifestyles impose. This study aims to develop a method to express a design baseline that enables the quantitative evaluation and comparison of the demand and supply of food, energy, and water (FE...

Urbanization, industrialization, and improvements in transportation have meant that most produce (fruits and vegetables) no longer needs to be produced within the cities where they are consumed. It can be more efficient to grow food intensively and on a large scale in rural areas. The separation of agriculture and cities raises issues about energy...

The urbanization of Tokyo took place in conjunction with a near continuous series of unprecedented disasters, events, and reconstructions; from the early fires in the Edo Era, to the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, the fire-bombing of World War II, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Great East Japan Earthquake, and somewhat anti-climactic, the 2020 Olymp...

Allotment gardens (AGs), one of the most popular forms of urban agriculture (UA), have attracted social attention because of the ecosystem services they provide to citizens. However, the services and availability of AGs may be unevenly distributed, owing to their geographic location. The patterns underlying the provision of AG plots and facilities...

The authors have developed the Geo CPS platform, which incorporates the advantages of cyber-physical systems, geographic information systems, and tangible user interfaces, and provides a platform to connect the three components for interactive sensing, processing, and actuation in smart city development. It can be also applied for education in envi...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has so far been the most severe global public health emergency in this century. Generally, citizen science can provide a complement to authoritative scientific practices for responding to this highly complex biological threat and its adverse consequences. Several citizen science projects have been de...

Urban areas around the world are today witnessing remarkable development transformations, paralleled by the growing influx of populations. The expanding city boundaries and their associated development activities are, however, altering the surrounding ecosystems. Against the growing water demands in urban areas and its declining availability, water...

Personal carbon trading (PCT) has garnered significant interest in the literature as an alternative policy instrument to the largely unpopular carbon tax. However, it has been hindered by the cost and administrative complexity concerns as a result of covering potentially millions of emitters. This work expands on a prior study which presented a mob...

In this article a planning approach is proposed to accommodate different paces of urbanisation. Instead of responding to a single problem with a Pavlov-type of response, analysis shows that the transformational tempi of different urban landscapes require multiple deployment strategies to develop urban environments that are sustainable and resilient...

Geotechnology, including GIS, remote sensing, and GNSS, is finding many applications in disaster risk reduction. Information flows in conventional systems tend to be one-way, however, from the physical world to cyber world, and their effectiveness often depends on professional training while support for participation is weak. This chapter overviews...

The current state of supplying food, energy and water to urban dwellers is often top-down organised and approached in a sectoral way. This means people in cities have lost connection to what and how they get their resources supplied. The implementation of food, energy and water systems is a siloed exercise and systems operate apart from each other....

Cities are facing complex problems, the solutions of which require co-creation by governments, companies, communities and citizens. Originally initiated as testbeds for companies to develop industrial products and solutions for consumers, Urban Living Labs (ULL) are now being used as an attempt to find broader solutions. This chapter develops the p...

Most cities around the world rely on long distance food supply from remote areas to feed their residents, indicating low food self-sufficiency for urban areas. As a result, urban food supply systems tend to be highly vulnerable to natural hazards and pandemics, and also have larger environmental consequences such as a high carbon footprint and a hi...

This chapter outlines a proposed Food-Energy-Water (FEW)-database, explicitly designed for architects and urban designers. The database is global, with the intent being to describe both commonalities and gaps across the varied physical, social and economic environments, and more importantly to examine the possibility of scaling methods and socio-ec...

Thinking about the future city the way food-energy-water generation, distribution and supply is organised may well make a difference for urban dwellers’ quality of life. The urban context is unprecedented and cannot be predicted very well. When uncertainties increase the demand for simple responses seems to be the preferred way of treatment. This i...

Research on urban flows is often limited to technical-rational understanding of the quantity of flows and, at best, the negative impact of their uses. In the M-Nex project an approach is proposed to shift the mindset from a sectoral way of looking that is aimed at efficiency towards a creative and adaptive planning process that is open to transform...

The evolving concept of 'Smart Cities' (SC) is today gaining global momentum in scientific and policy arenas. With the rising potential for jobs and improved lifestyle, these fast-growing cities are witnessing an ever-increasing concentration of populations and economic activities. However, the core aspect of sustainability is often overshadowed in...

Urban and rural areas often meet their water demands from a shared stock of finite water resources. Against the changing climate, the rising water demands in fast-growing urban areas are leading to increasing water-use conflicts with the co-dependent rural areas. Although poor water governance is frequently cited as the key reason for such urban-ru...

Rangelands located in arid and semi-arid region are particularly vulnerable to climate change. The objective of this research project is to assess vulnerability and its impacts on socio-economy of pastoral society and to formulate adaptation options for the selected rangelands. The analysis process consisted of (1) using geospatial techniques to as...

Developing countries have generally been overlooked in downstream carbon trading-based policy research. This can be attributed to the greater responsibility of developed economies for climate change, and the greater socio-demographic, political and technological challenges faced by their less-developed counterparts. This paper attempts to address t...

This paper presents an original approach to characterizing historical fire regimes for regions with limited fire data. Fire variables were derived from satellite datasets and regional fire occurrence statistics. They defined the integral elements of a fire regime such as historical trends, spatiotemporal evolution, fire seasonality and causes. Temp...

Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) have brought great opportunities for geographical information systems (GIS) to be integrated with cyber-physical systems (CPS) in urban management. However, the term IoT and CPS are new in the GIS realm. This article reviews the concepts of IoT and CPS from the perspective of geospatial spaces and pro...

Detection of surface water from satellite images is important for water management purposes like for mapping flood extents, inundation dynamics, and water resources distributions. In this research, we introduce a supervised contextual classification model to detect surface water bodies from polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A comple...

The redelivery problem occurs when a delivery service cannot deliver an item to the recipient on the first attempt, requiring one or more additional attempts. There are impacts on profit, efficiency, convenience, traffic, and the environment. In recent years, the redelivery problem in Japan has been aggravated by the growth of e-commerce, which inc...

Despite its potential use for earth observation and GIS-based analysis, Public Administrative Database (PAD) has been neglected in the spatial big data discussions. For instance, linking unaggregated public databases to the smallest administrative units for mining spatial data currently absents from literatures. In this study, a neighbourhood assoc...

In recent years, customer pick-up at collection and delivery points has become a popular alternative to traditional home delivery, which is under great pressure. However, current service of pick-up facilities has seldom been geographically evaluated despite its general uneven distribution and diverse needs. In this paper, in order to interpret the...

As downstream road transport has not been fully integrated into any emissions trading scheme, this paper proposes and evaluates the possibility of one by addressing the main barriers hindering its development. Based on this, a scheme which separates the “Cap” and “Trade” participation to motorists and local governments, respectively, is presented t...

With developing concerns of climate change, population growth and rapid urbanization, there is growing need to optimize Food-Energy-Water (FEW) sectors. Subsequently, FEW nexus thinking has become a prerequisite for development planning today, as the three sectors are intricately linked to each other. This study identifies the key barriers to opera...

This paper presents a workflow capitalizing Google Earth’s High-resolution Imagery (GEHRI) to detect and monitor Artificial Waterway (AW) in a tropical peat forest. The workflow applies an Object-Based approach derived from concepts and techniques for indexing visual semantics in a ten-levels of visual structures. Three sequential stages are propos...

Cycling has proven to be an important strategy in decreasing the risk of non-communicable diseases. This study aimed to discover barriers and enabling factors influencing satisfaction and safety perceptions towards the use of bicycle roads in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea. A cross-sectional survey of 190 youth and adult individuals was c...

Taman merupakan salah satu bentuk ruang terbuka publik yang memiliki peran penting di daerah perkotaan dalam rangka penyediaan layanan ekologis untuk penduduk. Taman adalah fasilitas penting yang mendorong kelayakan hidup perkotaan. Liveability berarti kualitas hidup yang dialami oleh penduduk suatu lingkungan melalui berbagai layanan / fasilitas y...

Urban communities are particularly vulnerable to the future demand for food, energy and water, and this vulnerability is further exacerbated by the onset of climate change at local. Solutions need to be found in urban spaces. This article based around urban design practice sees urban agriculture as a key facilitator of nexus thinking, needing water...

Differences in the political systems and the economic conditions of each country in the northeast region indeed lead to diversity in terms of climate change vulnerabilities. These differences cast strong shadows on the types and scale of adaptation plans and measures started in the region. Keeping context specificity in mind, this chapter summarize...

Unprecedented urban growth adds pressure on the finite water resources to meet the growing demands. Urban does not only account large direct consumption of water, but also account large water footprint because of consumption of water-intensive food and high-energy consumption. Consequently, urban areas have experienced competition among various wat...

Three-dimensional (3D) Semantic segmentation of aerial derived point cloud aims at assigning each point to a semantic class such as building, tree, road, and so on. Accurate 3D-segmentation results can be used as an essential information for constructing 3D city models, for assessing the urban expansion and economical condition. However, the fine-g...

The energy performance of residential and commercial buildings is a vital topic because of the rapid urbanization occurring throughout the world. Accommodation buildings are considered energy intensive compared to other commercial facilities. In addition, they are the main component of the tourism industry. Therefore, various actions and policies h...

This paper presents a collective sensing approach that integrates imperfect Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) obtained through Citizen Science (CS) tree mapping projects with very high resolution (VHR) optical remotely sensed data for low-cost, fine-scale, and accurate mapping of trees in urban orchards. To this end, an individual tree crown...

Nowadays the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most promising application areas in information technology for future products and services. Therefore, it is not surprising that new technologies arise, which are marketed as "the most useful technology" for applications in IoT devices. In this study, we focus on the new communication technology...

Six years have passed since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and at present collective relocation projects are being completed all over the tsunami stricken area. While safety is much improved it is considered that the lifestyle of migrated residents is to be affected due to steep slope topography and out of previous living area. In this resear...

In this paper, we present a fuzzy model for intrinsic quality assessment of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on species occurrences obtained by Citizen Science (CS) biodiversity monitoring programs. The proposed VGI quality assurance approach evaluates the thematic and positional quality of the crowdsourced biodiversity observation in terms...

This research presents an automatic method to detect and evaluate the shoreline changes from Landsat satellite images. In fact, a method, that we called Lukas-Kanade Adapted for Coastal Changes (LKA2C), has been developed to calculate and detect the changes around the study region. Mainly the proposed method is based on SURF algorithm to detect the...

Oat has been gaining renewed interest due to its role in human healthy diet. A field study was conducted across three diverse locations in Canada to determine N and P uptake, agronomic traits and yield performance of 10–12 cultivars under four fertilizer N rates. Our data showed that ‘SA060123’ and ‘OA1331-5’ were the highest-yielding cultivars, an...

This chapter examines the benefits of adventure education and of pairing adventure and environmental education in urban environments. By participating in outdoor activities, people learn about their surroundings and places they might not otherwise visit. These group experiences enhance social ties and may promote pro-environmental behaviors, which...

Traditional Japanese tea house with residence adjacent.

Before the 2011 disaster, Kesennuma was a key city on the Sanriku coast, with a population of 75,000. Major industries included fishing, marine products processing, and shipbuilding. While the ria geography of the coast provides a wealth of natural resources, disaster risk comes along with it.

In the hills of the Fukushima region the radiation fall out was significant. (1) Geiger counter reading shows radiation levels remain elevated. (2) Contaminated soil is being relocated and buried under a track. (3) Removal of contaminated soil.

The holistic land use planning process might contribute to reduce the risk of natural disaster and mitigate climate change. This also reduces huge national budget waste for reconstruction and social care after disasters. The aim of this study was to reveal the lessons derived from 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear accident....

The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake in March 2011 and subsequent Tsunami (Fig. 6.1) resulted in a substantial area that was flooded (Fig. 6.2) and a nuclear disaster in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) affiliated to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) (Suzuki and Kaneko in Public Administration, Governance and Globalization, 4, 7–2...

The municipality of Minamisoma was hit by a double disaster. The tsunami caused a heavy flood in the area and the break down of the nuclear plant of Fukushima caused a severe radioactive pollution. Both impacted the population of Minamisoma.

Six years have elapsed since the Great East Japan Earthquake struck the country’s Tohoku region on 11 March 2011. A variety of projects are under way for the reconstruction of the disaster-affected area. The government declared the five-year period from 2011 until the end of March 2016 as the intensive reconstruction period, and is pouring consider...

In this book the design charrettes, which were held in Minamisoma and Kesennuma, are presented as examples of resilience planning in complex circumstances. In chapter One five stages of planning for recovery have been introduced. Recovery, reparation and rebuilding are processes, which should start immediately after the disaster took place. In vari...

This book consists of two parts. The first part describes the context in which the Prefectures of Minamisoma and Kesennuma need to operate and what the meaning is of the multiple disasters that occurred in the area. The second part illuminates the design process and content of the Minamisoma and Kesennuma designs. Thirdly, the chapters are alternat...

Building resilience requires a good strategy for managing change across disciplines as well as scales of community. The chief difficulty is that it can be difficult to recognize the nature of change even when processes are ongoing and easy to observe. Inertia and the bias of previous knowledge can cloud perspective, while a lack of communication an...

Though change is often problematic and complicated by circumstance, and in the case of disaster profoundly damaging, it can also be an opportunity to improve otherwise intractable systemic problems. With that in mind, this chapter defines the nature of change as viewed through the lens of resilience and further outlines the relationship between res...

This book contributes to the literature on resilience, hazard planning, risk management, environmental policy and design, presenting articles that focus on building resilience through social and technical means. Bringing together contributions from Japanese authors, the book also offers a rare English-language glimpse into current policy and practi...

Given their considerable solubility in water and potentially high toxicity to human health, organoarsenic compounds have become an emerging contaminant. Herein, a heterogeneous Fenton process mediated by SiO2-coated nano zero-valent iron (SiO2-nZVI) was employed to simultaneously remove the p-arsanilic acid (p-ASA, a typical organoarsenic compound)...

Renewable natural resources, such as solar radiation, rainfall, wind, and geothermal heat, together with ecosystem services, provide the elementary supports for the sustainable development of human society. To improve regional sustainability, we studied the spatial distributions and quantities of renewable natural resources and net primary producti...

It is broadly known that tropical peat forest plays important role for local and regional social and environmental wellbeing. Nonetheless the existence is under serious threat due to unsustainable human activities that often exacerbated by extreme weather events. Monitoring and understanding health of tropical peat forest can help to determine corr...

Groundwater is considered as an important source of water supply in our world. Its contamination is of particular concern as it is a vital source of water for irrigation, drinking and industrial activities. To control and manage groundwater contamination DRASTIC model is a popular approach. This study applied an integrated DRASTIC model using Geogr...

The informal transport infrastructure is an inseparable and critical element of the transportation system in that it provides pedestrian accessibility in planned or unplanned environments. Despite this important role, the informal infrastructure is usually neglected in formal studies, plans, reports or maps. A sophisticated understanding of the dif...

This study is aimed at synthesizing the social value-based model of Shimokawa, Hokkaido with economic value-based model of Hita, Oita to implement woody biomass renewable energy business in Japan. These two areas were chosen to highlight their contradictory economic and social situations in utilizing their abundant forest resources. The research us...

Desire path also known as a desire line or social trail is a technical term which has been applied for a path that formed as a consequence of pedestrians walking in the formal urban environment by urban planners for almost a hundred year. A desire path is normally formed by people based on a bottom-up process , in the absence of a designed sidewalk...

Herders in Mongolia are directly affected by climate change impact more than urban residents. This research project is developing an early warning system to prevent disaster risk by using mobile SMS services based on the partnership between a scientific research group, local policy makers, industrial technology developers and support of pastoral co...

Herders in Mongolia are directly affected by climate change impact more than urban residents. This research project is developing an early warning system to prevent disaster risk by using mobile SMS services based on the partnership between a scientific research group, local policy makers, industrial technology developers and support of pastoral co...

The informal construction of dwellings (housing) and the informal growth of transport infrastructure are two main dynamics of an informal settlement growth phenomenon that may influence each other over time. Some studies have been done to understand the growth mechanisms of informal settlements, but not enough attention has been paid to study the i...

Urbanization has caused countless changes in the lives, behaviors, and community structures of wild animals. Habitat loss in urban areas has led to the proliferation of certain species over others; in the case of birds, frugivores and certain predators can be found in abundance in cities. These birds, however, occasionally show novel behaviors that...

In the absence of a generic approach to study shoreline changes, this research focus on the development of a generic methodology to detect, measure, analyze, and predict shoreline changes to manage coastal environment. The unique strength of this approach is that it incorporates image processing techniques, remotely sensed derived data into a GIS t...

The emigration of residents following the Fukushima nuclear accident has resulted in aging and depopulation problems in radiation-contaminated areas. The recovery of affected areas, and even those areas with low radioactive pollution levels, is still heavily affected by this problem. This slow recovery consequently affects immigration patterns. Thi...

Groat oil content and composition are important determinants of oat (Avena sativa L.) quality. We investigated these traits in a population of 146 recombinant inbred lines from a cross between ‘Dal’ (high oil) and ‘Exeter’ (low oil). A linkage map consisting of 475 Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) markers spanning 1271.8 cM across 40 linkage grou...

In Mongolia, from 1999 to 2001 and 2009 to 2010, about 10 million livestock animals were seriously died due to starvation and the cold by effects of overgrazing and Zud: extreme snow in winter season. Thus, it is required to reduce its risk by controlling number of overwinter livestock animals. In order to do that, it is required to simulate how ma...

Groat oil content and composition are important determinants of oat quality. We investigated these traits in a population of 146 recombinant inbred lines from a cross between 'Dal' (high oil) and 'Exeter' (low oil). A linkage map consisting of 475 DArT markers spanning 1271.8 cM across 40 linkage groups was constructed. QTL analysis for groat oil c...

As an island ecosystem, Djerba, a region of Tunisia located on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, is characterized by limited natural resources and threatened by land degradation due to rapid socio-economic development and heavy human-induced changes to the landscape. The objective of this study is to build a system based on computer visi...