Yimeng Song

Yale University | YU · School of the Environment

Background and aims The disease burden attributable to metabolic risk factors is rapidly increasing in China, especially in older people. The objective of this study was to (i) estimate the pattern and trend of six metabolic risk factors and attributable causes in China from 1990 to 2019, (ii) ascertain its association with societal development, an...

Background Reducing the burden of death due to infection is an urgent global public health priority. Previous studies have estimated the number of deaths associated with drug-resistant infections and sepsis and found that infections remain a leading cause of death globally. Understanding the global burden of common bacterial pathogens (both suscept...

Timely and accurate population mapping plays an essential role in a wide range of critical applications. Benefiting from the emergence of multi-source geospatial datasets and the development of spatial statistics and machine learning, multi-scale population mapping with high temporal resolutions has been made possible. However, the over-complex mod...

Intensifying wildfires and human settlement expansion have placed more people and infrastructure at the wildland–urban interface (WUI) areas under risk. Wildfire management and policy response are needed to protect ecosystems and residential communities; however, maps containing spatially explicit information on the distribution of WUI areas are li...

Aerosols significantly affect climate change, and ambient aerosols are related to various adverse health outcomes. Satellite aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieved by the MAIAC (Multiangle Implementation of Atmospheric Correct) algorithm provides a unique opportunity to represent worldwide local-scale gradients of aerosol loading. Although the MAIAC...

Background: Understanding the magnitude of cancer burden attributable to potentially modifiable risk factors is crucial for development of effective prevention and mitigation strategies. We analysed results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 to inform cancer control planning efforts globally. Methods:...

Background: The global burden of lower respiratory infections (LRIs) and corresponding risk factors in children older than 5 years and adults has not been studied as comprehensively as it has been in children younger than 5 years. We assessed the burden and trends of LRIs and risk factors across all age groups by sex, for 204 countries and territor...

The United Nations specified the need for “providing universal access to greenspace for urban residents” in the 11th Sustainable Development Goal. Yet, how far we are from this goal remains unclear. Here, we develop a methodology incorporating fine-resolution population and greenspace mappings and use the results for 2020 to elucidate global differ...

Background The health risks associated with moderate alcohol consumption continue to be debated. Small amounts of alcohol might lower the risk of some health outcomes but increase the risk of others, suggesting that the overall risk depends, in part, on background disease rates, which vary by region, age, sex, and year. Methods For this analysis,...

Supplementary data

With the ongoing spread of COVID-19, vaccination stands as an effective measure to control and mitigate the impact of the disease. However, due to the unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccination sites, people can have different levels of spatial accessibility to COVID-19 vaccination. This study adopts an improved gravity-based model to measure the...

Greenspace exposure metrics can allow for comparisons of green space supply across time, space, and population groups, and for inferring patterns of variation in opportunities for people to enjoy the health and recreational benefits of nearby green environments. A better understanding of greenspace exposure differences across various spatial scales...

Background: Built environment can influence physical conditions of older adults (e.g. osteoporosis). However, traditional methods using 2-dimensional circular buffer as a spatial structure to measure neighbourhood effect may create bias in health estimation, especially for the hilly and compact environment across low-income neighbourhoods (e.g. pub...

The influence of high-density environment on urban residents is controversial, and its effect varies with specific contexts. Meanwhile, urban planners and policy-makers are increasingly aware that urban greenery may mitigate the detrimental effects of crowded environments on quality of life in high-density cities. However, little empirical evidence...

Inequalities in accessibility to grocery stores can lead to disparate health outcomes among the population. Although existing studies have examined grocery accessibility inequality across income and racial/ethnic groups, little research has been dedicated to revealing the intra‐racial disparities of grocery accessibility and comparing inter‐racial...

Public transit is the main travel mode for residents in major urban areas to access different socioeconomic resources. Nodal accessibility can be used to measure the level of transit-based connectivity for residents from one neighborhood to socioeconomic resources in other neighborhoods. While many existing studies have measured the spatial inequal...

Urban greenspace, as an essential component of green infrastructure, is particularly important in the urban environment that maintains the function and sustainability of urbanities. With the rapid economic growth over recent decades, China has been experiencing unprecedented urbanisation processes, at the same time, led to dramatic changes in urban...

Objectives: Maintaining good cognition is crucial in later life. However, most existing research has focused on individual factors impacting cognition, and few studies have investigated the association between neighborhood built environment and older adults' cognition. This study examined the association between neighborhood built environment and c...

The United Nations specified the need for “providing universal access to greenspace for urban residents” in the 11th Sustainable Development Goal. Yet, how far we are from this goal remains unclear in the global context. Here, we developed a methodology incorporating fine-resolution population and greenspace mappings and used the results for 2020 t...

Background Recent research attention has been paid to anthropogenic heat emissions (AE), temperature increase generated by human activity such as lighting, transportation, manufacturing, construction, and building climate controls. However, there is no epidemiological data available to investigate the association between anthropogenic heat emission...

Given the important role of green environments playing in healthy cities, the inequality in urban greenspace exposure has aroused growing attentions. However, few comparative studies are available to quantify this phenomenon for cities with different population sizes across a country, especially for those in the developing world. Besides, commonly...

Background Emerging research suggested an association of early-life particulate air pollution exposure with development of asthma in childhood. However, the potentially differential effects of submicron particulate matter (PM; PM with aerodynamic diameter ≤1 μm [PM1]) remain largely unknown. Objective This study primarily aimed to investigate asso...

Exposure to ambient PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter) can cause adverse effects on human health. China has been experiencing dramatic changes in air pollution over the past two decades. Statistically deriving ground-level PM 2.5 from satellite aerosol optical depth (AOD) has been an emerging attempt to provide such PM 2.5 data for environmental moni...

Urban land-use maps outlining the distribution, pattern, and composition of various land use types are critically important for urban planning, environmental management, disaster control, health protection, and biodiversity conservation. Recent advances in remote sensing and social sensing data and methods have shown great potentials in mapping urb...

Background Knowledge of how intrinsic capacity (IC) and neighbourhood physical environment shape functional ability (FA) trajectories in later life remains understudied. We investigated four-year trajectories of IC and their impact on FA trajectories and the association between neighbourhood physical environment and FA trajectories among community-...

Background Smaller sizes of ambient particulate matter (PM) can be more toxic and can be breathed into lower lobes of a lung. Children are particularly vulnerable to PM air pollution because of their adverse effects on both lung functions and lung development. However, it remains unknown whether a smaller PM has a greater short-term impact on child...

Little is known about the accumulative impacts of neighbourhood physical environments on older adults' depressive symptoms over time. Based on a cohort study of 2081 older adults in Hong Kong, this study examined longitudinal relationships between neighbourhood physical environments and depressive symptoms among older adults, with a particular focu...

Real-time population data are vital for urban planning and resource management for sustainable development. To complement satellite-based population estimation methods, geospatial social media data provide additional opportunities to estimate the distribution of population with high levels of efficacy and accuracy. Thus, this study attempts to asse...

Sensing urban greenness from street view data offers a new and alternative way of measuring the association between greenness exposure and subjective wellbeing in developing countries where traditional census data are poor. This paper focuses on the association between life satisfaction and street-level visible greenness exposure at residential and...

Knowledge on how intrinsic capacity (IC) and neighbourhood physical environment shape functional ability (FA) trajectories in later life remains understudied. We investigated the 4-year trajectories of IC and their impact on FA trajectories, and the associations between neighbourhood physical environments and FA trajectories over time among older a...

Urban spatial structure, which is primarily defined as the spatial distribution of employment and residences, has been of lasting interest to urban economists, geographers, and planners for good reason. This paper proposes a nonparametric method that combines the Jenks natural break method and the Moran's I to identify a city's polycentric structur...

Neighborhood built environments (BEs) are increasingly recognized as being associated with late-life depression. However, their pathways are still understudied. This study investigates the mediating effects of physical, social activities (PA & SA) and functional ability (FA) in the relationships between BEs and late-life depression. We conducted a...

Background: It remains uncertain whether socioeconomic factors modify the effect of air pollution on human health. Moreover, studies investigating socioeconomic modifying roles on the effect of PM1 are quite limited, especially in developing countries. Objective: The present study aims to investigate socioeconomic modification effects on the associ...

An integrated analysis of housing and transport affordability provides comprehensive insights into the affordability of different locations in a city. By focusing on transit‐based workers, who constitute a significant portion of commuters but are understudied in the affordability literature, this study proposes a new, integrated method for estimati...

Background: Short-term exposure to PM2.5 has been widely associated with human morbidity and mortality. However, most up-to-date research was conducted at a daily timescale, neglecting the intra-day variations in both exposure and outcome. As an important fraction in PM2.5, PM1 has not been investigated about the very acute effects within a few hou...

Satellite-based estimation of fine particulate matter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5) at a high spatiotemporal resolution is important to understand the detailed dynamics of PM2.5 pollution and exposure. Stricter clean air policies have been enacted in recent years to tackle China’s serious problem with PM2.5 pollution, including the implementation of th...

Significance By linking seasonality of climate and changing human behavior, we demonstrate that collaboration on global efforts for prompt and intensive intervention is fundamental to coping with future pandemic waves of COVID-19. We propose that this collaboration can be started in locations with typically high population density and international...

The most effective interventions By 23 January 2020, China had imposed a national emergency response to restrict travel and impose social distancing measures on its populace in an attempt to inhibit the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, which measures were most effective is uncertain. Tian et al....

Fine particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters ≤2.5 µm (PM2.5) has adverse effects on human health and the atmospheric environment. The estimation of surface PM2.5 concentrations has made intensive use of satellite-derived aerosol products. However, it has been a great challenge to obtain high-quality and high-resolution PM2.5 data from both gr...

Satellite-based human settlement extraction methods have limited practical applications, due to merely studying the difference between human settlements with other land cover/use types in physical attributes (e.g., spectral signature and land surface temperature) instead of considering basic anthropogenic attributes (e.g., human distribution and hu...

Undetected cases The virus causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now become pandemic. How has it managed to spread from China to all around the world within 3 to 4 months? Li et al. used multiple sources to infer the proportion of early infections that went undetected and their contribution to virus spread. The researchers combined data f...

Background Estimation of the fraction and contagiousness of undocumented novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections is critical for understanding the overall prevalence and pandemic potential of this disease. Many mild infections are typically not reported and, depending on their contagiousness, may support stealth transmission and the spread of docum...

Understanding the difference of greenspace in different urban areas is a critical requirement for maintaining urban natural environment and lessening environmental inequality. However, how urban expansion impacts on people's exposure to ambient green environments has been limitedly addressed. Here we integrated multi-source geospatial big data incl...

Respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) appeared in China during December 2019. Attempting to contain infection, China banned travel to and from Wuhan city on 23 January and implemented a national emergency response. Here we evaluate the spread and control of the epidemic based on a unique synthesis of data including case repor...

Although a growing body of research has explored the relationship between neighbourhood natural outdoor environments and mental health, most studies have measured neighbourhood natural outdoor environments from a bird's-eye perspective, rather than measuring the visual experience of green and blue space that individuals have at the ground level. In...

Land use reflects human activities on land. Urban land use is the highest level human alteration on Earth, and it is rapidly changing due to population increase and urbanization. Urban areas have widespread effects on local hydrology, climate, biodiversity, and food production. However, maps, that contain knowledge on the distribution, pattern and...

In the past few decades, extensive epidemiological studies have focused on exploring the adverse effects of PM2.5 (particulate matters with aerodynamic diameters less than 2.5 μm) on public health. However, most of them failed to consider the dynamic changes of population distribution adequately and were limited by the accuracy of PM2.5 estimations...

Supplementary Materials for Dynamic assessment of PM2.5 exposure and health risk using remote sensing and geo-spatial big data

Although people may recognize urban vibrancy when they see or sense it, developing direct and comprehensive measures of urban vibrancy remains a challenge. In the context of intense globalcompetition, there is an increased realization that urban vibrancy is vital to the social and economic sustainability of cities. Such vibrancy may be significantl...

Supplementary Materials for Dynamic Assessments of Population Exposure to Urban Greenspace Using Multi-source Big Data

Supporting Information for [How do people in different places experience different levels of air pollution? Using worldwide Chinese as a lens]

Urban land-use mapping is a significant yet challenging task in the field of remote sensing. Although numerous classification methods have been developed for obtaining land-use information in urban areas, the accuracy and efficiency of these methods are insufficient to meet the requirements of real-world applications such as urban planning and land...