Thermal discomfort is one of the main triggers for occupants’ interactions with components of the built environment such as adjustments of thermostats and/or opening windows and strongly related to the energy use in buildings. Understanding causes for thermal (dis-)comfort is crucial for design and operation of any type of building. The assessment of human thermal perception through rating scales, for example in post-occupancy studies, has been applied for several decades; however, long-existing assumptions related to these rating scales had been questioned by several researchers. The aim of this study was to gain deeper knowledge on contextual influences on the interpretation of thermal perception scales and their verbal anchors by survey participants. A questionnaire was designed and consequently applied in 21 language versions. These surveys were conducted in 57 cities in 30 countries resulting in a dataset containing responses from 8225 participants. The database offers potential for further analysis in the areas of building design and operation, psycho-physical relationships between human perception and the built environment, and linguistic analyses.

Indices explaining health phenomena are important tools for identifying and investigating health inequalities and to support policy making. Some of these indices are expressed at area-level, and the investigation of the areal influences of these indices on individual health outcomes have scale and geographical contextual implications that need to be assessed. In this study we calculated two area-level indices: one deprivation index and one index of healthcare accessibility. Using multilevel modelling, we calculated the area-level influences of these indices on an individual-level index of healthcare satisfaction considering three kinds of areas or contexts: a context of deprivation, a context of healthcare accessibility and a context combining the two characteristics of healthcare accessibility and deprivation. We evaluated two kinds of geographical problems using the statistical results of these area-level influences: the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) and the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP). Regarding the MAUP we evaluated the scale effects at two scales: census blocks and census tracts. Regarding the UGCoP we evaluated the differences in areal influences between the three kinds of contexts for both scales. The case study area was the city of Quito, Ecuador. The results of the performed analyses showed no severe MAUP and UGCoP, and revealed important evidence of the area-level influence of deprivation and healthcare accessibility on healthcare satisfaction.

Natural ecosystems are declining and fragmenting globally at unprecedented rates. Fragmentation of natural ecosystems leads to decline in functions and services with severe impact on people. In Ecuador, despite establishment of the nationwide ecosystem classification, this baseline information has not been fully exploited to generate a monitoring system for ecosystem changes. Forest ecosystems are altered daily in Ecuador by human impact, but the relationship between forest fragmentation and human land use has not been adequately explored. To provide an overview of how recent forest fragmentation at the national and ecosystem level was affected by practices in human land use, we quantified the degree of forest fragmentation using the forest fragmentation index (FFI). The relationship between the degree of forest ecosystem fragmentation and human land use of 64 natural forest ecosystems was analyzed during the time period 1990 to 2014. At the national level, the expansion of pasture and inhabited area significantly increased forest fragmentation. The regression models based on the FFI value indicated that the forest fragmentation was highly correlated to pastures in forest ecosystems with low, moderate, and high fragmentation in 2014 due to a progressive increase in pastures. This study showed the critical gaps between forest conservation strategies and actual practices in human land use.