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Urbanization continues to be a transformative process globally, affecting ecosystem integrity and the health and well being of people around the world. Although cities tend to be centers for both the production and consumption of goods and services that degrade natural environments, there is also evidence that urban ecosystems can play a positive role in sustainability efforts. Despite the fact that most of the urbanization is now occurring in the developing countries of the Global South, much of what we know about urban ecosystems has been developed from studying cities in the United States and across Europe. We propose a conceptual framework to broaden the development of urban ecological research and its application to sustainability. Our framework describes four key contemporary urban features that should be accounted for in any attempt to build a unified theory of cities that contributes to urban sustainability efforts. We evaluated a range of examples from cities around the world, highlighting how urban areas are complex, connected, diffuse and diverse and what these interconnected features mean for the study of urban ecosystems and sustainability.

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Focus groups have gained a reputation for facilitating data collection about sensitive topics. However, we know little about how focus group methods perform compared to individual response formats, particularly for sensitive topics. The goal of this study is to assess how well focus groups perform when compared to individual responses collected using open-ended self-administered questionnaires for sensitive policy-making topics among water decision makers in Phoenix, Arizona. The analysis compares focus group and self-administered questionnaire responses among fifty-five decision makers for three types of sensitive topics: competence, risk, and gatekeeping. The results indicate that respondents (1) gave similar responses in group and open-ended self-administered questionnaires when discussion topics were only moderately sensitive, (2) volunteered less information in focus groups than in open-ended self-administered questionnaires for very sensitive topics when there did not appear to be a compelling reason for respondents to risk being stigmatized by other group members, and (3) volunteered more information in focus groups than in open-ended self-administered questionnaires for very sensitive topics when there appeared to be an opportunity to exchange important information or solve a pressing problem. The authors conclude that multimethod research—including individual and group response formats—may be the best strategy for collecting data from decision makers about sensitive policy-related issues.

Human biologists recognize the centrality of parental feeding beliefs and related practices in structuring children's under-nutrition risk in food-insecure settings. By contrast, how they might similarly structure children's nutrition-related health risks in calorically rich ecologies has barely been considered. Using the case of 3- to 6-year-old children in a rural Southeastern U.S. community with very high obesity rates, we use cognitive methods such as consensus analysis to determine how parental cultural models of child eating and feeding are linked to high calorie, obesogenic child diets. We find that parental models are very consistent with biomedical understandings (reduce fat, reduce sugar, portion control, etc.). Regardless, children's diets are extremely high in calories overall as well as in high sugar and fat food items. We suggest three likely and mutually reinforcing contributing factors to persistent and increasing early childhood overweight and obesity: parents' ambivalence about modeling healthy eating, children's active resistance, and the balance of parents' social against nutritive goals at meal times. The active role of children as social architects of their own biology has been little explored in human biological studies, and should provide novel and important understandings of the biocultural construction of childhood over-nutrition.