Seismic resilience of building inventory towards resilient cities

Resilience of a community after an extreme event depends on the resilience of different infrastructure including buildings.There is no well-established approach to characterize and integrate building resilience for community-level applications.This paper investigates how different potential functionality measures can be used to quantify building resilience indexes,and how the results could be aggregated for a set of buildings to provide an indi-cator for the resilience of an entire community.The quantification of building resilience is based on different functionality measures including repair cost,occupancy level,and asset value.An archetype city block with four different buildings is defined.The individual results for each building are combined using a weight-based ap-proach to quantify the resilience index for the city block.The study then considers small-scale communities with different number of buildings to investigate the influence of contractor availability and collapse probability on the resilience indexes for the set of buildings.Both parameters are shown to be important when quantifying the resilience index.It is also demonstrated that the overall resilience of a community is directly influenced by the resilience of individual buildings.The findings presented here are useful both from the perspective of quantifying the resilience of a community on the basis of its building inventory,as well as for possible inclusion into a holistic framework that aims to quantify community resilience.

EVALUATION OF BIM APPLICATION FOR WATER EFFICIENCY ASSESSMENT

Application of Building Information Modelling(BIM)in architecture,engineering,and construction industry is known for its productivity and efficiency.Green BIM is one of the recent applications that aids users in achieving sustainability and/or improved building performance objectives through design and analysis of digital semantic models.The focus is on the application of green BIM for water efficiency(WE)analysis in accordance with the Malaysian Green Building Index(GBI)as a sustainability assessment tool.Revit Green Project Template(RGPT)and Autodesk Green Building Studio(GBS)as two available BIM tools were selected to evaluate and compare the applicability of each method for GBI WE assessment.To resolve the limitations identified from each evaluated method,automated GBI assessment tool(AGBIA)was developed as an alternative.The AGBIA as a supporting tool was established with the use of Dynamo,a visual programming tool to compensate for the limitations faced in the investigated methods.The practicality of each method was explored using a hypothetical model in Revit to automate information correspondent to 10 water efficiency assessment points and generate reports and documents necessary for the GBI design stage certification.The final phase involves verification of results obtained from each method using the conventional GBI WE calculator.AGBIA is suitable for the green BIM users in Malaysia based on the flexibility and automation over defining and assigning green parameters that are in line with the local context,the direct link of green information to the model,as well as the detail of presented data.

Nestedness and underlying processes of bird assemblages in Nanjing urban parks

Nestedness is an important pattern frequently reported for species assemblages on islands or fragmented systems.However,to date,there are few studies that comprehensively investigated faunal nestedness and underlying processes in urbanized landscapes.In this study,we examined the nestedness of bird assemblages and its underlying causal mechanisms in 37 urban parks in Nanjing,China.We used the line-transect method to survey birds from April 2019 to January 2020.We used the Weighted Nestedness metric based on Overlap and Decreasing Fill(WNODF)to estimate the nestedness of bird assemblages.We applied spearman partial correlation test to examine the relationships between nestedness ranks of sites and park characteristics(area,isolation,anthropogenic noise,number of habitat types,and building index),as well as between nestedness ranks of species and their ecological traits(body size,geographic range size,clutch size,minimum area requirement,dispersal ratio,and habitat specificity).We found that bird assemblages in urban parks were significantly nested.Park area,habitat diversity,building index,habitat specificity,and minimum area requirement of birds were significantly correlated with nestedness.Therefore,the nestedness of bird assemblages was caused by selective extinction,habitat nestedness,and urbanization.However,the nestedness of bird assemblages did not result from passive sampling,selective colonization,or human disturbance.Overall,to maximize the number of species preserved in our system,conservation priority should be given to parks with large area,rich habitat diversity,and less building index.From a species perspective,we should focus on species with large area requirement and high habitat specificity for their effective conservation.