EPFL Logo
fr|en
Login
Publication

Relationship between land cover type and Body Mass Index in Geneva

Stéphane Joost, Idris Guessous, Jens Ingensand, Estelle Rochat, Ivo Widmer, Alain Clémence
2015
Conference paper
Abstract

Past studies conducted in urban areas analyzed the impact of the presence of green spaces on public health, and highlighted in particular the psychological benefits of interacting with nature. To investigate a supposed relationship between overweight and dense built environment, we focused on the State of Geneva, Switzerland, and calculated the correlation between Body Mass Index (BMI) in a representative sample of 6663 adults and the percentage of natural areas at the locations where these individuals were living. To this end, we used populationbased health data from the “Bus Sante” study (Geneva University Hospitals) and multi-scale land cover maps obtained by means of satellite images and LiDAR data classification. We found little correlation between BMI (as a proxy for health) and land cover data and were not able to verify the working hypothesis at local and regional scales. However, an important phenomenon highlighted here is the difference in the results obtained between the city center and the whole State.

Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Anthropology
Related concepts (33)
Urban area
An urban area, built-up area or urban agglomeration is a human settlement with a high population-density and an infrastructure of built environment. This is the core of a metropolitan statistical area in the United States, if it contains a population of more than 50,000. Urban areas originate through urbanization, and researchers categorize them as cities, towns, conurbations or suburbs. In urbanism, the term "urban area" contrasts to rural areas such as villages and hamlets; in urban sociology or urban anthropology it contrasts with natural environment.
Land cover
Land cover is the physical material at the surface of Earth. Land covers include grass, asphalt, trees, bare ground, water, etc. Earth cover is the expression used by ecologist Frederick Edward Clements that has its closest modern equivalent being vegetation. The expression continues to be used by the United States Bureau of Land Management. There are two primary methods for capturing information on land cover: field survey, and analysis of remotely sensed imagery.
Land grabbing
Land grabbing is the contentious issue of large-scale land acquisitions: the buying or leasing of large pieces of land by domestic and transnational companies, governments, and individuals. While used broadly throughout history, land grabbing as used in the 21st century primarily refers to large-scale land acquisitions following the 2007–08 world food price crisis. Obtaining water resources is usually critical to the land acquisitions, so it has also led to an associated trend of water grabbing.
Show more
Related publications (36)

Architectures de l'(in)hospitalité. Urbanité, spatialité et matérialité des politiques d'accueil à Bruxelles.

Marie Hannah Florence Trossat

While migration is intrinsically linked to the arrival to the city, the city is also shaped by migration. It is an in-between space, between "territory" and "home", the border and shelter. However, "urban" hospitality remains a concept that needs to be exp ...
EPFL2023

Cycling and walking as means of transport - current review of the research

Vincent Kaufmann, Sonia Monique Curnier, Renate Albrecher

Recent surveys by the Mobile Lives Forum show that around 30% of the French population live locally, yet many trips under 5 km are made by car. There is therefore huge potential for a modal shift to active modes of transport (Kaufmann et al. 2020, Héran 20 ...
EPFL2023

Humans are Poor Few-Shot Classifiers for Sentinel-2 Land Cover

Devis Tuia, Marc Conrad Russwurm

Learning to predict accurately from a few data samples is a central challenge in modern data-hungry machine learning. On natural images, human vision typically outperforms deep learning approaches on few-shot learning. However, we hypothesize that aerial a ...
IEEE2022
Show more
Related MOOCs (10)
Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (part 2)
Ce cours constitue la seconde partie d'un enseignement consacré aux bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique. Il propose une introduction aux systèmes d’information géogra
Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (part 2)
Ce cours constitue la seconde partie d'un enseignement consacré aux bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique. Il propose une introduction aux systèmes d’information géogra
Geographical Information Systems 2
This course is the second part of a course dedicated to the theoretical and practical bases of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It offers an introduction to GIS that does not require prior compu
Show more

Copyright © 2025 EPFL, all rights reserved