Impact of Odor Nuisance on Preferred Place of Residence

A New Perspective of Sustainable Perception: Research on the Smellscape of Urban Block Space

The smell of space is inseparable from the sustainable development of the living environment. The research on olfactory perception and smell landscape has a positive effect on landscape design and urban planning and contributes to the formation and design optimization of unique urban memory. This study combines urban smell tracking experiments with Internet social media data analysis to classify smells in the old city center of Guangzhou, China, and analyzes the study within the inner ring and six historic districts. Based on the research results, the smell map was drawn, and the reliability of the smell map was tested through social data and semantic analysis. The emotional score heat map of smell and emotion in six regions was constructed, highlighting the impact of smell in key neighborhoods on the environment. In the conclusion to the study, the thematic routes of green urban design are proposed: sightseeing routes, cultural routes, and food routes, as well as improvement strategies to promote the integration of smell and urban operation activities and the sustainable development of urban regional characteristics.

A review of environmental odor quantification and qualification methods: The question of objectivity in sensory analysis

For several years, various issues have up surged linked to odor nuisances with impacts on health and economic concerns. As awareness grew, recent development in instrumental techniques and sensorial analysis have emerged offering efficient and complementary approaches regarding environmental odor monitoring and control. While chemical analysis faces several obstacles, the sensory approach can help overcome them. Therefore, this latter may be considered as subjective, putting the reliability of the studies at risk. This paper is a review of the most commonly sensory methodology used for quantitative and qualitative environmental assessment of odor intensity (OI), odor concentration (OC), odor nature (ON) and hedonic tone (HT). For each of these odor dimensions, the assessment techniques are presented and compared: panel characteristics are discussed; laboratory and field studies are considered and the objectivity of the results is debated. For odor quantification, the use of a reference scale for OI assessment offers less subjectivity than other techniques but at the expense of ease-of-use. For OC assessment, the use of dynamic olfactometry was shown to be the least biased. For odor qualification, the ON description was less subjective when a reference-based lexicon was used but at the expense of simplicity, cost, and lesser panel-training requirements. Only when assessing HT was subjectivity an accepted feature because it reflects the impacted communities' acceptance of odorous emissions. For all discussed dimensions, field studies were shown to be the least biased due to the absence of air sampling, except for OC, where the dispersion modeling approach also showed great potential. In conclusion, this paper offers the reader a guide for environmental odor sensory analysis with the capacity to choose among different methods depending on the study nature, expectations, and capacities.