Identifying and communicating uncertainty is core to effective environmental assessment (EA). This study evaluates the extent to which uncertainties are considered and addressed in Canadian EA practice. We reviewed the environmental protection plans, follow-up programs, and panel reports (where applicable) of 12 EAs between 1995 and 2012. The types of uncertainties and levels of disclosure var…
Natural systems for the treatment and management of municipal and industrial wastewaters and residuals feature processes that use minimal energy and minimal or no chemicals, and they produce relatively lower amounts of residual solids. This book is intended for the practicing engineers and scientists who are involved in the planning, design, construction, evaluation, and operation of wastew…
In 2001, an international panel of distinguished climate scientists announced that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last two millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The story of how scientists reached that conclusion—by way of unexpected twists and turns—was the story Spencer R. Weart told in The Dis…
The twenty-first century is rapidly becoming the “perfect energy storm”; modern society is faced with volatile energy prices and growing environmental concerns, as well as energy supply and security issues. Today’s society was founded on hydrocarbon fuel—a finite resource that already is one of the main catalysts for international conflicts, which is likely to intensify in the future…
The Ecosystem Service Paradigm (EsSP) is increasingly a component or even an underlying principle of environmental policy, legislation and management internationally. The EsSP can be used to define links between human activities and ecosystems, and ecosystems and the services that in turn support and sustain those and other activities; this information can then be used to evaluate, justify or o…
Climate change has fully entered the public consciousness, but what to do and how fast to do it remains intensely controversial. These and other questions about how to mold transportation policy to help achieve climate goals was the focus of a high level meeting in California in July 2009. Two hundred leaders and experts were assembled from the automotive and energy industries, start-up technol…
Bringing climate change under control is one of the great historic challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. To succeed, the international community must reach an ambitious and comprehensive global agreement that provides the framework for worldwide action to keep global warming below dangerous levels. The most convincing leadership the European Union can provide is to become the …
Books have their fortunes. This book started life as a workshop organised from 14-16 June 2001 as one of the features of the KITLV 150-year jubilee. Upon the request of the board of KITLV, the topic of the workshop was prepared by a small committee consisting of Franz von Benda Beckmann, Willem Wolters and myself. The idea behind it was that the theme of the workshop should reflect both th…
Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is almost certain that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene the…
The monitoring and control of bioprocesses is a challenging task. This applies particularly if the actions to the process have to be carried out in real-time. This work presents a systemfor on-linemonitoring and control of batch yeast propagation under limiting conditions based on a virtual plant operator, which uses the concept of intelligent control algorithms by means of fuzzy logic theo…
I would like to mention some of the changes and additions that have been included in the third edition of Wastewater Microbiology. In general, every chapter of the book has been revised (up to July 2004) to include the latest developments in the field, and I will highlight only the major ones. A review of the most important molecular techniques has been added to Chapter 1, while the most…
Since this book was first published in 1972, several generations of students have become environmentally aware and conscious of their responsibilities to planet earth. Many of these environmental pioneers are now teaching in colleges and universities, and have students with the same sense of dedication and resolve that they themselves brought to the discipline. In those days, it was sometim…
By the mid-20th century, widespread concerns were being expressed for the way in which modern human populations and their industrial endeavors and products were affecting both the environment in which they lived and the planet’s wild populations and their ecosystems. Some predictions for the future were dire, and enough environmental activism developed so that some of the more conspicuous pro…
In interdisciplinary applications of stream hydrology, biologists and engineers interact in the solution of a number of problems such as the rehabilitation of streams, the design of operating procedures and fishways for dams, the classification of streams for environmental values and the simulation of field hydraulic characteristics in laboratory flumes to study flow patterns around obstacles …
Abstract The total concentration and size distribution of bioaerosols in three different types of housing (single room in shared accommodation [type I], single bedroom flat in three-storey building [type II] and two- or threebedroom detached houses [type III]) was assessed during the winter. This research was an extension of a previous study carried out in the summer. The measurement campai…
Abstract Indoor mesocosm experiments were conducted to test for potential climate change effects on the spring succession of Baltic Sea plankton. Two different temperature (D0 C and D6 C) and three light scenarios (62, 57 and 49 % of the natural surface light intensity on sunny days), mimicking increasing cloudiness as predicted for warmer winters in the Baltic Sea region, were simulated.…
Abstract The ubiquitous presence of chlorophenols (CPs) continues to be a cause of concern, owing to their recalcitrant nature. In this context, the present work investigated the degradation of model compounds, 4-chlorophenol, 2,4-dichlorophenol, 2,4,6-richlorophenol, and pentachlorophenol, by an organic oxidant, methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (MEKP) coupled with ultraviolet irradiation in b…
Abstract In this work, we address the mismatch in spatio-temporal resolution between individual, point-location based exposure and grid cell based air quality model predictions by disaggregating the grid model results. Variability of PM10 point measurements was modelled within each grid cell by the exponential variogram, using point support concentration measurements. Variogram parameters w…
Abstract This paper discusses the effects of breakwaters on the Rimini coastal environment over the last half century. Sediment cores of 50 cm thick were collected in various seasons from 2002 to 2005 and were subsampled at surface and subsurface levels at 20 inshore and offshore stations in order to take account of various freshwater and wastewater inputs. A 240-cm sediment core was colle…
Abstract In the present study, the trends in groundwater level and fifteen hydro-geochemical elements at 32 piezometric stations located in the Ardabil plain of the northwest of Iran were analyzed using the non-parametric Mann–Kendall method after removing the effect of significant lag-1 serial correlation from the respective time series by pre-whitening. The magnitudes of trends were comp…
Abstract Biomonitoring of atmospheric ammonia (NH3) concentrations is generally performed with epiphytic lichens, using species’ abundances and/or nitrogen concentration as monitoring tools. However, the potential of leaf characteristics of trees to monitor the atmospheric NH3 concentration has remained largely unexplored. Therefore, we performed a passive biomonitoring study with common …
Abstract In this research, drought in Yellow River basin has been studied by using dry spells. Three indices, including the maximum length (MxDS), mean length (MDS) and number of dry spells (NDS), and five periods (annual, winter, spring, summer and autumn) are considered. The results show that a south to north gradient for mean MxDS and MDS has been dominantly found in all periods except …
Abstract Based on the hydrologic and meteorological data in the Yarkand River Basin during 1957–2008, the nonlinear hydro-climatic process was analyzed by a comprehensive method, including the Mann–Kendall trend test, wavelet analysis, wavelet regression analysis and correlation dimension. The main findings are as following: (1) The annual runoff, annual average temperature and annual pr…
Abstract Parameter uncertainty involved in hydrological and sediment modeling often refers to the parameter dispersion and the sensitivity of the parameter. However, a limitation of the previous studies lies in that the assignment of range and specification of probability distribution for each parameter is usually difficult and subjective. Therefore, there is great uncertainty in the proces…
Abstract The response of the Baltic Sea spring bloom was studied in mesocosm experiments, where temperatures were elevated up to 6C above the present-day sea surface temperature of the spring bloom season. Four of the seven experiments were carried out at different light levels (32–202 Wh m-2 at the start of the experiments) in the different experimental years. In one further experiment,…
Abstract The objective of our study was to analyze the effects of temperature on the population dynamics of a three-species food web consisting of two prey bacteria (Pedobacter sp. and cinetobacter johnsonii) and a protozoan predator (Tetrahymena pyriformis) as model organisms. We assessed the effects of temperature on the growth rates of all three species with the objective of with four d…
Abstract During this study, we investigated the mineralogical characterization of technogenic magnetic particles (TMPs) contained in alkaline industrial dust and fly ash emitted by coal burning power plants and cement plants. The reaction of tested dust samples varied between values of pH 8 and pH 12. Their magnetic properties were characterized by measurement of magnetic susceptibility (�…
Abstract Earth and environmental variables are commonly taken to have multivariate Gaussian or heavy-tailed distributions in space and/or time. This is based on the observation that univariate frequency distributions of corresponding samples appear to be Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Of particular interest to us is the well-documented but heretofore little noticed and unexplained phenomenon tha…
Abstract High levels of airborne olive pollen represent a problem for a large proportion of the population because of the many allergies it causes. Many attempts have been made to forecast the concentration of airborne olive pollen, using methods such as time series, linear regression, neural networks, a combination of fuzzy systems and neural networks, and functional models. This paper pres…
Abstract Shifts in the timing and magnitude of the spring plankton bloom in response to climate change have been observed across a wide range of aquatic systems. We used meta-analysis to investigate phenological responses of marine and freshwater plankton communities in mesocosms subjected to experimental manipulations of temperature and light intensity. Systems differed with respect to th…
Abstract The spatialCopula toolbox contains a set of Matlab functions that provides utilities for copula-based analysis of spatially referenced data, a topic which has re cently attracted much attention in spatial statistics. These tools have been developed to support the work flow in parameter estimation, spatial interpolation and visualization. They offer flexible and user-friendly softwar…
Abstract Regional characteristics of extreme precipitation indices (EPI) of precipitation magnitude, intensity and persistence were analyzed based on a daily rainfall dataset of 135 stations during the period of 1961–2010 in the Yangtze River basin, China. The spatial distribution of temporal trends of the selected indices was regionally mapped and investigated by using non-parametric test…
Abstract UVR-absorbing mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) were detected in tissues of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and in ten species of Rhodophyte macroalgae (eight previously untested) collected from intertidal microhabitats in November and January 2006–2007 in Central California (35090N, 120450W). In sea urchins, MAA concentrations were higher in ovaries than testes, while epiderm…
Abstract To adequately describe seasonal rhythms in habitat utilization by fish communities, observations are needed that occur at a relatively high frequency and over large temporal windows. For the first time, images collected from a cabled video-observatory (the western Mediterranean expandable SEAfloor OBservatory; OBSEA) were utilized to examine habitat utilization by coastal fishes. …
Abstract A total of thirty-three surface water samples were collected from Meiliang Bay, Gonghu Bay and Xukou Bay of Lake Taihu, and analyzed for synthetic musks, including 1,3,4,6,7,8-hexahydro-4,6,6,7,8,8-hexamethylcyclopenta-[γ]-2-benzopyrane (HHCB), 7-acetyl-1,1,3,4,4,6-hexamethyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydronaphthalene (AHTN), 1-tert-butyl-3,5-dimethyl-2,5-dinitro-4-acetylbenzene (MK) and 1-tert…
Abstract The information on temperature-mediated changes in biodiversity in local assemblages is scarce and mainly addresses the change in species richness. However, warming may have more consistent eVects on species turnover than on the number of species. Moreover, very few studies extended the analysis of changes in biodiversity and species composition to questions of associated ecosystem…
Abstract Application of an agricultural residue (rice husk, RH) as a raw material for catalyst support for advanced oxidative processes (AOPs) was evaluated. The supported catalyst was produced by the calcination of TiCl4 impregnated in RH, thereby providing a composite TiO2/Si-C, which was characterized by elemental analysis (CHN), scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray s…
Abstract Northwest Arkansas, similar to many regions around the world, is home to intensive poultry production, which concentrates large amounts of nutrients in localized areas. Concerns over phosphorus (P) continue in these regions despite extensive conservation management efforts. Part of the concerns relates to the legacy effect of P in streams and the role of fluvial sediments in confoun…
Abstract Odors, such as the malodorous and toxic hydrogen sulfide (H2S), are released during leachate collection, storage, and treatment. A full-scale biofilter was applied to treat H2S emitted from a leachate equalization basin in a sanitary landfill site. The inlet concentration of H2S was 26.3–213.0 mg m−3. In steady state, total removal efficiency was over 90 % in summer and over 8…
Abstract Jellyfish blooms or invasions could be detected in an early phase of development if the youngest medusa stages (ephyrae) and their early growth stages (post-ephyrae) were identifiable in plankton samples but a useful identification key for ephyrae in early growth stages is lacking for most species. In the present study, the identification characteristics of adult North Sea scyphomed…
Abstract Associated heterotrophic bacteria alter the microenvironment of cyanobacteria and potentially influence cyanobacterial development. Therefore, we studied interactions of the unicellular freshwater cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa with heterotrophic bacteria. The associated bacterial community was greatly driven by temperature as seen by DNA fingerprinting. However, the associat…
Abstract The deteriorating environmental conditions of Baiyangdian Lake have caused a wide public concern. Surface soils (0–20 cm) were collected at 10 sites of reed wetlands in raised fields of the Baiyangdian Lake. They were analyzed for total contents of trace elements to investigate their distribution and pollution levels in wetland soils of this region. Results showed that the mean co…
Abstract A comprehensive investigation of polybromodiphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in wastewater was conducted in the second largest international metroplex area along the U.S. and Mexico (MX) border. Concentrations of PBDEs in wastewater and sludge were measured in four wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in El Paso, Texas and two WWTPs in Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, MX. A green approach in sample prepa…
Abstract We measured the clearance rates of the filter-feeding bivalve Corbicula fluminea over a period of 2 years. Strong seasonal variations, such as a 50-fold increase from February to July, were observed. These variations were only poorly linked to temperature, as they could be found at both the ambient field temperature and a constant temperature of 15°C. Instead, peaks in the filtrati…
Abstract Patchy distributions within landscapes may be caused by migration in response to different types of habitat patches. Intertidal boulder fields are landscapes in which boulders are discrete habitat patches, often with chitons attached to their under-surfaces. Chiton densities and associations with patch edges differed between boulders overlying coarse- versus fine-sediment types, wit…
Abstract The structuring and organizing effects of apex predators on ecosystems are becoming increasingly well documented. The enhancement of kelp forests via sea otter predation on herbivorous sea urchins is among the earliest and best known examples. This study provides evidence for direct and indirect trophic interactions among sea otters, predatory sea stars, and filter-feeding mussels (…
Abstract The causes of sex determination in amphipods are believed to be multi-factorial. Sex determination in Echinogammarus marinus (Leach, 1815) has been reported to be linked with feminising parasites. To date, however, no such studies have linked this species with environmental sex determination (ESD). A field study and laboratory breeding experiments were conducted to determine the inf…
Abstract Adsorption together with size exclusion and charge attraction/repulsion has to be taken into account when considering removal of pharmaceuticals as emerging contaminants from water by reverse osmosis and nanofiltration membranes. Glucocorticosteroids (hydrocortisone (HYDRO), dexamethasone (DEXA)), anesthetics (procaine, lidocaine) with relatively weak hydrophobicities (1
Abstract Biowastes and inorganic additives are acknowledged efficient but site-dependent alternatives for in situ metal immobilization. The present study evaluates food waste-based compost, a particularly abundant type of biowaste in South Korea, and zeolite as amendments for increasing pH and reducing metal leaching potential in weathered tailings from an abandoned mine site. Two types of b…