Lakes play an important role in the cycling of organic matter in the boreal landscape, due to the frequently high extent of bacterial respiration and the efficient burial of organic carbon in sediments. Based on a mass balance approach, we calculated a carbon budget for a small humic Swedish lake in the vicinity of a potential final repository for radioactive waste in Sweden, in order to assess its potential impact on the environmental fate of radionuclides associated with organic matter. We found that the lake is a net heterotrophic ecosystem, subsidized by organic carbon inputs from the catchment and from emergent macrophyte production. The largest sink of organic carbon is respiration by aquatic bacteria and subsequent emission of carbon.dioxide to the atmosphere. Although the annual burial of organic carbon in the sediment is a comparatively small sink, it results in the build-up of the largest carbon pool in the lake. Hence, lakes may simultaneously disperse and accumulate organic-associated radionuclides leaking from a final repository. 相似文献
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1065/espr2006.01.008
Background The hazard criterion of persistence as it applies to chemicals in the environment is reviewed and discussed. This quantity
can not be measured directly in the environment, thus it must be estimated using models that synthesise information on chemical
half-lives and partitioning properties, the nature of the environment and how the chemical is released into the environment.
Main Features It is suggested that the preferred criterion is the average residence time of the chemical in the environment, i.e. conceptually
the sum of the life-times of all molecules (attributable only to losses by degrading reactions) divided by the number of molecules.
If all chemical fate processes are first order, this persistence is independent of the quantity of chemical introduced and
whether introduction is steady- or unsteady-state in nature. It is shown that in a multimedia environment persistence is affected
not only by degradation kinetics, but also by mode-of-entry and partitioning. For screening level purposes a Level II equilibrium
model may be adequate but a Level III model is generally preferable for estimating the average persistence. If a distribution
of persistences is required a dynamic Level IV model must be used.
Discussion The implications for regulating chemicals on the basis of persistence are discussed.
Conclusion It is concluded that the preferred strategy is to use Level II, III, and IV models and that the use of only degradation kinetics
or media-specific half-lives can be misleading and uneconomical. 相似文献
Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Arsenic (As) concentrations and deposition fluxes were measured in snow and rime at 10 mountain-top sites near the borders between the Czech Republic... 相似文献
The risk of cancer due to PCB exposure in humans is highly debated. In eastern Slovakia, high exposure of the population to organochlorines (especially PCBs) was associated with various disease and disorder pathways, viz., endocrine disruption, metabolic disorder & diabetes, and cancer, thereby disturbing several cellular processes, including protein synthesis, stress response, and apoptosis. We have evaluated a Slovak cohort (45-month children, at lower and higher levels of PCB exposure from the environment) for disease and disorder development to develop early disease cancer biomarkers that could shed new light on possible mechanisms for the genesis of cancers under such chemical exposures, and identify potential avenues for prevention.
Microarray studies of global gene expression were conducted from the 45-month-old children on the Affymetrix platform followed by Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA®) to associate the affected genes with their mechanistic pathways. High-throughput qRT-PCR TaqMan low-density array (TLDA) was performed to further validate the selected genes on the whole blood cells of the most highly exposed children from the study cohort (n = 71).
TP53, MYC, BCL2, and LRP12 differential gene expressions suggested strong relationships between potential future tumor promotion and PCB exposure in Slovak children. The IPA analysis further detected the most important signaling pathways, including molecular mechanism of cancers, prostate cancer signaling, ovarian cancer signaling, P53 signaling, oncostatin M signaling, and their respective functions (viz., prostate cancer, breast cancer, progression of tumor, growth of tumor, and non-Hodgkin’s disease). The results suggest that PCB exposures, even at the early age of these children, may have lifelong consequences for the future development of chronic diseases.
Conservation and management of marine biodiversity depends on biomonitoring of marine habitats, but current approaches are resource-intensive and require different approaches for different organisms. Environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from water samples is an efficient and versatile approach to detecting aquatic animals. In the ocean, eDNA composition reflects local fauna at fine spatial scales, but little is known about the effectiveness of eDNA-based monitoring of marine communities at larger scales. We investigated the potential of eDNA to characterize and distinguish marine communities at large spatial scales by comparing vertebrate species composition among marine habitats in Qatar, the Arabian Gulf (also known as the Persian Gulf), based on eDNA metabarcoding of seawater samples. We conducted species accumulation analyses to estimate how much of the vertebrate diversity we detected. We obtained eDNA sequences from a diverse assemblage of marine vertebrates, spanning 191 taxa in 73 families. These included rare and endangered species and covered 36% of the bony fish genera previously recorded in the Gulf. Sites of similar habitat type were also similar in eDNA composition. The species accumulation analyses showed that the number of sample replicates was insufficient for some sampling sites but suggested that a few hundred eDNA samples could potentially capture >90% of the marine vertebrate diversity in the study area. Our results confirm that seawater samples contain habitat-characteristic molecular signatures and that eDNA monitoring can efficiently cover vertebrate diversity at scales relevant to national and regional conservation and management. 相似文献
Feral pigeons are descendants of wild rock pigeons that have adapted to the urban habitat. They have partially conserved the foraging behaviour of their wild ancestors (flights to agricultural areas) but have also developed new habits. Previous studies on the foraging strategies of feral pigeons have given various results, e.g. maximum distances reached by the pigeons (measured in a straight line from the resting places) differed between 0.3–0.5 km and 18–25 km. This study focuses on the spatio-temporal activity of feral pigeons in the urban habitat. We equipped 80 free-living feral pigeons from Basel, Switzerland with GPS receivers. We found three different foraging strategies for pigeons in Basel: (1) in the streets, squares and parks near the home loft, (2) in agricultural areas surrounding the city, (3) on docks and railway lines in harbours. The maximum distance reached by a pigeon was 5.29 km. More than 32% of the pigeons remained within 0.3 km of the home lofts and only 7.5% flew distances of more than 2 km. Females covered significantly longer distances than males, preferring to fly to more abundant and predictable food sources. Temporal activity patterns showed to be influenced by sex, breeding state and season. In contrast to wild rock pigeons and to feral pigeons in other cities, pigeons in Basel showed a clear bimodal activity pattern for breeding birds only. The differences between our results and those of other studies seem to be partly method-dependent, as the GPS-technique allows to record the pigeons’ localisations continuously in contrast to other methods. Other differences might be due to different kinds of food supply in the various cities. Our study shows that feral pigeons have individual foraging strategies and are flexible enough to adapt to different urban environments.Electronic supplementary material Supplementary material is available for this article at 相似文献
To investigate copepod nauplii ingestion rates on phytoplankton, we have adapted the traditional gut fluorescence technique
as it can be used with lower gut pigment concentrations. With the improved technique, laboratory experiments were performed
to estimate functional responses for nauplii of Calanus helgolandicus and Centropages typicus. Nauplii were raised from eggs to copepodites and the experiments were performed with stages NIV-NV. Gut evacuation rates
and ingestion rates were measured on Isochrysis galbana at different concentrations. Specific ingestion rates ranged between 0.038–0.244 μg C μg−1 nauplii C d−1 for C. typicus and 0.041–1.412 μg C μg−1 nauplii C d−1 for C. helgolandicus. Both species showed a type III functional response, reaching a saturation concentration at around 600 μgC l−1 for C. typicus and 800 μgC l−1 for C. helgolandicus.
An erratum to this article can be found at 相似文献