Ecological Monitoring for Assessing the State of the Nearshore and Open Waters of the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement stipulates that the Governments of Canada and the United States are responsible for restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Due to varying mandates and areas of expertise, monitoring to assess progress towards this objective is conducted by a multitude of Canadian and U.S. federal and provincial/state agencies, in cooperation with academia and regional authorities. This paper highlights selected long-term monitoring programs and discusses a number of documented ecological changes that indicate the present state of the open and nearshore waters of the Great Lakes.     

Development of similarity relationships for energy dissipation rate and temperature structure parameter in stably stratified flows: a direct numerical simulation approach

In this study, a newly developed direct numerical simulation (DNS) solver is utilized for the simulations of numerous stably stratified open-channel flows with bulk Reynolds number (Re _b ) spanning 3400–16,900. Overall, the simulated bulk Richardson number (\(Ri_b\)) ranges from 0.08 (weakly stable) to 0.49 (very stable). Thus, both continuously turbulent and (globally) intermittently turbulent cases are represented in the DNS database. Using this comprehensive database, various flux-based and gradient-based similarity relationships for energy dissipation rate (ε) and temperature structure parameter (\(C_T^2\)) are developed. Interestingly, these relationships exhibit only minor dependency on Re _b . In order to further probe into this Re _b -effect, similarity relationships are also estimated from a large-eddy simulation (LES) run of an idealized atmospheric boundary layer (very high Re _b ) case study. Despite the fundamental differences in the estimation of ε and \(C_T^2\) from the DNS- and the LES-generated data, the resulting similarity relationships, especially the gradient-based ones, from these numerical approaches are found to be remarkably similar. More importantly, these simulated relationships are also comparable, at least qualitatively, to the traditional observational data-based ones. Since these simulated similarity relationships do not require Taylor’s hypothesis and do not suffer from mesoscale disturbances and/or measurement noise, they have the potential to complement the existing similarity relationships.     

Air quality analysis and indexing of Kolkata city with respect to vertical floor heights and seasonal variation

Air pollution is one of the most important global environmental issues. Urban air quality is generally becoming vulnerable especially in the developing countries due to various developmental activities. Several national and international studies prove that air pollution is harmful to human health and its long term exposure contributes to even mortality. Current study has been designed to determine the vertical floor wise air quality status of the city of Kolkata and the seasonal variation of the pollutants during two consecutive years. Particulate matter (PM₁₀ and suspended particulate matter), oxides of nitrogen, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide were analyzed for a total number of 135 air quality samples throughout the study area and period. Pollutants were found positively correlated with each other and with the floor heights. According to the air quality indexing, all the places were found affected from moderate to severe air pollution irrespective of the vertical floor heights, seasons and places. Although, no such seasonal trend has been emerged from the study but the number of samples beyond standard is found highest during the winter season followed by pre-monsoon.     

Species-level study on arsenic availability from dietary components

Arsenic (As) contaminated water and foodstuffs are of major concern. Samples of drinking–cooking water (n = 50), raw rice (n = 50), common vegetables (eight types), and common pulses (three types) were collected from households in the endemic region. The study found up to 70% As reduction by using safe water for cooking of rice and vegetables. Speciation study reflected more arsenate than arsenite and other organic arsenicals in all the types of samples. Male intake of 293 μg As through drinking water contained 38 μg arsenite and 246 μg arsenate, and female intake of 199 μg As contained 167 μg arsenate and 25 μg arsenite. In cooked rice, 108 μg As contained 69 μg arsenate and 17 μg arsenite with 9 μg dimethylarsonic acid (DMA). Total As consumption from cooked vegetables was 45 μg with 34 and 4 μg of arsenite and arsenate, respectively, and 5 μg of DMA. Data indicate that cooking with As-free water removes arsenic in already contaminated foodstuffs but without interconversion of the As species, from toxic inorganic to less toxic organic forms.     

An ecotoxicological view on neurotoxicity assessment

The numbers of potential neurotoxicants in the environment are raising and pose a great risk for humans and the environment. Currently neurotoxicity assessment is mostly performed to predict and prevent harm to human populations. Despite all the efforts invested in the last years in developing novel in vitro or in silico test systems, in vivo tests with rodents are still the only accepted test for neurotoxicity risk assessment in Europe. Despite an increasing number of reports of species showing altered behaviour, neurotoxicity assessment for species in the environment is not required and therefore mostly not performed. Considering the increasing numbers of environmental contaminants with potential neurotoxic potential, eco-neurotoxicity should be also considered in risk assessment. In order to do so novel test systems are needed that can cope with species differences within ecosystems. In the field, online-biomonitoring systems using behavioural information could be used to detect neurotoxic effects and effect-directed analyses could be applied to identify the neurotoxicants causing the effect. Additionally, toxic pressure calculations in combination with mixture modelling could use environmental chemical monitoring data to predict adverse effects and prioritize pollutants for laboratory testing. Cheminformatics based on computational toxicological data from in vitro and in vivo studies could help to identify potential neurotoxicants. An array of in vitro assays covering different modes of action could be applied to screen compounds for neurotoxicity. The selection of in vitro assays could be guided by AOPs relevant for eco-neurotoxicity. In order to be able to perform risk assessment for eco-neurotoxicity, methods need to focus on the most sensitive species in an ecosystem. A test battery using species from different trophic levels might be the best approach. To implement eco-neurotoxicity assessment into European risk assessment, cheminformatics and in vitro screening tests could be used as first approach to identify eco-neurotoxic pollutants. In a second step, a small species test battery could be applied to assess the risks of ecosystems.     

On stochastic differential equations and equilibrium distribution: a conditional moment approach

In the recent past there have been several attempts to obtain the equilibrium distribution of multiple populations and their moments in the context of some biological or ecological processes (e.g., Matis and Kiffe in Biometrics 52:155, 1996; Matis and Kiffe in Environ Ecol Stat 9:237, 2002; Renshaw in J Math Appl Med Biol, 15:1, 1998). In particular, the method of cumulant truncation (Matis and Kiffe in Biometrics 52:155, 1996) is a pioneering work in this field. However it requires solving a large number of cumulant functions even in the case of two simultaneous differential equations. Besides the solutions are approximate and depend on the precision of the software. Renshaw (Math Biosci 168:57, 2000) provided a nice extension of the univariate truncated saddle point procedure to multivariate scenarios. But this approach involves a multivariate Newton-Raphson type iterative algorithm whose performance and convergence are critically dependent on the choice of the initial values. In the present paper we propose a new and simple approach to obtain the equilibrium distribution of populations and their conditional moments in a system of differential equations of any dimension. Our proposed method, which is a natural extension of the classical variational matrix approach, has several advantages which are discussed in detail in the paper; among other things it includes the derivation of additional conditions which can be interpreted as environmental surrogates.     

Flux-based assessment at a manufacturing site contaminated with trichloroethylene

Groundwater and contaminant fluxes were measured, using the passive flux meter (PFM) technique, in wells along a longitudinal transect passing approximately through the centerline of a trichloroethylene (TCE) plume at a former manufacturing plant located in the Midwestern US. Two distinct zones of hydraulic conductivity were identified from the measured groundwater fluxes; a 6-m-thick upper zone ( approximately 7 m to 13 m below the ground surface or bgs) with a geometric mean Darcy flux (q(0)) of 2 cm/day, and a lower zone ( approximately 13 m to 16.5m bgs) with a q(0) approximately 15 cm/day; this important hydrogeologic feature significantly impacts any remediation technology used at the site. The flux-averaged TCE concentrations estimated from the PFM results compared well with existing groundwater monitoring data. It was estimated that at least 800 kg of TCE was present in the source zone. The TCE mass discharge across the source control plane (85 m x 38 m) was used to estimate the "source strength" ( approximately 365 g/day), while mass discharges across multiple down-gradient control planes were used to estimate the plume-averaged, TCE degradation rate constant (0.52 year(-1)). This is close to the rate estimated using the conventional centerline approach (0.78 year(-1)). The mass discharge approach provides a more robust and representative estimate than the centerline approach since the latter uses only data from wells along the plume centerline while the former uses all wells in the plume.     

Effects of particle size on structural,physical, mechanical and tribology behaviour of agricultural waste (corncob micro/nano-filler) based epoxy biocomposites

Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management - Solid waste management is one of the major problems in the twenty-first century. Utilizations of the food/Agro waste materials are crucial to...