Larvicidal and pupicidal activities of eco-friendly phenolic lipid products from Anacardium occidentale nutshell against arbovirus vectors

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus are vectors of diseases that constitute public health problems. The discovery of products capable of...     

The Potential of Public Participation Geographic Information Systems in UK Environmental Planning: Appraisals by Active Publics

The paper draws on an empirical study of two workshops in which the issues that arise from the use of geographic information systems (GIS) as a planning tool in public participation settings were explored by local residents who take an active interest in local planning matters in their London borough. The paper demonstrates how issues concerned with the democratization of GIS and public participation GIS (PPGIS) informed the structure and conduct of the workshops and the qualitative analysis of the workshop discussions. Key themes raised by participants included: the potential of PPGIS as a means of extending knowledge networks; issues of data ownership and the responsiveness of data providers to public concerns; and the role that institutional norms and practices play in democratizing information availability and the transparency of the decision-making process. The paper concludes that the potential of PPGIS as a planning tool cannot be separated from public concerns about the legitimacy of the planning process or local government.     

Contribution of canopy leaching to sulphate deposition in a Scots pine forest

Radioactive sulphate (35SO4) was applied to the soil below a Scots pine forest on 23 June 1989, and its movement into the canopy and into throughfall and stemflow was measured over 4 months. The specific activity, Bq (mg S)(-1), of the canopy increased monotonically; uptake by current-year (1989) expanding needles was initially twice as fast as by older needles or live twigs. By 10 October the canopy average specific activity was 62 Bq (mg S)(-1). The specific activity of net throughfall (throughfall + stemflow - rain), deduced from measurements from six throughfall collectors, six stemflow collectors and two rain collectors, fell rapidly from 12.6 Bq (mg S)(-1) in late July to <1 Bq (mg S)(-1) in mid-August. The results suggest (assuming rapid equilibration of 35S with sulphate in soil) that root-derived sulphate contributed c. 3% of sulphate in net throughfall and that dry deposition of SO2 and sulphate particles contributed c. 97% of the 0.56 g S m(-2) measured in net throughfall over the period. Simultaneous measurements of SO2 at canopy height and of NH3 above and within the canopy gave mean concentrations of 5.9 and 0.86 microg m(-3), respectively, sufficient to account for the sulphate measured in net throughfall only if codeposition of NH3 and SO2 occurred to canopy surfaces. The large values of specific activity observed in July, however, indicate that throughfall composition may be closely related to recent soil input of sulphate, and that equilibrium cannot be safely assumed. The possibility of a significant contribution of soil-derived sulphate to sulphate deposition in net throughfall cannot be ruled out on the basis of this experiment.     

Environmental reporting for global higher education institutions using the World Wide Web

Voluntary environmental reporting on the progress achieved against policy objectives is an emerging trend in industry and business and is recognized as a valuable aid in implementing policy and improving environmental management systems. Environmental reporting in the UK, has a whole range of formats including PERI, GEMI, WICE and EMAS, with the last, in particular, aiming to improve the level of environmental stewardship and to increase the flow of environmental information to audiences both internally and externally. Higher education institutions globally have been slow to respond in this respect and there is much that they can learn from corporate environmental reporting. An environmental policy is not sufficient proof of commitment for those institutions who have signed the global Talloires Declaration or the European COPERNICUS Charter: demonstrable progress in policy implementation is essential. The environmental management systems that higher education institutions adopt or create and the ways in which their environmental information is collated are of great significance, but the medium selected for the report is perhaps one of the most important aspects to consider. Those institutions such as the University of Sunderland, UK who are using the World Wide Web have been able to produce a flexible, hypertext-linked service on request with inbuilt feedback mechanisms containing varied, up-to-date, comprehensive and well-structured environmental information signposted to external pro-active institutions and agencies. These reports have unique educational angles and reveal links and networks that are naturally more pervasive and far-reaching in their scope and impact and could well provide a key way forward to practical and sustainable environmental reporting into the millennium.     

Isoprene emissions and climate

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) play an important role in atmospheric chemistry and the carbon cycle. Isoprene is quantitatively the most important of the non-methane BVOCs (NMBVOCs), with an annual emission of about 400–600 TgC; about 90% of this is emitted by terrestrial plants. Incorporating a mechanistic treatment of isoprene emissions within land-surface schemes has recently become a focus for the modelling community, the aim being to quantify the potential magnitude of associated climate feedbacks. However, these efforts are hampered by major uncertainties about why plants emit isoprene and the relative importance of different environmental controls on isoprene emission. The availability and reliability of observations of isoprene fluxes from different types of vegetation is limited, and this also imposes constraints on model development. Nevertheless, progress is being made towards the development of mechanistic models of isoprene emission which, in conjunction with atmospheric chemistry models, will ultimately allow improved quantification of the feedbacks between the terrestrial biosphere and climate under past and future climate states.     

Warm forming die design,part I: Experimental validation of a novel thermal finite element modeling code

Finite element analysis (FEA) has become an invaluable tool in the design of sheet metal stamping dies and processes. FEA has gained widespread acceptance as the best method of optimizing dies for conventional stamping processes. More recently, FEA has been shown to be an effective method of designing tooling for sheet forming processes. In this work, an FEA based approach is applied to the warm stamping (warm forming) process. This work introduces a new thermal finite element analysis software called PASSAGE®/Forming (PASSAGE) that enables the up-front design of the thermal management of warm forming dies. This thermal finite element analysis software is designed to specifically handle the forming and optimization scenarios related to the heating of a stamping die while minimizing user interface time. In this work, PASSAGE has been applied to a simple block of steel embedded with cartridge heaters to validate the prediction capability of this software under two different heating conditions. The results show that PASSAGE is capable of predicting the actual steady-state temperature distribution within the block with an acceptable level of accuracy while yielding notable information to the user with respect to specifying power requirements. A finite element software package like PASSAGE is a valuable tool that will aid greatly in the implementation of warm forming as a manufacturing process beyond the scope of the laboratory and into production.     

Estimating the extent and structure of trade in horticultural orchids via social media

The wildlife trade is a lucrative industry involving thousands of animal and plant species. The increasing use of the internet for both legal and illegal wildlife trade is well documented, but there is evidence that trade may be emerging on new online technologies such as social media. Using the orchid trade as a case study, we conducted the first systematic survey of wildlife trade on an international social‐media website. We focused on themed forums (groups), where people with similar interests can interact by uploading images or text (posts) that are visible to other group members. We used social‐network analysis to examine the ties between 150 of these orchid‐themed groups to determine the structure of the network. We found 4 communities of closely linked groups based around shared language. Most trade occurred in a community that consisted of English‐speaking and Southeast Asian groups. In addition to the network analysis, we randomly sampled 30 groups from the whole network to assess the prevalence of trade in cultivated and wild plants. Of 55,805 posts recorded over 12 weeks, 8.9% contained plants for sale, and 22–46% of these posts pertained to wild‐collected orchids. Although total numbers of posts about trade were relatively small, the large proportion of posts advertising wild orchids for sale supports calls for better monitoring of social media for trade in wild‐collected plants.     

The wind speed dependence of the concentrations of airborne particulate matter and NOx

The wind speed dependence of concentrations of PM₁₀, chloride, sulphate, nitrate, organic carbon, elemental carbon, particle number and NO_x has been determined at three separate sites, Marylebone Road (kerbside), North Kensington (urban background) and Harwell (rural). The data are best described by a general dilution term multiplied by up to three separate source-related terms which we interpret as representing long-range transport sources, discrete local (including area) sources and marine sources respectively. Using this approach, the various particulate metrics can be quantitatively disaggregated according to the contributions of the three source types. The behaviour of nitrate is anomalous, probably due to an influence of wind speed upon the dissociation of ammonium nitrate.     

Analysis of the air pollution climate at a background site in the Po valley

The Po valley in northern Italy is renowned for its high air pollutant concentrations. Measurements of air pollutants from a background site in Modena, a town of 200 thousand inhabitants within the Po valley, are analysed. These comprise hourly data for CO, NO, NO(2), NO(x), and O(3), and daily gravimetric equivalent data for PM(10) from 1998-2010. The data are analysed in terms of long-term trends, annual, weekly and diurnal cycles, and auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions. CO, NO and NO(2) exhibit a strongly traffic-related pattern, with daily peaks at morning and evening rush hour and lower concentrations over the weekend. Ozone shows an annual cycle with a peak in July due to local production; notwithstanding the diurnal cycle dominated by titration by nitrogen oxide, the decreasing long term trend in NO concentration did not affect the long term trend in O(3), whose mean concentration remained steady over the sampling period. PM(10) shows a strong seasonality with higher concentration in winter and lower concentration in summer and spring. Both PM(10) and ozone show a marked weekly cycle in summer and winter respectively. Regressions of PM(10) upon NO(x) show a consistently greater intercept in winter, representing higher secondary PM(10) in the cooler months of the year. There is a seasonal pattern in primary PM(10) to NO(x) ratios, with lower values in winter and higher values in summer, but the reasons are unclear.