Activity-Based Patterns of Everyday Mobility: The Potential for Long-Term Behaviour Change Across Five Groups of Travellers

Abstract

Significant differences in our mobility patterns can be found in relation to both range/distance and form. While some people travel on multiple occasions to global destinations over the course of a year, others travel mainly locally, that is, by bicycle or on foot. Policymakers and planners need to have a clear conception of the different mobility patterns if they are to develop valid and precise measures promoting more sustainable forms of mobility. This paper points to five key mobility types based on an exploratory cluster analysis of approximately 20,000 Norwegian travel diaries. Three of the defined groups are dominated by the private car, while two are oriented towards the use of public transport, bicycling and walking. The key differences and similarities between the mobility types are discussed and the relationship between everyday travel patterns and long-distance travel is analysed. Opportunities and challenges for transformations in the everyday travel habits of the five groups are discussed in the final section.     

Assessing the sustainability of forest management: An application of multi-criteria decision analysis to community forests in northern Ethiopia

Continuous deterioration of the natural resource base has become a serious threat to both the ecological systems and economic production in Ethiopia. Many of these problems have been attributed directly or indirectly to the rapid dwindling of the country's forest cover which is associated with unsustainable forest use and management. Closing community woodlands from human and livestock intervention to promote natural regeneration of forests has been one of the environmental restoration strategies pursued in the degraded highland areas of northern Ethiopia. However, local pressure to use reforested community lands for economic benefit has become a major threat to forest sustainability.Using locally identified sets of criteria and indicators for sustainable community forest management, this paper applies a multi-criteria decision analysis tool to evaluate forest management problems in the northern province of Tigray, Ethiopia. Three MCA methods – ranking, pair-wise comparison, and scoring – were used in evaluating the sets of criteria and indicators and alternative forest management scenarios.Results from the study indicate a number of noteworthy points: 1) MCA techniques both for identifying local level sustainability criteria and indicators and evaluating management schemes in a participatory decision environment appear to be effective tools to address local resource management problems; 2) Evaluated against the selected sets of criteria and indicators, the current forest management regime in the study area is not on a sustainable path; 3) Acquainting local people with adequate environmental knowledge and raising local awareness about the long-term consequences of environmental degradation ranked first among the set of sustainability criteria; and 4) In order to harmonize both environmental and economic objectives, the present ‘ecological-biased’ forest management regime needs to be substituted by an appropriate holistic scheme that takes into account stakeholders' multiple preferences and priority rankings.     

The cell-free DNA virome of 108,349 Dutch pregnant women

Objective

Viral infections during pregnancy are a major health concern to mother and fetus. By repurposing cell-free Non Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) sequencing data, we investigated prevalence and abundance of viral DNA in a cohort of 108,349 pregnant women.

Method

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) sequencing reads that did not map to any of the human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA of the human reference genome build GRCh38 were aligned to 224 DNA viruses selected from the NCBI refseq viral database.

Results

In total 443,665 reads of viral origin were detected across 42,273 samples representing 165 viral species. Several are known to be potentially harmful during pregnancy and/or childbirth, including Cytomegalovirus, Parvovirus B19 and Hepatitis B. Viral sequences were mostly detected at very low abundance. However, several cases had exceptionally high viral loads for Parvovirus B19, Hepatitis B and others. We found statistically significant associations between presence of viral DNA and gestational age, maternal age, fetal fraction, cfDNA concentration and others.

Conclusion

We demonstrate the feasibility to detect viral DNA from typical genome-wide NIPT cfDNA sequencing and describe the main characteristics of the viral DNA in our cohort. Our dataset of detected viral sequence reads is made publicly available to guide future clinical implementations.     

城市区域的水资源管理和保护

为了管理和保护城市水资源，需要有各种各样的方法 .污水处理是昂贵的，而且发展中国家经常使用的 2－ 4步处理也阻碍了他们的污水处理 .化学沉淀法和废水稳定池＋构造湿地组合法常常可以明显地减少对水资源的冲击 .建议发展中国家最好考虑采用这些方法 .     

Modelling the global heat balance

A previous model of the global heat balance has been expanded by including the influence of SO₂ pollution, water content of the atmosphere and cloudiness. It was found that the previous results were not changed significantly by this expansion of the model. The conclusions set up uising the previous model were still valid: (1) it is great importance to include the buffer capacity of the sea, including its dependence on pH and the temperature; (2) it is of importance to include natural climatic variations; (3) the dominanting factor is the trend in the consumption of fossil fuel.     

Marine ecosystem modeling beyond the box: using GIS to study carbon fluxes in a coastal ecosystem

Studies of carbon fluxes in marine ecosystems are often done by using box model approaches with basin size boxes, or highly resolved 3D models, and an emphasis on the pelagic component of the ecosystem. Those approaches work well in the ocean proper, but can give rise to considerable problems when applied to coastal systems, because of the scale of certain ecological niches and the fact that benthic organisms are the dominant functional group of the ecosystem. In addition, 3D models require an extensive modeling effort. In this project, an intermediate approach based on a high resolution (20x20 m) GIS data-grid has been developed for the coastal ecosystem in the Laxemar area (Baltic Sea, Sweden) based on a number of different site investigations. The model has been developed in the context of a safety assessment project for a proposed nuclear waste repository, in which the fate of hypothetically released radionuclides from the planned repository is estimated. The assessment project requires not only a good understanding of the ecosystem dynamics at the site, but also quantification of stocks and flows of matter in the system. The data-grid was then used to set up a carbon budget describing the spatial distribution of biomass, primary production, net ecosystem production and thus where carbon sinks and sources are located in the area. From these results, it was clear that there was a large variation in ecosystem characteristics within the basins and, on a larger scale, that the inner areas are net producing and the outer areas net respiring, even in shallow phytobenthic communities. Benthic processes had a similar or larger influence on carbon fluxes as advective processes in inner areas, whereas the opposite appears to be true in the outer basins. As many radionuclides are expected to follow the pathways of organic matter in the environment, these findings enhance our abilities to realistically describe and predict their fate in the ecosystem.     

Biological assessment of bisphenol A degradation in water following direct photolysis and UV advanced oxidation

Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) are exogenous environmental chemicals that can interfere with normal hormone function and present a potential threat to both environmental and human health. The fate, distribution and degradation of EDCs is a subject of considerable investigation. To date, several studies have demonstrated that conventional water treatment processes are ineffective for removal of most EDCs and in some instances produce multiple unknown transformation products. In this study we have investigated the use of direct photolysis with low-pressure (LP) Hg UV lamps and UV+hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) advanced oxidation process (AOP) for the degradation of a prototypic endocrine disrupter, bisphenol A (BPA), in laboratory water. Removal rates of BPA and formation of degradation products were determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis. Changes in estrogenic activity were evaluated using both in vitro yeast estrogen screen (YES) and in vivo vitellogenin (VTG) assays with Japanese medaka fish (Oryzias latipes). Our results demonstrate that UV alone did not effectively degrade BPA. However, UV in combination with H(2)O(2) significantly removed BPA parent compound and aqueous estrogenic activity in vitro and in vivo. Removal rates of in vivo estrogenic activity were significantly lower than those observed in vitro, demonstrating differential sensitivities of these bioassays and that certain UV/AOP metabolites may retain estrogenic activity. Furthermore, the UV/H(2)O(2) AOP was effective for reducing larval lethality in treated BPA solutions, suggesting BPA degradation occurred and that the degradation process did not result in the production of acutely toxic intermediates.