Application of a Modified Health Belief Model to the Pro‐Environmental Behavior of Private Well Water Testing

A social cognition model of health behavior, the health belief model, was applied to the pro‐environmental behavior of private well water testing. Conceptualizing environmental behaviors as health behaviors may provide new insight into pro‐environmental behavior change. A groundwater education program was provided to K‐12 children throughout New England. Both child participants and their parents completed surveys pertaining to private well water behavior. Results indicate that perceived barriers and socioeconomic status significantly influenced past well water testing of parent participants. Perceived barriers included: participants' concern related to the cost of treating their water, and how a well water problem would influence their property value. Parent participants also indicated that they would perform future well water testing if they received a reminder cue to action that might include: getting a discount or reminder in the mail, if a well testing program was available, and state or local requirement. Our findings reinforce the need for continued private well water research and parallels to additional environmental behaviors.     

A media framing analysis of urban flooding in Nigeria: current narratives and implications for policy

Regional Environmental Change - A critical element of current flood management is the importance of engaging key policy actors when policy decisions are to be made. However, there is still only...     

A guide to representing variability and uncertainty in biodiversity indicators

Biodiversity indicators are used to inform decisions and measure progress toward global targets, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Indicators aggregate and simplify complex information, so underlying information influencing its reliability and interpretation (e.g., variability in data and uncertainty in indicator values) can be lost. Communicating uncertainty is necessary to ensure robust decisions and limit misinterpretations of trends, yet variability and uncertainty are rarely quantified in biodiversity indicators. We developed a guide to representing uncertainty and variability in biodiversity indicators. We considered the key purposes of biodiversity indicators and commonly used methods for representing uncertainty (standard error, bootstrap resampling, and jackknife resampling) and variability (quantiles, standard deviation, median absolute deviation, and mean absolute deviation) with intervals. Using 3 high-profile biodiversity indicators (Red List Index, Living Planet Index, and Ocean Health Index), we tested the use, suitability, and interpretation of each interval method based on the formulation and data types underpinning the indicators. The methods revealed vastly different information; indicator formula and data distribution affected the suitability of each interval method. Because the data underpinning each indicator were not normally distributed, methods relying on normality or symmetrical spread were unsuitable. Quantiles, bootstrapping, and jackknifing provided useful information about the underlying variability and uncertainty. We built a decision tree to inform selection of the appropriate interval method to represent uncertainty or variation in biodiversity indicators, depending on data type and objectives. Our guide supports transparent and effective communication of biodiversity indicator trends to facilitate accurate interpretation by decision makers.     

Evaluation of Quicklime Incorporation in Bench-Scale and Full-Scale Lime Stabilized Biosolids Using a Flat Surface pH Electrode

Abstract

Uniform lime incorporation into sewage sludge is critical for biosolid lime stabilization processes. There is no class B biosolids regulation for lime incorporation. The slurry method is currently used to evaluate the pH of limed biosolids, but this method homogenizes the biosolids and potentially masks poor lime mixing. In this study, a flat-surface pH electrode was used in bench-scale and full-scale experiments to measure the pH of lime-stabilized biosolids without creating slurries. The standard deviation of 15 pH measurements at different locations in a biosolid sample was used to assess mixing quality. The bench-scale experimental study showed that well-mixed limed biosolids had consistently high pHs (~12) with low standard deviations (<0.5 pH units), whereas poorly mixed biosolids had areas with low pH (<10) and high standard deviations (>2 pH units). Poorly mixed biosolids exhibited rapid and marked pH reduction, as well as offensive odor generation, whereas well-mixed biosolids resisted pH reduction and offensive odor generation. The full-scale study aimed at improving lime incorporation and biosolids quality confirmed the use of a flat surface pH electrode to capture low pH regions in biosolids that were masked by the current slurry method.     

Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions, and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost‐effective conservation.     

Application of partial order to stream channel assessment at bridge infrastructure for mitigation management

Many environmental systems and infrastructure systems are monitored using a set of indicator values that assess several aspects of site condition. The values of different indicators often convey different comparative messages for the study sites. The comparability between sites is analyzed within the theory of partially-ordered sets and visualized with Hasse diagrams. This paper demonstrates that properties of partially-ordered sets and the conversion of indicator scores into a rank matrix provide a manager or decision-maker with valuable information that would be lost if the monitored indicator data were aggregated only into a single index. Stream stability assessment data from 49 bridge crossing sites in the United States are used to demonstrate these techniques in prioritization and identification of restoration and maintenance needs of stream channels at bridge crossings.     

Exploring the ‘Birch effect’ in reservoir sediments: influence of inundation history on aerobic nutrient release

The release of nutrients on wetting (‘the Birch effect’) is well documented for terrestrial soils. The effect for aquatic sediments has received much less attention. An extreme drawdown event in a large reservoir during a period of drought presented an opportunity to test whether or not reflooding dried sediments would be a source of nutrients to the overlying water column. Wetting and drying history influences the release of ammonium, but not oxides of nitrogen, organic nitrogen, filterable reactive phosphorus or total phosphorus, from dried sediments following re-wetting. Dried reservoir sediments that have never, or have only rarely, been desiccated since the 1920s produced a pulse of ammonium on re-inundation. Conversely, dried sediments from parts of the reservoir that undergo frequent wetting and drying cycles do not release substantial amounts of ammonium on rewetting.     

Activated carbon adsorption,activated sludge and ozonation treatments evaluated by impact intensity based on acute toxicity test

A Toxicity Reduction Evaluation (TRE) conducted on various water treatments was successful in optimizing the acute toxicity of the final effluent. In particular, we found that the acute toxicity of the sample water treated by a water treatment process should not be correlated with the concentrations of the parent compounds still remaining in the water. Therefore, it was concluded that an acute toxicity test based on a bioassay must be performed in order to evaluate the efficiency of the water treatment process for various effluents containing environmental pollutants. In addition, the treatability and the resultant toxicity was evaluated as a simple scoring system. The scoring system ranked the treated water in three classes of toxicity with the calculation of several factors for the concerned toxicity. Using an impact evaluation based on the score of the characteristics, different water treatment processes could be directly compared. The new methodology presented here is specifically effective in listing possible unit operations for a water treatment process based on the impact, and thereby enables targeted and cost-effective water treatment.