Evaluating post-Katrina recovery in Mississippi using repeat photography

Hurricane Katrina of August 2005 had extensive consequences for the state of Mississippi in the United States. Widespread infrastructure and property damage, massive social dislocation, and ecological loss remain among the many challenges faced by communities as they work towards 'normalcy'. This study employs repeat photography to understand differential recovery from Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. Revealing change with conventional landscape photography, a process known as repeat photography, is common in the natural sciences. Simply stated, repeat photography is the practice of re-photographing the same scene as it appears in an earlier photograph. Photographs were taken at 131 sites every six months over a three-year period. Each photograph was assigned a recovery score and a spatially interpolated recovery surface was generated for each time period. The mapped and graphed results show disparities in the progression of recovery: some communities quickly entered the rebuilding process whereas others have lagged far behind.     

Adaptive resource management and the value of information

The value of information is a general and broadly applicable concept that has been used for several decades to aid in making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Yet there are relatively few examples of its use in ecology and natural resources management, and almost none that are framed in terms of the future impacts of management decisions. In this paper we discuss the value of information in a context of adaptive management, in which actions are taken sequentially over a timeframe and both future resource conditions and residual uncertainties about resource responses are taken into account. Our objective is to derive the value of reducing or eliminating uncertainty in adaptive decision making. We describe several measures of the value of information, with each based on management objectives that are appropriate for adaptive management. We highlight some mathematical properties of these measures, discuss their geometries, and illustrate them with an example in natural resources management. Accounting for the value of information can help to inform decisions about whether and how much to monitor resource conditions through time.     

Sustainable innovation in wastewater management: lessons for nutrient recovery and reuse

Urine diversion (UD) has great potential to contribute to sustainably managing wastewater by separating urine at the source and recovering nutrients for reuse in agriculture. While factors enabling the UD technology in Sweden are thought to involve policies supporting nutrient recovery/reuse, on closer inspection, the variable success of UD systems has revealed that critical factors for success also relate to human-centred issues of social organisation, participation and incorporation of social knowledges of a variety of stakeholders into the decision-making process in which new technologies are trialled and adopted. Through the analytical lens of strategic niche management, we consider how early experimentation in UD has involved user participation and whether internal processes of learning, networking and visioning have been consciously considered and to what effect. As niche experiments are enabled/disabled not only by informal institutions such as values and social norms but also formal regulatory institutions, we have concurrently analysed the broader environment in which policies and institutions influence, to varying degrees, the uptake of UD.     

Beyond barriers: examining root causes behind commonly cited Cleaner Production barriers in Vietnam

Despite the promotion of Cleaner Production (CP) by government, academia and research institutions in the past few years, only a small number of Vietnamese industries have adopted it. This paper explores why CP has not been widely adopted by industry through an examination of the root causes preventing effective CP implementation in Vietnam. The paper concludes with possible directions for improving the effectiveness and sustainability of CP programs in Vietnam through training and education.     

VARIATION IN ADIRONDACK,NEW YORK,LAKEWATER CHEMISTRY AS FUNCTION OF SURFACE AREA1

ABSTRACT: Data from a recent survey conducted by the Adirondack Lake Survey Corporation were used to evaluate the influence of lake surface area on the acid-base status of lakes in Adirondack State Park, New York. Acid neutralizing capacity (ANC) in the small lakes (< 4 ha) occurred more frequently at extreme values (> 200, < 0 μeq L^?1), whereas larger lakes tended to be intermediate in ANC. Consequently, acidic (ANC ≤ 0) and low-pH lakes were typically small. The small lakes also exhibited lower Ca²⁺ concentration and higher dissolved organic carbon than did larger lakes. Lakes ≥ 4 ha were only half as likely to be acidic as were lakes ≥ 1 ha in area. These data illustrate the dependence of lake chemistry on lake surface area and the importance of the lower lake area limit for a statistical survey of lake water chemistry.     

Turnover and vertical transport of zinc by the euphausiid Meganyctiphanes norvegica in the Ligurian Sea

Participatory turnover time is defined as the time required to cycle an element in a system through a given material in that system. The participatory turnover time of ionic zinc by the adult Meganyctiphanes norvegica population in the Ligurian Sea ranged between 498 and 1243 years, depending upon the available food supply, and considering the food chain as the only route for zinc accumulation by the population. A total-impact turnover time was calculated as the sum of the participatory turnover time for live individuals plus the time required for dead euphausiids to lose 90% of their zinc to the water. Carcasses lost zinc to the water slower than either feces or molts, and so established the maximum loss time for all particulate excretion products; nevertheless, total-impact turnover time for zinc did not differ significantly from the participatory turnover time. The net vertical transport of zinc by M. norvegica from the sea surface to any specified depth can be calculated as the sum of the dissolved zinc excreted below the depth plus the concentrations of zinc left in feces, molts, and carcasses after they have sunk to the specified depth. Carcasses sink the fastest and lose the smallest fraction of their zinc concentration during descent; fecal pellets sink the slowest and lose the greatest fraction of their zinc concentration, and molts are intermediate. Nevertheless, feces represents the major route for delivering zinc to the bottom of the Ligurian Sea (2500 m), because concentration of the element in the pellets is so much higher than in carcasses or molts. Excretion of dissolved zinc into the water at the vertical migration depth of the living population during daylight hours was also inconsequential. Feces zinc represented over 80% of the total zinc transported to the sea floor if only marginal food supplies were available to the euphausiids, and over 90% if food was in sufficient supply. M. norvegica can effect a net transport of about 98% of its body zinc concentration below 500 m daily, in conditions of sufficient food supply and assuming that no released products are eaten during descent. If the food supply in the Ligurian Sea is considered only marginal throughout the year, M. norvegica can still effect a daily net transport below 500 m of about 36% of its body concentration, and about 6% of its body concentration will reach 2500 m daily.     

Grooves to tubes: evolution of the venom delivery system in a Late Triassic “reptile”

Venom delivery systems occur in a wide range of extant and fossil vertebrates and are primarily based on oral adaptations. Teeth range from unmodified (Komodo dragons) to highly specialized fangs similar to hypodermic needles (protero- and solenoglyphous snakes). Developmental biologists have documented evidence for an infolding pathway of fang evolution, where the groove folds over to create the more derived condition. However, the oldest known members of venomous clades retain the same condition as their extant relatives, resulting in no fossil evidence for the transition. Based on a comparison of previously known specimens with newly discovered teeth from North Carolina, we describe a new species of the Late Triassic archosauriform Uatchitodon and provide detailed analyses that provide evidence for both venom conduction and document a complete structural series from shallow grooves to fully enclosed tubular canals. While known only from teeth, Uatchitodon is highly diagnostic in possessing compound serrations and for having two venom canals on each tooth in the dentition. Further, although not a snake, Uatchitodon sheds light on the evolutionary trajectory of venom delivery systems in amniotes and provide solid evidence for venom conduction in archosaur-line diapsids.     

A novel approach to the sequential extraction of plutonium from oxic and anoxic sediment using sodium citrate to inhibit post-extraction resorption

Sequential extraction has been used extensively to study the solid partitioning of radionuclides in soils and sediments. A difficulty with sequential extraction is that radionuclides released by a particular extractant can be resorbed and artificially redistributed amongst the remaining solid phases. Here, we describe experiments (on selected model phase and natural materials), which were designed to determine whether the inclusion of a chelating agent (sodium citrate) in an established sequential extraction protocol (a) inhibits post-extraction resorption of plutonium, (b) increases non-targeted dissolution of sediment phases, and (c) gives rise to unwanted ligand competition for plutonium. The results clearly demonstrate the capacity of citrate to inhibit the resorption of plutonium from the various extractants, and confirm that there is no discernible increase in non-targeted phase dissolution, but indicate significant ligand competition with the carbonate phase. The merits of using citrate are discussed and an optimised sequential extraction protocol that includes citrate is proposed. Finally, the protocol is applied to oxic and anoxic sediments sampled in the NE Irish Sea and the Roads of Cherbourg, and it is shown that the bulk of the plutonium on these sediments is associated with the more labile geochemical fractions.     

Actinide analysis of a depleted uranium penetrator from a 1999 target site in southern Serbia

Following the detection of 236U in depleted uranium (DU) ammunition used during the Balkans conflict in the 1990s, concern has been expressed about the possibility that other nuclides from the nuclear fuel cycle and, in particular, transuranium nuclides, might be present in this type of ammunition. In this paper, we report the results of uranium and plutonium analyses carried out on a depleted uranium penetrator recovered from a target site in southern Serbia. Our data show the depleted nature of the uranium and confirm the presence of trace amounts of plutonium in the penetrator. The activity concentration of (239+240)PU, at 45.4+/-0.7 Bq kg(-1), is the highest reported to date for any penetrator recovered from the Balkans. This concentration, however, is comparable to that expected to be present naturally in uranium ores and, from a radiological perspective, would only give rise to a very small increase in dose to exposed persons compared to that from the DU itself.