Retrofitting existing housing stock to improve energy efficiency is often required to meet climate mitigation, public health and fuel poverty targets. Increasing uptake and effectiveness of retrofit schemes requires understanding of their impacts on householder attitudes and behaviours. This paper reports results of a survey of 500 Kirklees householders in the UK, where the Kirklees Warm Zone scheme took place. This was a local government led city scale domestic retrofit programme that installed energy efficiency measures at no charge in over 50,000 houses. The results highlight key design features of the scheme, socio-economic and attitudinal factors that affected take-up of energy efficiency measures and impacts on behaviour and energy use after adoption. The results emphasise the role that positive feedback plays in reinforcing pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours of participants and in addressing concerns of non-participants. Our findings have implications for the design and operation of future domestic energy efficiency retrofit schemes. 相似文献
Abstract The disposal of digested sewage sludge on crop‐producing land appeals to municipalities as an option but may pose a hazard to human and animal health if the plant material contains elevated levels of some heavy metals. This paper reports the levels of cadmium in corn grain and stover for six years — three years with sludge applied annually and for three years after sludge applications were terminated. The cadmium concentration in corn grain from the sixth year was similar to values found in corn grown on non‐sludged plots. In corn stover fron treated plots the cadmium concentration was greater than from untreated plots. Our. study indicated that phytotoxic levels of cadmium did not exist even though elevated levels occurred in the corn stover. 相似文献
Monthly samples were collected in oceanic waters off Discovery Bay, Jamaica, in 60- and 200-m vertical hauls, using 200- and 64-m mesh plankton nets, from June 1989 to July 1991. Sixty-nine species of copepods were identified: nauplii, copepodites and adults were separately enumerated. Total copepod abundances (all stages) ranged from 695 to 4120 m-3 in the upper 60 m, and from 483 to 3319 m-3 in the 200-m water column, without any clear seasonal pattern. With the exception of temperature, no seasonal variations in physico-chemical (chlorophyll a, S, particulate organic carbon, particulate protein) or biological variables were evident. Nauplii, adults and copepodites of selected taxa, and two chaetognath species, showed no significant variations in body length. Significant variantions in reproductive index were detected for several species, but without seasonal trends; many species appear to be continuous or intermittent breeders. There was no evidence of seasonal pattern in overall community composition or diversity, or evidence of changes due to water mass advection. The copepod community can be divided into a recurrent group of 13 (at 60 m) to 17 (at 200 m) perennial species, present year-round, and associated ephemeral groups of 1 to 3 species, present randomly for 1 to 4 consecutive months. The most plausible explanation of these patterns is that broad areas of the Caribbean Sea are dominated by the community of perennial species, while the ephemeral species represent the superimposed influence of local mesoscale gyres. 相似文献
Motivated by shallow ocean waves propagating over coral reefs, we investigate the drift velocities due to surface wave motion in an effectively inviscid fluid that overlies a saturated porous bed of finite depth. Previous work in this area either neglects the large-scale flow between layers (Phillips in Flow and reactions in permeable rocks, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991) or only considers the drift above the porous layer (Monismith in Ann Rev Fluid Mech 39:37–55, 2007). Overcoming these limitations, we propose a model where flow is described by a velocity potential above the porous layer and by Darcy’s law in the porous bed, with derived matching conditions at the interface between the two layers. Both a horizontal and a novel vertical drift effect arise from the damping of the porous bed, which requires the use of a complex wavenumber k. This is in contrast to the purely horizontal second-order drift first derived by Stokes (Trans Camb Philos Soc 8:441–455, 1847) when working with solely a pure fluid layer. Our work provides a physical model for coral reefs in shallow seas, where fluid drift both above and within the reef is vitally important for maintaining a healthy reef ecosystem (Koehl et al. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Coral Reef Symposium, vol 2, pp 1087–1092, 1997; Monismith in Ann Rev Fluid Mech 39:37–55, 2007). We compare our model with field measurements by Koehl and Hadfield (J Mar Syst 49:75–88, 2004) and also explain the vertical drift effects as documented by Koehl et al. (Mar Ecol Prog Ser 335:1–18, 2007), who measured the exchange between a coral reef layer and the (relatively shallow) sea above.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to validate the application of an invertebrate community index (ICI) to assess the biological integrity of urban streams. Validation involved comparing chemical and habitat data to ICI scores from 20 urban streams and four least‐impacted streams in the Choctawhatchee and Pea River watersheds located in Southeast Alabama. Chemical and habitat data were collected to support whether the ICI accurately predicts the health of the streams. A significant difference between urban and least‐impacted ICI scores, habitat evaluation scores, chemical variables, taxa richness, and Shannon‐Wiener diversity were observed when urban sites were compared with least‐impacted sites using Mann‐Whitney U‐test. Urban sites having low ICI scores, low species richness and diversity, and poor habitat showed greater impairment than least‐impacted sites. Cluster analysis of macroinvertebrate assemblages indicated two clusters. Significant differences between clusters in habitat evaluations, chemical parameters, and ICI scores showed that some urban sites were more degraded than other urban sites in the study. Differentiation between least‐impacted and urban sites indicated that the ICI provided valid biotic assessments. Therefore, this study validated that the ICI is capable of predicting the biological integrity of urban streams in the Choctawhatchee and Pea River watersheds. 相似文献
Water pollution from small rural industries is a serious problem throughout China. Over half of all river sections monitored for water quality are rated as being unsafe for human contact, and this pollution is estimated to cost several per cent of GDP. While China has some of the toughest environmental protection laws in the world, the implementation of these laws in rural areas is not effective. This paper explains the reasons for this implementation gap. It argues that the factors that have underpinned the economic success of rural industry are precisely the same factors that cause water pollution from rural industry to remain such a serious problem in China. This means that the control of rural water pollution is not simply a technical problem of designing a more appropriate governance system, or finding better policy instruments or more funding. Instead, solutions lie in changes in the model that underpins rural development in China. 相似文献