Sustainability research and practices in enforced residential institutions: collaborations of ecologists and prisoners

Enforced institutional settings such as penitentiaries provide environments to raise awareness, carry out research, and implement and assess practices for sustainable living. Institutions where residence is enforced due to health, recreational, military, or legal reasons (e.g., assisted living centers, summer camps, army bases, prisons) house people who may lack scientific training but have time and need for intellectual stimulation that can be filled by supervised research. These institutions have stable populations, structured social organization, and measurable inputs and outputs of materials and energy to carry out sustainable practices in tasks that affect regional resources such as groundwater quality and landfill use. We report on three examples at a corrections center resulting from partnerships among visiting academic ecology researchers, sustainability practitioners, corrections administrators, and prisoners: (1) research on how to sustainably “farm” moss for the horticulture trade to reduce harvesting pressure on wild moss populations; (2) a vermiculture and thermophilic composting system to reduce the kitchen waste; and (3) a monthly seminar series at the prison. Over 26 months: (1) participants developed methods to optimize moss growth; (2) landfill-bound waste and particulate flow rate destined for wastewater treatment decreased by 50%, to less than 50% of permit limits; (3) resulting compost (ca. 5000 kg) fertilized institutional vegetable gardens; (4) water quality improved so that the prison could return funds allocated to upgrade the prison’s water quality. The lectures encouraged intellectual exchange among researchers, convicts, and guards. Researchers derived new perspectives and broader impacts for their work. This can be a model for other correctional facilities and other enforced residential institutions (ERIs). Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Aqueous accelerated solvent extraction of native polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from carbonaceous river floodplain soils

In this study, three river floodplain soils with different compositions of carbonaceous materials and a reference coal sample were extracted with water using the accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) method. The desorption enthalpy values for 2-ring PAHs were highest in the coal sample, with values in the soil samples decreasing with decrease in coal content. The values for the higher condensed PAHs showed that the highest desorption enthalpies were from the samples with the largest amount of coal-derived particles. Elevated desorption enthalpies indicated a strong bonding between PAHs and geosorbents. Moreover, with the application of ASE this study was able to conclude that the PAHs in the samples were preferentially adsorbed to carbonaceous materials with high surface areas.     

Coordinating links among research, standardisation and policy in support of water framework directive chemical monitoring requirements

The need for coordination among scientific and policy activities is an old debate in which respective communities have often tried to impose their views rather than reflecting on pragmatic solutions. In the last few years, however, constructive exchanges have taken place in the context of expert groups linked to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and related EU funded research projects, which have resulted in a better understanding of communication and knowledge transfer gaps. These exchanges concern not only the way research is being interfaced with water policies, but also how improved coordination could be organised regarding technical specifications linked to standardisation. This paper discusses on-going efforts to improve coordination among research, standardisation and policy in support of WFD implementation, with emphasis on chemical monitoring requirements.     

Sources and spatial distribution of heavy metals in scleractinian coral tissues and sediments from the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, Panama

Marine ecosystems worldwide are threatened by aquatic pollution; however, there is a paucity in data from the Caribbean region. As such, five heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, copper, zinc, mercury) were measured in tissues of the scleractinian corals Porites furcata and Agaricia tenuifolia and in adjacent sediments in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, Panama. Samples were collected from five reef sites along a gradient of distance from an international shipping port and were analysed using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry and atomic absorption spectrophotometry for mercury. Copper and zinc were the most abundant metals and ranged from 11 to 63 mg kg^?1 and from 31 to 185 mg kg^?1 in coral tissues, respectively. The highest concentration of each metal was measured in P. furcata tissues, with copper and mercury concentrations significantly higher in P. furcata than in A. tenuifolia at every site. These results suggest that P. furcata has a higher affinity for metal accumulation and storage than A. tenuifolia. With the exception of cadmium, metal concentrations in coral tissues were generally elevated at coral reefs in closer proximity to the port; however, this pattern was not observed in sediments. Hard coral cover was lowest at reefs in closest proximity to the port, suggesting that metal pollution from port-related activities is influencing hard coral abundance at nearby coral reefs.     

Analysing the fate of nanopesticides in soil and the applicability of regulatory protocols using a polymer-based nanoformulation of atrazine

For the first time, regulatory protocols defined in the OECD guidelines were applied to determine the fate properties of a nanopesticide in two agricultural soils with contrasting characteristics. The nanoformulation studied had no effect on the degradation kinetics of atrazine indicating that (1) the release of atrazine from the polymer nanocarriers occurred rapidly relative to the degradation kinetics (half-lives 36–53 days) and/or that (2) atrazine associated with the nanocarriers was subject to biotic or abiotic degradation. Sorption coefficients, derived from a batch and a centrifugation technique at a realistic soil-to-solution ratio, were higher for the nanoformulated atrazine than for the pure active ingredient. Results indicate that the nanoformulation had an effect on the fate of atrazine. However, since the protocols applied were designed to assess solutes, conclusions about the transport of atrazine loaded onto the nanocarriers should be made extremely cautiously. The centrifugation method applied over time (here over 7 days) appears to be a useful tool to indirectly assess the durability of nanopesticides under realistic soil-to-solution ratios and estimate the period of time during which an influence on the fate of the active ingredient may be expected. More detailed investigations into the bioavailability and durability of nanopesticides are necessary and will require the development of novel methods suitable to address both the “nano” and “organic” characteristics of polymer-based nanopesticides.     

Null model analysis of species associations using abundance data

The influence of negative species interactions has dominated much of the literature on community assembly rules. Patterns of negative covariation among species are typically documented through null model analyses of binary presence/absence matrices in which rows designate species, columns designate sites, and the matrix entries indicate the presence (1) or absence (0) of a particular species in a particular site. However, the outcome of species interactions ultimately depends on population-level processes. Therefore, patterns of species segregation and aggregation might be more clearly expressed in abundance matrices, in which the matrix entries indicate the abundance or density of a species in a particular site. We conducted a series of benchmark tests to evaluate the performance of 14 candidate null model algorithms and six covariation metrics that can be used with abundance matrices. We first created a series of random test matrices by sampling a metacommunity from a lognormal species abundance distribution. We also created a series of structured matrices by altering the random matrices to incorporate patterns of pairwise species segregation and aggregation. We next screened each algorithm-index combination with the random and structured matrices to determine which tests had low Type I error rates and good power for detecting segregated and aggregated species distributions. In our benchmark tests, the best-performing null model does not constrain species richness, but assigns individuals to matrix cells proportional to the observed row and column marginal distributions until, for each row and column, total abundances are reached. Using this null model algorithm with a set of four covariance metrics, we tested for patterns of species segregation and aggregation in a collection of 149 empirical abundance matrices and 36 interaction matrices collated from published papers and posted data sets. More than 80% of the matrices were significantly segregated, which reinforces a previous meta-analysis of presence/absence matrices. However, using two of the metrics we detected a significant pattern of aggregation for plants and for the interaction matrices (which include plant-pollinator data sets). These results suggest that abundance matrices, analyzed with an appropriate null model, may be a powerful tool for quantifying patterns of species segregation and aggregation.     

The influence of initial conditions on the propagation of smouldering fires in dust accumulations

A mathematical model is presented which allows one to treat the combined phenomena of heat, mass and species transfer by diffusion as they occur within smouldering fires in accumulations of dust or other solid bulk materials. The model was applied to predict self-ignition temperatures of five different dusts, where it could be shown that computed and experimental self-ignition temperatures coincide within an error margin of ±5%.

For smouldering fires, if initiated by either self-ignition or an ignition source, it could be shown that the temperature and the velocity at which the reaction front propagates both depend on the volume of the dust accumulation. In addition, the propagation velocity increases when the initial temperature of the dust accumulation is increased and decreases when the initial moisture content of the dust accumulation is increased.

Comparisons of the numerical model with experiments show that the smouldering propagation is mirrored qualitatively, while the accuracy of the computations strongly depends on the accuracy of the input parameters, namely on the apparent activation energy.     

Batch methanogenic fermentation experiments of wastewater from a brown coal low-temperature coke plant

Coke plant effluents with high contents of organic compounds are mainly treated by biological aerobic fermentation after physical pre-treatment.In this study,a brown coal condensate wastewater from a low temperature coking process was fermented under methanogenic conditions in discontinuous experiments.By this fermentation,acetate,propionate,and the main polyphenolic compounds(catechol,resorcinol and hydroquinone) were degraded to a level below the detection limit.The COD was reduced by 72% with a residual ...