Implementation of the first adaptive management plan for a European migratory waterbird population: The case of the Svalbard pink-footed goose <Emphasis Type="Italic">Anser brachyrhynchus</Emphasis>

An International Species Management Plan for the Svalbard population of the pink-footed goose was adopted under the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds in 2012, the first case of adaptive management of a migratory waterbird population in Europe. An international working group (including statutory agencies, NGO representatives and experts) agreed on objectives and actions to maintain the population in favourable conservation status, while accounting for biodiversity, economic and recreational interests. Agreements include setting a population target to reduce agricultural conflicts and avoid tundra degradation, and using hunting in some range states to maintain stable population size. As part of the adaptive management procedures, adjustment to harvest is made annually subject to population status. This has required streamlining of monitoring and assessment activities. Three years after implementation, indicators suggest the attainment of management results. Dialogue, consensus-building and engagement among stakeholders represent the major process achievements.     

Pollution status and human health risk assessment of potentially toxic elements and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in urban street dust of Tyumen city,Russia

Environmental Geochemistry and Health - This study investigated levels and sources of pollution and potential health risks associated with potentially toxic elements (PTEs) and polycyclic aromatic...     

Use and misuse of motor-vehicle crash death rates in assessing highway-safety performance

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the article are to assess the extent to which comparisons of motor-vehicle crash death rates can be used to determine the effectiveness of highway-safety policies over time in a country or to compare policy effectiveness across countries. METHODS: Motor-vehicle crash death rates per mile traveled in the 50 U.S. states from 1980 to 2003 are used to show the influence on these rates of factors independent of highway-safety interventions. Multiple regression models relating state death rates to various measures related to urbanization and demographics are used. RESULTS: The analyses demonstrate strong relationships between state death rates and urbanization and demographics. Almost 60% of the variability among the state death rates can be explained by the independent variables in the multiple regression models. When the death rates for passenger vehicle occupants (i.e., excluding motorcycle, pedestrian, and other deaths) are used in the regression models, almost 70% of the variability in the rates can be explained by urbanization and demographics. CONCLUSIONS: The analyses presented in the article demonstrate that motor-vehicle crash death rates are strongly influenced by factors unrelated to highway-safety countermeasures. Overall death rates should not be used as a basis for judging the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of specific highway-safety countermeasures or to assess overall highway-safety policies, especially across jurisdictions. There can be no substitute for the use of carefully designed scientific evaluations of highway-safety interventions that use outcome measures directly related to the intervention; e.g., motorcyclist deaths should be used to assess the effectiveness of motorcycle helmet laws. While this may seem obvious, there are numerous examples in the literature of death rates from all crashes being used to assess the effectiveness of interventions aimed at specific subsets of crashes.     

Building resilience and adaptation to manage Arctic change

Unprecedented global changes caused by human actions challenge society's ability to sustain the desirable features of our planet. This requires proactive management of change to foster both resilience (sustaining those attributes that are important to society in the face of change) and adaptation (developing new socioecological configurations that function effectively under new conditions). The Arctic may be one of the last remaining opportunities to plan for change in a spatially extensive region where many of the ancestral ecological and social processes and feedbacks are still intact. If the feasibility of this strategy can be demonstrated in the Arctic, our improved understanding of the dynamics of change can be applied to regions with greater human modification. Conditions may now be ideal to implement policies to manage Arctic change because recent studies provide the essential scientific understanding, appropriate international institutions are in place, and Arctic nations have the wealth to institute necessary changes, if they choose to do so.     

Effect of quasi-static prestrain on the formability of dual phase steels in electrohydraulic forming

Dual phase steels derive their name from their microstructure, which consists of islands of martensite surrounded by a ferrite matrix. These steels are increasingly being used in automobile structures in order to reduce weight, improve fuel economy, and maintain crash safety performance. The higher strength grades of dual phase steels, such as DP780 and DP980, often present significant formability challenges in sheet stamping operations, and therefore any technologies which could alleviate these issues would be of significant value to the automotive industry. Electrohydraulic forming (EHF) is based upon the electro-hydraulic effect: a complex phenomenon related to the discharge of high voltage electrical current through a liquid. In EHF, electrical energy is stored in a bank of capacitors and is converted into the kinetic energy needed to form sheet metal by rapidly discharging that energy across a pair of electrodes submerged in a fluid. During such a discharge, a high pressure, high temperature plasma channel is created between the tips of the electrodes. The resulting shockwave in the liquid, initiated by the expansion of the plasma channel, is propagated toward the blank at the acoustic velocity of the fluid, and the mass and momentum of the water in the shock wave accelerates the sheet metal blank toward the die. The objective of this paper is to report the results of formability testing of dual phase steels under three basic conditions: (1) conventional limiting dome height (LDH) testing; (2) starting with a flat blank and using one pulse of EHF to fill the desired die geometry; and (3) starting with a quasi-static preforming step to partially fill the die cavity and then using one pulse of EHF to fill the remaining area of the die cavity. A hybrid process which combines sheet hydroforming (HF) and EHF as described herein has the potential to reduce the cycle time of the EHF process by replacing the initial EHF forming increments with one quasi-static preforming step. Additionally, a numerical model was developed and employed in order to better understand the sheet deformation process within EHF. The numerical model consists of four distinct models that are integrated into one: (1) an electrical model of the discharge channel, (2) a model of the plasma, (3) a model of the liquid as a pressure-transmitting medium, and (4) a deformable sheet metal blank in contact with a rigid die. Significant improvements in formability were confirmed experimentally for DP780 and DP980 by forming into conical and v-shape dies using EHF from a flat sheet and by using EHF combined with a quasi-static preforming step. Numerical modeling showed that the peak strain rates occurring in both single-pulse EHF the hybrid HF-EHF process are approximately 17,000 units per second.     

Industrial and wildfire aerosol pollution over world heritage Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal is the biggest reservoir of fresh water with unique flora and fauna; presently it is negatively affected by climate change, water warming, industrial emissions, shipping, touristic activities, and Siberian forest fires. The assessment of air pollution - related Baikal's ecosystem damage is an unsolved problem. Ship, based expedition exploring the Baikal atmospheric aerosol loading, was performed over the lake area in July 2018. We combine the aerosol near - water and vertical distributions over the Lake Baikal basin with meteorological observations and air mass transportation simulations. Lidar sounding of aerosol fields in the troposphere assesses the atmospheric background in the pristine areas and the pollution during fire-affected periods. Aerosol optical properties (scattering and spectral absorption) converted to the particle number size, black carbon (BC) mass, and Absorption Angstrom Exponent (AAE) provide the inside into aerosol characterization. Transport of industrial emissions from Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk regions, and wildfire plumes from Republic of Yakutia relates the pollution sources to the increased concentrations of fine particle numbers, PM₁₀ and BC mass over Southern and Northern/Central Baikal, respectively. The highest PM₁₀ and BC are associated to the harbor and touristic areas of intensive shipping and residential biomass burning. Deposition estimates applied to aerosol data exhibit the pollution fluxes to water surface over the whole Baikal area. AAE marks the impact of coal combustion, residential biomass burning, and wildfires indicating the high pollution level of the Lake Baikal ecological system .     

Physiological testing of Mytilus galloprovincialis for the environmental assessing of coastal marine areas: a case study in Boka Kotorska Bay (the Adriatic Sea)

The aim of this work was to validate in the field certain measurement of the heart rate alterations of the bioindicator organism Mytilus galloprovicialis as a tool for ecotoxicological biomonitoring and assessment applications related to coastal and marine environment. The latter was determined by testing the mussels according to the method of functional loading (1-hour lowered salinity stress-exposure). The time of heart rate (HR) recovery (T_rec) and the coefficient of HR variation (CV_HR) in a group of tested animals were used as biomarkers for the assessment of their physiological state. It was found that the values of the biomarkers in mussels from our reference location were 1.3-1.5 times lower than in mussels from differently polluted coastal areas of the Bay. The study also included an investigation of the relationship between the mussel’s cardiac rhythm characteristics and the bioaccumulation of trace elements in their soft tissues, caused by chronic pollution. The conclusion was drawn that this approach to the physiological testing of mussels could be useful in developing a rapid and low-cost method for the assessment of the health of coastal ecosystems.     

Principle of the worst scenario in the modelling past and future of biosphere dynamics

The “biosphere–climate” system is subjected to different influences (influx of anthropogenic CO₂ and pollutants, deforestation, harmful land management, biological species depopulation, etc.). Therefore, the vital question arises: “Can these influences lead to irreversible negative changes in the climate–biosphere system or a global ecological catastrophe?” The possibility of irreversible changes may be not very high, but one cannot ignore it. So the main aim of our investigation is to evaluate possible consequences of human impact on the biosphere focusing on irreversible changes of it.     

Speciation and hydrological transport of metals in non-acidic river systems of the Lake Baikal basin: Field data and model predictions

The speciation of metals in aqueous systems is central to understanding their mobility, bioavailability, toxicity and fate. Although several geochemical speciation models exist for metals, the equilibrium conditions assumed by many of them may not prevail in field-scale hydrological systems with flowing water. Furthermore, the dominant processes and/or process rates in non-acidic systems might differ from well-studied acidic systems. We here aim to increase knowledge on geochemical processes controlling speciation and transport of metals under non-acidic river conditions. Specifically, we evaluate the predictive capacity of a speciation model to novel measurements of multiple metals and their partitioning, under high-pH conditions in mining zones within the Lake Baikal basin. The mining zones are potential hotspots for increasing metal loads to downstream river systems. Metals released from such upstream regions may be transported all the way to Lake Baikal, where increasing metal contamination of sediments and biota has been reported. Our results show clear agreement between speciation predictions and field measurements of Fe, V, Pb and Zn, suggesting that the partitioning of these metals mainly was governed by equilibrium geochemistry under the studied conditions. Systematic over-predictions of dissolved Cr, Cu and Mo by the model were observed, which might be corrected by improving the adsorption database for hydroxyapatite because that mineral likely controls the solubility of these metals. Additionally, metal complexation by dissolved organic matter is a key parameter that needs continued monitoring in the Lake Baikal basin because dependable predictions could not be made without considering its variability. Finally, our investigation indicates that further model development is needed for accurate As speciation predictions under non-acidic conditions, which is crucial for improved health risk assessments on this contaminant.

     

Seasonal variations of air pollutant concentrations within Krasnoyarsk City

This paper examines the significant differences in seasonal variations of criteria pollutant concentrations in various parts of a large urban area. These differences are caused by the microclimatic heterogeneity of the city and show the influence of breeze and orographic-type circulations on urban air pollution. The temperature heterogeneity of Krasnoyarsk territory during the winter leads to an increase of 150% in CO air pollution levels in the central part of city. During the summer the orographical heterogeneity of Krasnoyarsk City leads to increases of up to 400% in air pollution for different areas.