Native medicinal plants commercialized in Brazil – priorities for conservation

A majority of the native medicinal plants that are commercialized in Brazil are harvested from natural populations. In addition to this essentially unrestrained collecting, these plants have been heavily impacted by the cutting and the fragmentation of forest formations throughout the country. Considering the limited availability of natural resources, threats to species diversity, and the necessity of conservation efforts in light of the rapid exhaustion of natural ecosystems, it is becoming exceedingly important to establish conservation priorities. The present work sought to identify the native medicinal plants harvested for industrial purposes and to establish conservation priorities for the species of highest commercial value. To that end, a survey of Brazilian industrial products that use medicinal plants was undertaken in 54 shops in the city of Recife (Pernambuco, NE Brazil). The survey noted information concerning the commercial name of the product, its plant composition and pharmaceutical presentation, therapeutic indications, as well as the laboratory that produced it. Only native species were considered. A total of 74 different native species used to produce more than 300 types of products were encountered in the present survey. Twelve species demonstrated significant versatility (Species which had the highest numbers of different therapeutic indications and body systems), and 58.33% of these plants were trees. Destructive collecting predominates (58.11%), greatly affecting taxa collected exclusively from wild populations (86.49%). The intensive use of exclusively wild species and the destructive harvesting techniques employed in gathering them create serious problems that will threaten the availability of these resources to future generations.     

Water Quality Index (WQI) of Jaguari and Atibaia Rivers in the region of Paulínia,São Paulo,Brazil

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment - Due to the concern with the quality of hydric resources, the monitoring is essential to evaluate and identify the anthropogenic and environmental...     

Geochronology of anthropogenic radionuclides in Ribeira Bay sediments, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ribeira Bay is located approximately 130 km south of the city of Rio de Janeiro and receives discharges of liquid effluent from the Angra dos Reis nuclear power plant (NPP) site, where two pressurized water reactors are located. To test whether the presence of anthropogenic radionuclides in sediments in Ribeira Bay could be correlated to the NPP operations, we sampled seven sediment cores and determined accumulation rates and chronologies. Only one sediment core did not exhibit a superficial mixing layer; this sample was used for dating purposes. Cesium-137 and ²⁰⁷Bi were observed in this sediment profile, but their presence was associated with atmospheric fall-out rather than the nearby NPP. The exponential decay of ²¹⁰Pb concentration with sediment layer depth was verified below a superficial mixing layer for all other sediment cores. Calculated accumulation rates ranged from 1.2 mm y⁻¹ in the inner bay to 6.2 mm y⁻¹ close to its entrance.     

CO2 dispersion around two PWR nuclear power plants in Brazil

Atmospheric air samples were taken within 3 km from power plants encompassing five different distances and wind directions. Samples were taken between 2002 and 2005 aiming to evaluate the environmental ¹⁴C enrichment due to the operation of Brazilian nuclear power plants. The sampling system consisted of a pump connected to a trapping column filled with a 3 M NaOH solution. The trapped CO₂ was analyzed for ¹⁴C by using a single stage accelerator mass spectrometry (SSAMS).     

Adaptive threat management framework: integrating people and turtles

In the 35 years since its inception, the Brazilian National Program for the Conservation of Marine Turtles (TAMAR) has had great success in protecting the five species of sea turtles that occur in Brazil. It has also contributed significantly to worldwide scientific data and knowledge about these species’ biology, such as life cycles and migration patterns. TAMAR’s conservation strategies have always relied on a variety of environmental education and social inclusion (EESI) activities highly adapted to the socio-environmental evolving contexts of its 25 locations distributed across nine states. Diversity and flexibility are critical to enable timely and effective local responses to existing or potential threats to sea turtles. The intuitive, locally adapted, decentralized, and independent way EESI activities have been carried out have generated positive results in the resolution of specific and evolving local problems through the course of the project. This article brings EESI under the same conceptual framework that underlies its conservation approach by adopting an adaptive threat management framework to organize and qualify its educational and social inclusion interventions according to the main categories of threat addressed by TAMAR.     

Diagnostic Study of Critical Circuits of the Kraft Pulp Production Process Considering the Environmental Aspects

Abstract

This paper describes systematic work undertaken in the field of atmospheric emissions from Portuguese Kraft pulp mills. The study led to the determination of emission factors from stationary sources, which proved to be an important tool for assessing the need for investment in air pollution abatement equipment, specifically for malodorous gases.     

Separate collection of the biodegradable fraction of MSW: an economic assessment

There is little experience in Portugal with the separate collection of the biodegradable fraction of municipal solid waste (MSW). Therefore, it is relevant to evaluate how this process could economically affect the actual practices of MSW collection in small municipalities. This article simulates the costs of collection by means of a fixed container system and a transfer station, using values from a municipality with a population of 28,000 inhabitants. The main goal of this exercise is to compare the economic effects of three alternative scenarios: (i) the traditional, unsorted collection; (ii) the separate collection of whole biowaste; and (iii) the separate collection of biowaste generated in the major urban communities, while setting aside the other biowaste for home composting. The input data are from 2001, and include waste quantities, travel times, work crew composition, crew time shifts, vehicles, and containers. Calculations of the proposed mathematical method were carried out using the Microsoft Excel software. This study concludes that the global cost for separate collection of biowaste (alternative ii) need not necessarily be higher than the corresponding cost of the traditional, unsorted method of collection (alternative i). Furthermore, the global cost for collection with separated biowaste and home composting (alternative iii) could also be lower than the corresponding cost of the traditional, unsorted method of collection.     

Reserve design to optimize functional connectivity and animal density

Ecological distance-based spatial capture–recapture models (SCR) are a promising approach for simultaneously estimating animal density and connectivity, both of which affect spatial population processes and ultimately species persistence. We explored how SCR models can be integrated into reserve-design frameworks that explicitly acknowledge both the spatial distribution of individuals and their space use resulting from landscape structure. We formulated the design of wildlife reserves as a budget-constrained optimization problem and conducted a simulation to explore 3 different SCR-informed optimization objectives that prioritized different conservation goals by maximizing the number of protected individuals, reserve connectivity, and density-weighted connectivity. We also studied the effect on our 3 objectives of enforcing that the space-use requirements of individuals be met by the reserve for individuals to be considered conserved (referred to as home-range constraints). Maximizing local population density resulted in fragmented reserves that would likely not aid long-term population persistence, and maximizing the connectivity objective yielded reserves that protected the fewest individuals. However, maximizing density-weighted connectivity or preemptively imposing home-range constraints on reserve design yielded reserves of largely spatially compact sets of parcels covering high-density areas in the landscape with high functional connectivity between them. Our results quantify the extent to which reserve design is constrained by individual home-range requirements and highlight that accounting for individual space use in the objective and constraints can help in the design of reserves that balance abundance and connectivity in a biologically relevant manner.     

Planning waste cooking oil collection systems

This research has been motivated by a real-life problem of a waste cooking oil collection system characterized by the existence of multiple depots with an outsourced vehicle fleet, where the collection routes have to be plan. The routing problem addressed allows open routes between depots, i.e., all routes start at one depot but can end at the same or at a different one, depending on what minimizes the objective function considered. Such problem is referred as a Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Mixed Closed and Open Inter-Depot Routes and is, in this paper, modeled through a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation where capacity and duration constraints are taken into account. The model developed is applied to the real case study providing, as final results, the vehicle routes planning where a decrease of 13% on mileage and 11% on fleet hiring cost are achieved, when comparing with the current company solution.