Particulates, not plants, dominate nitrogen processing in a septage-treating aerated pond system

In pond and wetland systems for wastewater treatment, plants are often thought to enhance the removal of ammonium and nitrogen through the activities of root-associated bacteria. In this study, we examined the role of plant roots in an aerated pond system with floating plants designed to treat high-strength septage wastewater. We performed both laboratory and full-scale experiments to test the effect of different plant root to septage ratios on nitrification and denitrification, and measured the abundances of nitrifying bacteria associated with roots and septage particulates. Root-associated nitrifying bacteria did not play a significant role in ammonium and total nitrogen removal. Investigations of nitrifier populations showed that only 10% were associated with water hyacinth [Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms] roots (at standard facility plant densities equivalent to 2.2 wet g roots L(-1) septage); instead, nitrifiers were found almost entirely (90%) associated with suspended septage particulates. The role of root-associated nitrifiers in nitrification was examined in laboratory batch experiments where high plant root concentrations (7.4 wet g L(-1), representing a 38% net increase in total nitrifier populations over plant-free controls) yielded a corresponding increase (55%) in the non-substrate-limited nitrification rate (V(max)). However, within the full-scale septage-treating pond system, nitrification and denitrification rates remained unchanged when plant root concentrations were increased to 7.1 g roots L(-1) (achieved by increasing the surface area available for plants while maintaining the same tank volume). Under normal facility operating conditions, nitrification was limited by ammonium concentration, not nitrifier availability. Maximizing plant root concentrations was found to be an inefficient mechanism for increasing nitrification in organic particulate-rich wastewaters such as septage.     

Marginal abatement cost curve for nitrogen oxides incorporating controls,renewable electricity,energy efficiency,and fuel switching

A marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) traces out the relationship between the quantity of pollution abated and the marginal cost of abating each additional unit. In the context of air quality management, MACCs are typically developed by sorting control technologies by their relative cost-effectiveness. Other potentially important abatement measures such as renewable electricity, energy efficiency, and fuel switching (RE/EE/FS) are often not incorporated into MACCs, as it is difficult to quantify their costs and abatement potential. In this paper, a U.S. energy system model is used to develop a MACC for nitrogen oxides (NO_x) that incorporates both traditional controls and these additional measures. The MACC is decomposed by sector, and the relative cost-effectiveness of RE/EE/FS and traditional controls are compared. RE/EE/FS are shown to have the potential to increase emission reductions beyond what is possible when applying traditional controls alone. Furthermore, a portion of RE/EE/FS appear to be cost-competitive with traditional controls.

Implications: Renewable electricity, energy efficiency, and fuel switching can be cost-competitive with traditional air pollutant controls for abating air pollutant emissions. The application of renewable electricity, energy efficiency, and fuel switching is also shown to have the potential to increase emission reductions beyond what is possible when applying traditional controls alone.     

Effects of nitrogen and phosphorus limitation on the activated sludge biomass in a kraft mill biotreatment system.

Unlike wastewater, pulp and paper mill effluents are generally severely deficient in bioavailable nitrogen and phosphorus. The influence of nitrogen and phosphorus limitations on steady-state or typical pulp and paper mill activated sludge floc properties and performance was studied using a bioreactor-fed synthetic raw mill effluent and seeded with mill activated sludge. Limitation of either nitrogen or phosphorus decreased growth, five-day biochemical oxygen demand, and suspended solids removal. Nitrogen limitation greatly enhanced activated sludge floc poly-beta3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), but not carbohydrate or extracellular polymeric substances (EPS). In contrast, phosphorus limitation increased total floc carbohydrate and EPS, but not PHB. The flocs showed little ability to store either nitrogen or phosphorus. Nitrogen limitation, but not phosphorus limitation, produced much more negative net floc surface charge, increasing fines, while phosphorus limitation, but not nitrogen limitation, increased the floc bound water content and surface hydrophobicity and decreased fines.     

The drivers of risk to water security in Shanghai

Big cities are often said to have big water problems, and Shanghai is no exception. In this paper, we examine and compare the influence of the major factors that give rise to the risk of water insecurity in Shanghai. There is an extensive and diverse literature on these issues, dealt with in isolation, and here, we provide a synthesis of the literature, together with our own assessments and calculations, to assess what are the risks to Shanghai’s water supply and what is our degree of confidence in this assessment. We describe the systems that supply water to the city, and past and future changes in the systems, including changes in the glaciers that supply some water to the river, changes in climate, changes in land use, the construction of dams, and water diversions. We show how, at the same time as Shanghai is increasing its dependence on the Yangtze river, water diversions and sea level rise are increasing the risk that this water will be too saline to consume at certain times of the year. This analysis suggests that most of the major drivers of the risk to water security in Shanghai are within the power of environmental managers to control.     

Division of labor in honeybees: form, function, and proximate mechanisms

Honeybees exhibit two patterns of organization of work. In the spring and summer, division of labor is used to maximize growth rate and resource accumulation, while during the winter, worker survivorship through the poor season is paramount, and bees become generalists. This work proposes new organismal and proximate level conceptual models for these phenomena. The first half of the paper presents a push–pull model for temporal polyethism. Members of the nursing caste are proposed to be pushed from their caste by the development of workers behind them in the temporal caste sequence, while middle-aged bees are pulled from their caste via interactions with the caste ahead of them. The model is, hence, an amalgamation of previous models, in particular, the social inhibition and foraging for work models. The second half of the paper presents a model for the proximate basis of temporal polyethism. Temporal castes exhibit specialized physiology and switch caste when it is adaptive at the colony level. The model proposes that caste-specific physiology is dependent on mutually reinforcing positive feedback mechanisms that lock a bee into a particular behavioral phase. Releasing mechanisms that relate colony level information are then hypothesized to disrupt particular components of the priming mechanisms to trigger endocrinological cascades that lead to the next temporal caste. Priming and releasing mechanisms for the nursing caste are mapped out that are consistent with current experimental results. Less information-rich, but plausible, mechanisms for the middle-aged and foraging castes are also presented.     

Optimal design for sustainable development of a material recovery facility in a fast-growing urban setting

Installing material recovery facilities (MRFs) in a solid waste management system could be a feasible alternative to achieve sustainable development goals in urban areas if current household and curbside recycling cannot prove successful in the long run. This paper addresses the optimal site selection and capacity planning for a MRF in conjunction with an optimal shipping strategy of solid waste streams in a multi-district urban region. Screening of material recovery and disposal capacity alternatives can be achieved in terms of economic feasibility, technology limitation, recycling potential, and site availability. The optimization objectives include economic impacts characterized by recycling income and cost components for waste management, while the constraint set consists of mass balance, capacity limitation, recycling limitation, scale economy, conditionality, and relevant screening constraints. A case study for the City of San Antonio, Texas (USA) presents a vivid example where scenario planning demonstrates the robustness and flexibility of this modeling analysis. It proves especially useful when determining MRF ownership structure. Each scenario experiences two case settings: (1) two MRF sites are proposed for selection and (2) a single MRF site is sought. Cost analysis confirms processing fees are not the driving force in the City's operation, but rather shipping cost. Sensitivity analysis solidifies the notion that significant public participation plays the most important role in minimizing solid waste management expenses.     

Rapidly eroding piñon-juniper woodlands in New Mexico: response to slash treatment

The pi?on (Pinus edulis Engelm.)-juniper [Juniperus monosperma (Engelm.) Sarg.] woodlands of Bandelier National Monument are experiencing accelerated erosion. Earlier studies suggest that causes of these rapidly eroding woodlands are related to an unprecedented rapid transition of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa C. Lawson) savanna to pi?on-juniper woodlands as a result of cumulative historical effects of overgrazing, fire suppression, and severe drought. To study the effectiveness of slash treatment in reducing accelerated erosion, we used sediment check dams to quantify sediment yield from twelve paired microwatersheds (300-1100 m2) within an existing paired water-shed study. Six of the twelve microwatersheds were located in a 41-ha (treatment) watershed with scattered slash treatment, whereas six microwatersheds were located in an adjacent 35-ha untreated (control) watershed. The primary purpose of our research was to quantify the rates of sediment yield between the treated and control microwatersheds. Sediment yield was measured from 15 individual storms during the months of June-September (2000 and 2001). In response to slash treatment, mean seasonal sediment yield for 2000 equaled 2.99 Mg/ha in the control vs. 0.03 Mg/ha in the treatment and 2.07 Mg/ha in the control vs. 0.07 Mg/ha in the treatment in 2001. The practice of slash treatment demonstrates efficacy in reducing erosion in degraded pi?on-juniper woodlands by encouraging herbaceous recovery. Our data show that slash treatment increases total ground cover (slash and herbaceous growth) beyond a potential erosion threshold. Restored pi?on-juniper woodlands, as the result of slash treatment, provide a forest structure similar to pre-grazing and pre-fire suppression conditions and decrease catastrophic fire hazard.     

Land use planning and wildfire risk mitigation: an analysis of wildfire-burned subdivisions using high-resolution remote sensing imagery and GIS data

This paper evaluates risk factors that influence the probability that a house will burn from wildfire. A logistic regression is used to analyse data processed from pre-fire and post-fire IKONOS images and other geo-referenced data. The dependent variable is the probability that a given house will burn. A total of 12 independent variables are evaluated: vegetation density; area of defensible space; adjacency of a parcel to public lands; proximity of a house to fire station; road width; road type; parcel size; subdivision morphology; assessed value; elevation; slope and aspect. Model results generally support dominant land use planning and design strategies for wildfire risk reduction including vegetation treatments, site selection with respect to topography, and improving access to fire stations.     

Modeling the Hydrology of Climate Change in California’s Sierra Nevada for Subwatershed Scale Adaptation1

Young, Charles A., Marisa I. Escobar‐Arias, Martha Fernandes, Brian Joyce, Michael Kiparsky, Jeffrey F. Mount, Vishal K. Mehta, David Purkey, Joshua H. Viers, and David Yates, 2009. Modeling the Hydrology of Climate Change in California’s Sierra Nevada for Subwatershed Scale Adaptation. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 45(6):1409‐1423. Abstract: The rainfall‐runoff model presented in this study represents the hydrology of 15 major watersheds of the Sierra Nevada in California as the backbone of a planning tool for water resources analysis including climate change studies. Our model implementation documents potential changes in hydrologic metrics such as snowpack and the initiation of snowmelt at a finer resolution than previous studies, in accordance with the needs of watershed‐level planning decisions. Calibration was performed with a sequence of steps focusing sequentially on parameters of land cover, snow accumulation and melt, and water capacity and hydraulic conductivity of soil horizons. An assessment of the calibrated streamflows using goodness of fit statistics indicate that the model robustly represents major features of weekly average flows of the historical 1980‐2001 time series. Runs of the model for climate warming scenarios with fixed increases of 2°C, 4°C, and 6°C for the spatial domain were used to analyze changes in snow accumulation and runoff timing. The results indicated a reduction in snowmelt volume that was largest in the 1,750‐2,750 m elevation range. In addition, the runoff center of mass shifted to earlier dates and this shift was non‐uniformly distributed throughout the Sierra Nevada. Because the hydrologic model presented here is nested within a water resources planning system, future research can focus on the management and adaptation of the water resources system in the context of climate change.     

A CALIBRATION PROCEDURE USING TOPMODEL TO DETERMINE SUITABILITY FOR EVALUATING POTENTIAL CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS ON WATER YIELD1

ABSTRACT: An evaluation was conducted on three forested upland watersheds in the northeastern U.S. to test the suitability of TOPMODEL for predicting water yield over a wide range of climatic scenarios. The analysis provides insight of the usefulness of TOPMODEL as a predictive tool for future assessments of potential long-term changes in water yield as a result of changes in global climate. The evaluation was conducted by developing a calibration procedure to simulate a range of climatic extremes using historical temperature, precipitation, and streamfiow records for years having wet, average, and dry precipitation amounts from the Leading Ridge (Pennsylvania), Fernow (West Virginia), and Hubbard Brook (New Hampshire) Experimental Watersheds. This strategy was chosen to determine whether the model could be successfully calibrated over a broad range of soil moisture conditions with the assumption that this would be representative of the sensitivity necessary to predict changes in streamfiow under a variety of climate change scenarios. The model calibration was limited to a daily time step, yet performed reasonably well for each watershed. Model efficiency, a least squares measure of how well a model performs, averaged between 0.64 and 0.78. A simple test of the model whereby daily temperatures were increased by 1.7°C, resulted in annual water yield decreases of 4 to 15 percent on the three watersheds. Although these results makes the assumption that the model components adequately describe the system, this version of TOPMODEL is capable to predict water yield impacts given subtle changes in the temperature regime. This suggests that adequate representations of the effects of climate change on water yield for regional assessment purposes can be expected using the TOPMODEL concept.