Mortality and other determinants of bird divorce rate

Pair bonds can end in two different ways: either death of the partner or divorce, where the frequency of divorce varies enormously among bird species, from 0% to 100%. To better understand this variation, we created and analyzed the largest dataset so far, consisting of 158 species and 20 variables that quantify the species’ body size, life history, diet, and other characteristics. Our results suggest that species with a high divorce rate have a high mortality rate, tend to be ornamented and sexually dichromatic, live colonially, and form part-time rather than continuous partnerships. Traits quantifying body size or life history are often nonlinearly related with divorce rate. These nonlinearities might (partly) be caused by nonlinear relationships of the same traits with mortality rate which is, in turn, linearly related with divorce rate. In contrast to what has been found previously, mortality rate appears as a key factor for divorce rate in our study. This makes sense, as the likelihood that a partner survives from one year to the next decreases with increasing mortality rate, diminishing the likely success of a partner that attempts to locate its previous partner. We also found taxonomic differences in divorce rate. Specifically, Anseriformes have an exceptionally low divorce rate, which, however, can be explained by the generally important determinants of divorce rate: They also have a lower mortality rate, lower degree of ornamentation and coloniality, and more continuous partnerships than members of other orders. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

塔里木河流域生态脆弱性评价研究

塔里木河流域受自然及人为因素的影响,局部地区生态退化问题突出,从景观生态学的干扰性质理论和恢复生态学的观点出发,选择水资源系统、土地资源系统及植被资源系统及其10个综合性敏感因子对流域生态的敏感性及恢复力进行分析,并确定敏感因子的定量指标,定性代码及其权重和阈值,通过算术对数插值对敏感因子实际值进行规范化处理,并构建生态胁迫度。结果表明,塔里木河三源流阿克苏河流域、叶尔羌河流域、和田河流域及于流区的上、中、下游区生态胁迫度分别为0．13、0．25、0．30、0．31、0．57及0．84,在评价分级标准的限定下,其对应的生态脆弱性程度依次为轻微脆弱、一般脆弱、一般脆弱、一般脆弱、中等脆弱及严重脆弱。     

混合加权模式在环境空气质量评价中的应用

应用混合加权地某城区的环境空气质量进行评价,并与均值型和上海医科大学空气质量指数模式相比较,认为用模型比较多个监测点的环境空气质量的优劣比均值型和上海医科大学指数模式均优越。     

环境影响评价制度现存不足与完善

环境影响评价制度在我国已实行多年,但仍存在某些问题尚需解决和完善,本文从七个方面提出现行制度的不足之处,同时给出相应的改善措施和建议。     

我国现行大气环境影响评价预测模型的若干问题及其改进

我国现行大气环境影响预测评价模型存在以下几个问题:大气混合层高度求算偏低;稳定条件下大气扩散计算结果不合理;模型未考虑非扩散因素影响(干湿沉积、化学转化);非正常排放模型在小风、静风条件下计算结果偏大;熏烟模型计算的不可操作性等。本文针对这些问题提出相应的改进方法,并进行了实例计算。     

沈阳市浑南新区规划战略环境评价中的公众参与

阐述了规划环境评价中公众参与的意义和作用 ,结合沈阳市浑南新区规划环境评价对规划环境评价公众参与的方式方法及相关问题作了探讨     

钛酸锂电池在绝热环境中循环的热响应特性

钛酸锂电池广泛应用于储能系统,其安全性也备受关注。采用加速量热仪与电池循环仪联用技术,对钛酸锂电池在循环过程中的热响应情况进行了研究。研究表明,测试电池在放电和充电阶段均有明显的小幅度温升现象。通过测试电池在不同倍率下的产热情况,发现电池在各循环阶段的绝热产热量与循环倍率成正比,其热失控危险性也随着循环倍率的增大而增加。     

Urban road space allocation incorporating the safety and construction cost impacts of lane and footpath widths

Introduction: Walkability continues to attract great attention from urban planners, designers, and engineers as they recognize not only the merits of pedestrian facilities in terms of the health benefits but also their demerits in terms of accident risk to pedestrians. Wide footpaths improve the pedestrian environment and experience, and thereby motivate travelers to walk as much as possible. However, if footpaths are too wide, they may leave a smaller space for the roadway. On the other hand, wide road lanes may lead to higher road vehicle safety but are costly to construct and maintain and also may leave little space for the footpath. Evidently, for a fixed urban space, what is needed is an optimal balance between the vehicle lane and pedestrian path. This problem is encountered routinely in dense cities including Hong Kong where land availability is severely limited. Method: To address the issue, this paper first establishes safety performance functions (SPFs) for the pedestrian space and the road space, using the random-parameter negative binomial regression. The results indicate the extent to which road lane and footpath width changes are associated with changes in in-vehicle occupant and pedestrian casualties. Then the paper uses the SPFs to develop a methodology for optimizing the width allocations to the road lanes and footpaths, duly considering the user (safety) costs and agency (construction) costs associated with each candidate allocation of the widths. Finally, the paper analyzes the sensitivity of the optimal solution to the relative weights of user cost and agency cost. Results: When user and agency costs are considered equally important, the optimal lane width is 5.4 m. Conclusion: It is observed that the road space allocation ratio used by the Hong Kong road agency suggests that the agency places a higher weight to user cost compared to agency cost. Practical Application: The findings can help incorporate design-safety relationships, and the stakeholders (agency and users) perspectives in urban road and footpath design.     

Rubber tire life cycle assessment and the effect of reducing carbon footprint by replacing carbon black with graphene

This research utilizes real operating data from a tire plant operating in Central Taiwan to investigate the carbon footprint emissions (CO₂e) involved in producing the electric bicycle. The simulation results are based on the PAS 2050 standard using the SimaPro 7.3 software tool. Our results show the total carbon footprint emissions of 1.2-kg tire for the electric bicycle weighing 4.53-kg CO₂e, composed of 2.63-kg CO₂e from raw tire materials stage, 1.295-kg CO₂e from tire manufacturing stage, and 0.605-kg CO₂e from tire transport stage. An international certified organization, British Standard Institute (BSI), verified the accuracy of our results as 98.7%. We found that carbon emissions at the raw materials stage were higher than that for the other two stages – manufacturing and transportation. Carbon black was determined as the maximum source of carbon emissions at the raw material stage. To reduce the tire plant carbon emissions, this paper recommends using graphene to replace carbon black. Graphene has been reported by many researches to improve the properties of rubber products. From our simulation results, the carbon footprint emissions of 4.56-kg CO₂e of the origin tire plant uses 0.456-kg carbon black to produce 1.2-kg electric bicycle tires. This can be reduced to 4.29 (5.92%), 4.03 (11.62%), 3.75 (11.76%), and 3.49-kg CO₂e (23.46%) by using graphene to replace carbon black 25, 50, 75, and 100 wt% respectively. If we focus only on 0.456-kg carbon black producing 1.08-kg CO₂e, the reduced carbon footprint will be 0.812 (24.81%), 0.547 (49.35%), 0.28 (74.07%), and 0.0128-kg CO₂e (98.81%) by using graphene to replace carbon black 25, 50, 75, and 100 wt% respectively. From our analysis, graphene replacing carbon black can reduce carbon footprint. This has not been published previously and provides a direction for the tire plant to save carbon emissions.     

Alternative scenarios to meet the demands of sustainable waste management

This paper analyses different alternatives for solid waste management that can be implemented to enable the targets required by the European Landfill and Packaging and Packaging Waste Directives to be achieved in the Valencian Community, on the east coast of Spain. The methodology applied to evaluate the environmental performance of each alternative is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The analysis has been performed at two levels; first, the emissions accounted for in the inventory stage have been arranged into impact categories to obtain an indicator for each category; and secondly, the weighting of environmental data to a single unit has been applied. Despite quantitative differences between the results obtained with four alternative impact assessment methods, the same preference ranking has been established: scenarios with energy recovery (1v and 2v) achieve major improvements compared to baseline, with scenario 1v being better than 2v for all impact assessment methods except for the EPS'00 method, which obtains better results for scenario 2v. Sensitivity analysis has been used to test some of the assumptions used in the initial life cycle inventory model but none have a significant effect on the overall results. As a result, the best alternative to the existing waste management system can be identified.