Comparative study of four QSAR models of aromatic compounds to aquatic organisms

Quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs)were developed for 43 aromatic compounds toxicity to Photobacterium phosphoreum and Daphnia magna based on four methods: octanol/water partition coefficient, linear solvation energy relationship, molecular connectivity index and group contribution. Through the evaluation of four QSAR methods, LSER was proved to be the best. And it applied to the widest range of chemicals with the greatest accuracy.     

珠江口区域海上溢漏污染物动态预测系统的开发与应用

为了对《珠江口区域溢油应急计划》提供决策支持,在国内外最新研究成果基础上,针对珠江口海域的环境特点研究开发了先进实用的“珠江口区域海上溢漏污染动态预测系统”,综合有三维潮流模型、三维溢油与化学品漂移扩散模型、溢油风化模型、应急反应模型、以及电子海图、地理信息系统(GIS)、数据库等关键技术,能够快速准确地预测并可视化显示不同种类的溢漏油品、化学品在水面及水体中的漂移扩散范同和性质变化过程,还可以同时显示环境敏感区和应急人员设备分布等相关信息。经实际溢油案例应用表明,系统的预测结果与现场实际情况相符。此系统的成功开发应用将有效地提高对船舶污染事故的应急指挥效率。     

Analysing countries’ contribution to climate change: scientific and policy-related choices

This paper evaluates the influence of different policy-related and scientific choices on the calculated regional contributions to global climate change (the “Brazilian Proposal”). Policy-related choices include the time period of emissions, the mix of greenhouse gases and different indicators of climate change impacts. The scientific choices include historical emissions and model representations of the climate system. We generated and compared results of several simple climate models. We find that the relative contributions of different nations to global climate change—from emissions of greenhouse gases alone—are quite robust, despite the varying model complexity and differences in calculated absolute changes. For the default calculations, the average calculated contributions to the global mean surface temperature increase in 2000 are about 40% from OECD, 14% from Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union, 24% from Asia and 22% from Africa and Latin America. Policy-related choices, such as time period of emissions, climate change indicator and gas mix generally have larger influence on the results than scientific choices. More specifically, choosing a later attribution start date (1990 instead of 1890) for historical emissions, decreases the contributions of regions that started emitting early, such as the OECD countries by 6 percentage points, whereas it increases the contribution of late emitters such as Asia by 8 percentage points. However, only including the fossil CO₂ emissions instead of the emissions of all Kyoto gases (fossil and land use change), increases the OECD contributions by 21 percentage points and decreases the contribution of Asia by 14 percentage points.     

北京市大气环境二氧化硫浓度分布初探

利用北京市大气自动监测系统冬季逐时二氧化硫浓度监测资料，分析研究了对数正态分布，Ｗｅｉｂｕｌｌ分布，指数分布等常用分布模型对监测资料人布推迟合的适用性，并估算出各种分布模型的参数值。研究发现城区及高百分位数二氧化硫浓度频率分布符合Ｗｅｉｂｕｌｌ分布，近郊及背景站的浓度分布符合常用的对数正态分布，二氧化硫浓度的频率分布不符合指数分布规律。     

A frontier model for landscape ecology: the tapir in Honduras

We borrow a frontier specification from the econometrics literature to make inferences about the tolerance of the tapir to human settlements. We estimate the width of an invisible band surrounding human settlements which would act as a frontier or exclusion zone to the tapir to be around 290 metres.     

Dynamic multi-resolution spatial models

Data from remote-sensing platforms play an important role in monitoring environmental processes, such as the distribution of stratospheric ozone. Remote-sense data are typically spatial, temporal, and massive. Existing prediction methods such as kriging are computationally infeasible. The multi-resolution spatial model (MRSM) captures nonstationary spatial dependence and produces fast optimal estimates using a change-of-resolution Kalman filter. However, past data can provide valuable information about the current status of the process being investigated. In this article, we incorporate the temporal dependence into the process by developing a dynamic MRSM. An application of the dynamic MRSM to a month of daily total column ozone data is presented, and on a given day the results of posterior inference are compared to those for the spatial-only MRSM. It is apparent that there are advantages to using the dynamic MRSM in regions where data are missing, such as when a whole swath of satellite data is missing.     

Spatio-temporal Analysis of Acute Admissions for Ischemic Heart Disease in NSW,Australia

The recently funded Spatial Environmental Epidemiology in New South Wales (SEE NSW) project aims to use routinely collected data in NSW Australia to investigate risk factors for various chronic diseases. In this paper, we present a case study focused on the relationship between social disadvantage and ischemic heart disease to highlight some of the methodological challenges that are likely to arise.     

Pattern formation and individual-based models: The importance of understanding individual-based movement

This paper demonstrates that while pattern formation can stabilize individual-based models of predator–prey systems, the same individual-based models also allow for stabilization by alternate mechanisms, particularly localized consumption or diffusion limitation. The movement rules of the simulation are the critical feature which determines which of these mechanisms stabilizes any particular predator–prey individual-based model. In particular, systems from well-connected subpopulations, in each of which a predator can attack any prey, generally exhibit stabilization by pattern formation. In contrast, when restricted movement within a (sub-)population limits the ability of predators to consume prey, localized consumption or diffusion limitation can stabilize the system. Thus while the conclusions from differential equations on the role of pattern formation for stability may apply to discrete and noisy systems, it will take a detailed understanding of movement and scales of interaction to examine the role of pattern formation in real systems. Additionally, it will be important to link an understanding of both foraging and inter-patch movement, since by analogy to the models, both would be critical for understanding how real systems are stabilized by being discrete and spatial.     

Some Interpolation Estimators in Environmental Risk Assessment for Spatially Misaligned Health Data

Ecological regression studies are widely used in geographical epidemiology to assess the relationships between health hazard and putative risk factors. Very often, health data are measured at an aggregate level because of confidentiality restrictions, while putative risk factors are measured on a different grid, i.e., independent (exposure) variable and response (counts) variable are spatially misaligned. To perform a regression of risk on exposure, one needs to realign the spatial support of the variables. Bayesian hierarchical models constitute a natural approach to the problem because of their ability to model the exposure field and the relationship between exposure and relative risk at different levels of the hierarchy, taking proper account of the variability induced by the covariate estimation. In the current paper, we propose two fully Bayesian solutions to the problem. The first one is based on the kernel-smoothing technique, while the second one is built on the tessellation of the study region. We illustrate our methods by assessing the relationship between exposure to uranium in drinkable waters and cancer incidence, in South Carolina (USA).     

Comparisons between air-transport models via bootstrapped significance tests

The bootstrap resampling method is used to help with the intercomparison of air transport models. Time-by-time analysis of variance and follow up simultaneous comparisons are proposed which do not rely on distributional assumptions for the predictions of the models and which allow errors to be postulated in the observed values of the phenomena under investigation. The techniques are demonstrated using some data from the APSIS experiment.