关于煤粉工业锅炉的技术分析与政策思考

在技术进步和政策的推动下,煤粉工业锅炉的应用正在形成高潮,但存在技术上的不实宣传和推广政策偏向问题。为使该技术能健康和可持续地发展,本文针对该锅炉的效率、污染物排放、制粉配送、风险和经济效益以及推广政策等方面,做了较深入的研究。研究认为该锅炉有高效节煤、SO2和NOx排放总量下降、集中配送煤粉和锅炉房干净等优点,值得推广;但因粉尘排放总量和浓度上升,综合环保效果处于劣势,同时存在电耗较大、煤源要求苛刻、煤粉储运和使用有风险,及经济效益不确定等问题,因此必须根据全面的技术、环境和经济评价,因地制宜地推广。建议政府采取具体措施,如资助布局优质煤粉供应点,以节能减排实效为资助的依据,鼓励专业锅炉制造厂参与研发和竞争,制定地方和国家有关煤粉工业锅炉的制造、用煤和污染物排放等标准,使该技术不断完善,可持续地发展。     

Characterizing Interpersonal Influence for Grassland Conservation Behaviours in a Unique Population

Interpersonal communication can influence the decisions people make about engaging in conservation behaviours. In-depth interviews with Tibetan pastoralists serve as the basis for examining interpersonal communication patterns and sources of interpersonal influence about grassland conservation behaviours. Herding and family groups are key collectives; salient sources of information vary across types of information. Salient individuals are those with credibility and means control: community leaders, elders, veterinarians, and government officials. Explicit information about conservation comes from religious leaders. The findings have significant implications for understanding the function and nature of interpersonal influence in unique population groups regarding conservation actions.     

Why most conservation monitoring is, but need not be, a waste of time

Ecological conservation monitoring programmes abound at various organisational and spatial levels from species to ecosystem. Many of them suffer, however, from the lack of details of goal and hypothesis formulation, survey design, data quality and statistical power at the start. As a result, most programmes are likely to fail to reach the necessary standard of being capable of rejecting a false null hypothesis with reasonable power. Results from inadequate monitoring are misleading for their information quality and are dangerous because they create the illusion that something useful has been done. We propose that conservation agencies and those funding monitoring work should require the demonstration of adequate power at the outset of any new monitoring scheme.     

Even Conservation Rules Are Made to Be Broken: Implications for Biodiversity

Despite efforts to enclose and control conservation zones around the world, direct human impacts in conservation areas continue, often resulting from clandestine violations of conservation rules through outright poaching, strategic agricultural encroachment, or noncompliance. Nevertheless, next to nothing is actually known about the spatially and temporally explicit patterns of anthropogenic disturbance resulting from such noncompliance. This article reviews current understandings of ecological disturbance and conservation noncompliance, concluding that differing forms of noncompliance hold differing implications for diversity. The authors suggest that forms of anthropogenic patchy disturbance resulting from violation may maintain, if not enhance, floral diversity. They therefore argue for extended empirical investigation of such activities and call for conservation biologists to work with social scientists to assess this conservation reality by analyzing how and when incomplete enforcement and rule-breaking drive ecological change.     

Characterizing Small Subbasins: A Case Study from Coastal Oregon

A fine-grained statisticaly robust probability sample of stream segments is used to compare two small (20,000 hectare) subbasins of the Tillamook watershed, north coastal Oregon. The two subbasins are matched with respect to several variables [size coastal climates], but vary in terms of geology and consequently land use. A total of 67 wadeable + non-wadeable sizes were identified for sampling in the two subbasins (combined) over two field seasons from a sampling universe consisting of the River Reach File 3 (blue lines on 1:100,000 maps). Target variables include an extensive array of physical habitat endpoints, selected water chemistry endpoints, species composition, and relative abundance of both benthic macroinvertebrates and fish. Field protocols generally followed those of the U.S. EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP).Eleven fish species were encountered, a typically low number for coastal Oregon streams. Exploratory analysis using nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed that 92.4% of the variation in the fish assemblages could be explained with two ordination axes. Environmental factors related to stream size and substate were the most correlated to these axes. Further, stream segments for the two subbasins tended to map in different areas of species space. Therefore, we also give unweighted probability distributions for several of the factors that heavily on these two axes by subbasins, as well as probability distributions for chemical endpoints. Results from the subset of sites sampled during the first year (21 wadeable sites) reveal: 1) differences between samples from the two subbasins relates to dream size and substrate composition that are consistent with known differences in geology and land use, 2) unexpectedly minor differences between samples from the two subbasins for stream temperature, canopy cover, and dissolved oxygen, 3) differences between samples from the two subbasins for total P, and total N, possibly related to land use, and 4) unexpected differences in samples from the two subbasins for conductivity, probably related to geological factors. Sample size for each subbasin is low and therefore our samples cannot be taken to necessarily characterize either subbasin. However, our findings are consistent with a comprehensive assessment that had been previously produced for one of the two subbasins.All field work was completed in 8 weeks 3-person field crew. We conclude that rapid assessment protocols, based on probability samples at this level of resolution, can be a cost-effective approach to watershed analysis. This approach should be seen as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, systematic surveys that produced finer scale, reach specific information on factors such as channel complexity and cover relevant to in-stream restoration planning.     

Simulating population variation and movement within fragmented landscapes: An application to the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus)

As the human activity footprint grows, land-use decisions play an increasing role in determining the future of plant and animal species. Studies have shown that urban and agricultural development cannot only harm species populations directly through habitat destruction, but also by destroying the corridors that connect habitat patches and populations within a metapopulation. Without these pathways, populations can encounter inbreeding depression and degeneration, which can increase death rates and lower rates of reproduction. This article describes the development and application of the FRAGGLE model, a spatial system dynamics model designed to calculate connectivity indices among populations. FRAGGLE can help planners and managers identify the relative contribution of populations associated with habitat patches to future populations in those patches, taking into account the importance of interstitial land to migration success. The model is applied to the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus), a threatened species whose southeastern U.S. distribution has diminished significantly within its native range due to agricultural and urban development over the last several decades. This model is parameterized with life history and movement traits of the gopher tortoise in order to simulate population demographics and spatial distribution within an area in west-central Georgia that supports a significant tortoise population. The implications of this simulation modeling effort are demonstrated using simple landscape representations and a hypothetical on land-use management scenario. Our findings show that development resulting in even limited habitat losses (10%) may lead to significant increases in fragmentation as measured by a loss in the rate of dispersions (31%) among area subpopulations.     

Incorporating consumer–resource spatial interactions in reserve design

The persistence of species in reserves depends in large part on the persistence of functional ecological interactions. Despite their importance, however, ecological interactions have not yet been explicitly incorporated into conservation prioritization methods. We develop here a general method for incorporating consumer–resource interactions into spatial reserve design. This method protects spatial consumer–resource interactions by protecting areas that maintain the connectivity between the distribution of consumers and resources. We illustrate our method with a conservation planning case study of a mammalian predator, American marten (Martes americana), and its two primary prey species, Red-backed vole (Clethrionomys rutilus) and Deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). The conservation goal was to identify a reserve for marten that comprised 12% of a forest management unit in the boreal forest in Québec, Canada. We compared reserves developed using analysis variants that utilized different levels of information about predator and prey habitat distributions, species-specific connectivity requirements, and interaction connectivity requirements. The inclusion of consumer–resource interactions in reserve-selection resulted in spatially aggregated reserves that maintained local habitat quality for the species. This spatial aggregation was not induced by applying a qualitative penalty for the boundary length of the reserve, but rather was a direct consequence of modelling the spatial needs of the interacting consumer and resources. Our method for maintaining connectivity between consumers and their resources within reserves can be applied even under the most extreme cases of either complete spatial overlap or complete spatial segregation of consumer–resource distributions. The method has been made available via public software.     

The distribution and habitat preference of coastally occurring minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) in the outer southern Moray Firth, northeast Scotland

The coastal waters of the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland (57o41’N 2o40’W) provide rich, inshore feeding grounds for minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) during the summer and autumnal months. In order to better understand the habitat selection, movements and feeding ecology of the animals utilising this North Sea region, distribution data from the southern coastline of the outer Moray Firth were subsequently examined with respect to the marine physiography of the area, specifically the environmental variables water depth, slope, aspect and sediment-type. A total of 305 minke whale encounters – collected from dedicated boat surveys conducted between May and October 2001 to 2006 inclusive – were used in the construction of a Geographic Information System (GIS) for the 860 square-km study site. The subsequent analysis revealed a strong spatial preference by whales in this location for water depths between 20 and 50 metres (mean 46.9 m, SD = 30.9), steep slopes (mean 75.7 degrees, SD = 8.9), a northerly-facing aspect and sandy-gravel sediment type. Kruskal-Wallis tests for variance confirmed that the distribution of B. acutorostrata was significantly different across each of these physiographic features examined (P < 0.05). In particular, water depth and sediment type were shown to be highly correlated with the frequency of whales observed (Spearman’s Rank Correlation P < 0.05 for depth and sediment respectively). From these results, we conclude that sea bottom characteristics may be used to predict the fine-scale distribution of minke whales on their feeding grounds; the physiographic features identified providing valuable proxies for inferring prey distributions in the absence of fisheries data. However, an appreciation of both abiotic and biotic factors (using a combination of GIS and remote sensing outputs) is clearly desirable for ecosystem-based management approaches for the coastal conservation of these whales. The application of GIS capacities to ecological studies based largely on field data of these marine mammals is highly recommended in the present study to cetologists, environmental modellers and conservation managers alike.     

Effects of Natural Disasters on Conservation Policies: The Case of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake,China

Conservation policies are increasing in response to human-induced ecosystem degradation, but little is known about their interplay with natural disasters. Through an analysis of satellite imagery and field data we evaluated the impacts of a devastating earthquake on forest recovery and avoided forest loss estimated to have been obtained by two of the largest conservation programs in the world. Results show that more than 10% of the forests in Wenchuan County, Sichuan province, China were immediately affected by the 2008 earthquake, offsetting some gains in forest cover observed since the enactment of the conservation programs. But without the enactment of these conservation programs, the combined effects of human disturbance and earthquake-induced landslides could have severely reduced the region’s forest cover. The continuation—and enhancement—of incentives for participation in conservation programs will be important for reducing the environmental impacts of the combined effects of human disturbance and natural hazards not only in the study area but also in many disaster-prone regions around the world.