矿化垃圾作回灌型准好氧填埋场日覆盖材料的适宜性研究

本文在对矿化垃圾的基本性质进行测定的基础上,将其作为填埋场覆盖材料进行室内模拟实验.结果显示:经过筛分后的矿化垃圾细料可作为回灌型准好氧填埋场的日覆盖材料,除了具有日覆盖材料的常规功能外,还有净化渗滤液的能力;矿化垃圾对渗滤液中污染物的净化能力优于普通砂土;矿化垃圾作日覆盖材料的最佳粒度为d≤3mm,最优厚度为13cm,双层结构对污染物的净化能力优于单层结构.所以矿化垃圾是一种性能良好的日覆盖替代材料.     

Flooding in Texas: Examination of Temporal Changes and Impacts of Tropical Cyclones

Annual maximum peak discharge measurements from 62 stations with a record of at least 70 years are used to assess extreme flooding in Texas at the regional scale. This work focuses on examination of the validity of the stationarity assumption and on the impact of tropical cyclones (TCs) on the upper tail of the flood peak distribution. We assess the validity of the stationarity assumption by testing the records for abrupt and gradual changes. The presence of abrupt changes in the first two moments of the flood peak distribution is assessed using the Lombard test. We use the Mann‐Kendall test to examine the presence of monotonic trends. Results indicate that violations of the stationarity assumption are most commonly caused by abrupt changes, which are often associated with river regulation. We fit the time series of stationary flood records with the generalized extreme value distribution to investigate whether TCs control the upper tail of the flood peak distribution. Our results indicate that TCs play a diminished role in shaping the upper tail of the flood peak distribution compared with areas of the eastern United States subject to frequent TCs.     

Winter bird use of seed-rich habitats in agri-environment schemes

To assess the effectiveness of over-winter seed provision by agri-environment schemes, bird use of patches of seed-bearing crops was compared with that of other seed-rich habitats on 53 farms in eastern Scotland over three winters. Seed-bearing crops were the most frequently selected habitat, and held 28% of birds of the 10 species recorded. Outside schemes, cereal stubble was the most selected habitat and held 44% of birds. For nine species, seed-bearing crops were used by more birds than expected from the area of crop available in at least one winter, and five species were more likely to occur in first-winter patches, reflecting a greater abundance of cereal grain than in second-winter patches. For cereal grain specialists such as buntings, sowing cereal-based crops annually would ensure that grain is available in each winter, whilst either a 1-year or a 2-year crop would be appropriate for finches that favour oilseeds, and species with a more generalist diet.     

Optimizing model for land use/land cover retrieval from remote sensing imagery based on variable precision rough sets

The suitable spectral mode in remote sensing is often desirable to facilitate the inversion of ecological environment and landscape. This paper put forward an optimizing model based on variable precision rough sets (VPRS) for the land cover discrimination in wetland inventory. In the case study of Lake Baiyangdian which has important ecological functions to the northern China, this model is established successfully according to the domain-experts knowledge. The procedure is as follows. First step is data collection, including remote-sensing data (e.g., Landsat-5 TM bands), the digitized relief maps, and statistical yearbooks. Second, the remote sensing imagery (RSI) and relief maps are co-registered into the same resolution. Third, a condition set, including various attributes is derived from spectral bands, band math or ratio indices based on previous studies, at the same time, the decision set is derived from true land types after investigation and validation. Then, the remote sensing decision table (RSDT) is constructed by linking condition set with decision set according to the sequential pixels in RSI. Fourth, we create one forward greedy searching algorithm based on VPRS to handle this RSDT. After adjusting parameters such as β and knowledge granularity diameter (KGD), we obtain the stable optimized results. Comparative experiments and evaluation show that the discrimination or retrieval accuracy of VPRS model is satisfying (overall accuracy: 87.32% and KHAT: 0.84) and better than original data. Moreover, data dimension has been decreased dramatically (from 12 to 3) and key attributes found by the model may be useful for specific retrieval in wetland inventories.     

Examining Flood Frequency Distributions in the Midwest U.S.1

Villarini, Gabriele, James A. Smith, Mary Lynn Baeck, and Witold F. Krajewski, 2011. Examining Flood Frequency Distributions in the Midwest U.S. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(3):447‐463. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752‐1688.2011.00540.x Abstract: Annual maximum peak discharge time series from 196 stream gage stations with a record of at least 75 years from the Midwest United States is examined to study flood peak distributions from a regional point of view. The focus of this study is to evaluate: (1) “mixtures” of flood peak distributions, (2) upper tail and scaling properties of the flood peak distributions, and (3) presence of temporal nonstationarities in the flood peak records. Warm season convective systems are responsible for some of the largest floods in the area, in particular in Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa. Spring events associated with snowmelt and rain‐on‐snow are common in the northern part of the study domain. Nonparametric tests are used to investigate the presence of abrupt and slowly varying changes. Change‐points rather than monotonic trends are responsible for most violations of the stationarity assumption. The abrupt changes in flood peaks can be associated with anthropogenic changes, such as changes in land use/land cover, agricultural practice, and construction of dams. The trend analyses do not suggest an increase in the flood peak distribution due to anthropogenic climate change. Examination of the upper tail and scaling properties of the flood peak distributions are examined by means of the location, scale, and shape parameters of the Generalized Extreme Value distribution.     

Pressure cookers or pressure valves: Do roads lead to deforestation in China?

The effect of roads on forests is ambiguous. Many studies conclude that building and upgrading roads increases pressure on forests but some find that new and better roads may reduce the rate of deforestation. In this paper we use satellite remote sensing images of forest cover in Jiangxi Province, China, to test whether the existence and the size of roads (ranging from expressways to tertiary roads) in 1995 affected the level of forest cover in 2000 or the rate of change between 1995 and 2000. To account for road access for each of our 1 km² (“pixel”) units of forest cover we measure whether or not and what type of roads penetrate the “watershed” in which the pixel lies. These watersheds allow more plausible measures of accessibility than do traditional “crowfly” distance measures that ignore topography. To account for possible confounding we also use 12 additional covariates: geographic and climatic variables (e.g., elevation, slope, rainfall, temperature, soil properties); demographic and economic variables (e.g., local population and GDP per square kilometer); and distance variables (e.g., distance to the nearest provincial capital). Although simple univariate OLS regressions show that forest levels are lower and deforestation rates higher either when there is a road, or when there is a higher quality road, these results are not robust. Controlling for all of the covariates and also using recently developed covariate matching techniques to estimate treatment effects, we find that roads in China’s Jiangxi Province can most safely be described as having no impact on the level of forests and no impact on the rate of deforestation.     

季节性雪被对青藏高原东缘高寒草甸土壤氮矿化的影响

依据自然雪被分布的差异,在青藏高原东缘高寒草甸中设置3条样带(即深雪、中等厚度雪被和浅雪),于2008年的秋冬过渡期,连续监测各样带中的雪被厚度和土壤温度,并采用原位培养法测定每月的土壤氮素氨化、硝化和矿化速率,以研究不同厚度雪被对高寒草甸土壤氮矿化的影响.结果表明,月均土温、每月日最高土温均值分别与雪被厚度极显著相关,二次函数关系拟合较好(R2=0.576,0.685),且根据每月日最高土温均值与雪被厚度的二次函数关系方程可知,25 cm厚的雪被可以起到较好的隔绝效果;土壤含水量受雪被厚度和土壤温差两个因素的显著影响.在秋冬过渡期末,浅雪梯度下土壤硝态氮含量显著降低,且雪被下的净氮矿化速率与月均土温、每月日最高土温均值、每月日最低土温均值都分别呈极显著相关,二次函数关系拟合较好(R2=0.589,0.541,0.601).研究表明,不同厚度的雪被对土壤温度和含水量影响显著,从而显著地影响着土壤氮的矿化,深雪更有利于氨化、硝化和氮矿化.图7表2参36     

Effects of Climate and Land Cover on Hydrology in the Southeastern U.S.: Potential Impacts on Watershed Planning

The hydrologic response to statistically downscaled general circulation model simulations of daily surface climate and land cover through 2099 was assessed for the Apalachicola‐Chattahoochee‐Flint River Basin located in the southeastern United States. Projections of climate, urbanization, vegetation, and surface‐depression storage capacity were used as inputs to the Precipitation‐Runoff Modeling System to simulate projected impacts on hydrologic response. Surface runoff substantially increased when land cover change was applied. However, once the surface depression storage was added to mitigate the land cover change and increases of surface runoff (due to urbanization), the groundwater flow component then increased. For hydrologic studies that include projections of land cover change (urbanization in particular), any analysis of runoff beyond the change in total runoff should include effects of stormwater management practices as these features affect flow timing and magnitude and may be useful in mitigating land cover change impacts on streamflow. Potential changes in water availability and how biota may respond to changes in flow regime in response to climate and land cover change may prove challenging for managers attempting to balance the needs of future development and the environment. However, these models are still useful for assessing the relative impacts of climate and land cover change and for evaluating tradeoffs when managing to mitigate different stressors.     

Conservation Threats Due to Human-Caused Increases in Fire Frequency in Mediterranean-Climate Ecosystems

Periodic wildfire is an important natural process in Mediterranean-climate ecosystems, but increasing fire recurrence threatens the fragile ecology of these regions. Because most fires are human-caused, we investigated how human population patterns affect fire frequency. Prior research in California suggests the relationship between population density and fire frequency is not linear. There are few human ignitions in areas with low population density, so fire frequency is low. As population density increases, human ignitions and fire frequency also increase, but beyond a density threshold, the relationship becomes negative as fuels become sparser and fire suppression resources are concentrated. We tested whether this hypothesis also applies to the other Mediterranean-climate ecosystems of the world. We used global satellite databases of population, fire activity, and land cover to evaluate the spatial relationship between humans and fire in the world's five Mediterranean-climate ecosystems. Both the mean and median population densities were consistently and substantially higher in areas with than without fire, but fire again peaked at intermediate population densities, which suggests that the spatial relationship is complex and nonlinear. Some land-cover types burned more frequently than expected, but no systematic differences were observed across the five regions. The consistent association between higher population densities and fire suggests that regardless of differences between land-cover types, natural fire regimes, or overall population, the presence of people in Mediterranean-climate regions strongly affects the frequency of fires; thus, population growth in areas now sparsely settled presents a conservation concern. Considering the sensitivity of plant species to repeated burning and the global conservation significance of Mediterranean-climate ecosystems, conservation planning needs to consider the human influence on fire frequency. Fine-scale spatial analysis of relationships between people and fire may help identify areas where increases in fire frequency will threaten ecologically valuable areas.     

INFLUENCES OF WATERSHED,RIPARIAN‐CORRIDOR,AND REACH‐SCALE CHARACTERISTICS ON AQUATIC BIOTA IN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHEDS1

ABSTRACT: Multivariate analyses and correlations revealed strong relations between watershed and riparian‐corridor land cover, and reach‐scale habitat versus fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages in 38 warmwater streams in eastern Wisconsin. Watersheds were dominated by agricultural use, and ranged in size from 9 to 71 km² Watershed land cover was summarized from satellite‐derived data for the area outside a 30‐m buffer. Riparian land cover was interpreted from digital orthophotos within 10‐, 10‐to 20‐, and 20‐to 30‐m buffers. Reach‐scale habitat, fish, and macroinvertebrates were collected in 1998 and biotic indices calculated. Correlations between land cover, habitat, and stream‐quality indicators revealed significant relations at the watershed, riparian‐corridor, and reach scales. At the watershed scale, fish diversity, intolerant fish and EPT species increased, and Hilsenhoff biotic index (HBI) decreased as percent forest increased. At the riparian‐corridor scale, EPT species decreased and HBI increased as riparian vegetation became more fragmented. For the reach, EPT species decreased with embeddedness. Multivariate analyses further indicated that riparian (percent agriculture, grassland, urban and forest, and fragmentation of vegetation), watershed (percent forest) and reach‐scale characteristics (embeddedness) were the most important variables influencing fish (IBI, density, diversity, number, and percent tolerant and insectivorous species) and macroinvertebrate (HBI and EPT) communities.