Environmental Effect

The environmental effects of the three strawberry (Fragaria ×ananassa) cold-climate production systems were compared: the traditional method of conventional matted row (CMR) and the two more recently developed practices of advanced matted row (AMR) and cold-climate plasticulture (CCP). Side-by-side field plots were instrumented with automated flow meters and samplers to measure and collect runoff, which was filtered and analyzed to determine soil, pesticide, and nitrogen losses. Although annual mean runoff volumes were similar for all three production systems, the soil losses from CMR plots were two to three times greater than the CCP plots throughout the study and two to three times greater than the AMR plots only in the first year of the 3-year study. In general, decreases in erosion and runoff volumes were observed in plots that were disturbed less by machine operations and had less foot traffic as a result of decreased need for hand weeding and in the plots that used straw mulch...

Significant recent attention has been given to quantifying the environmental impacts of international trade. However, the United States, despite being the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and having large recent growth in international trade, has seen little analysis. This work uses a multi-country input-output model of the US and its seven largest trading partners (Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, the UK, and Korea) to analyze the environmental effects of changes to US trade structure and volume from 1997 to 2004. ...

Woodleigh is a recently discovered impact structure with a diameter of 120 km, and thereby represents the third largest proven Phanerozoic impact structure known after Morocweng and Chicxulub. K-Ar isotopic studies of fine-grained authigenic illitic clay minerals (<2 μm), considered to be impact-induced hydrothermal alteration products, indicate a Late Devonian (359±4 Ma) age for the impact. Other evidence reported for Late Devonian extraterrestrial impacts include the strong iridium anomaly in the Canning Basin, Western Australia, and microtektites and elemental anomalies (including iridium) in South China. Given the large diameter of the Woodleigh impact structure and its relative proximity to iridium anomalies also of Late Devonian age in eastern Gondwana basins, environmental effects of the Woodleigh impact event are a likely contributor to a biotic crisis in the Late Devonian.

Ensuring acceptance of dedicated biomass feedstocks by landowners, agricultural communities, environmental and public interest groups, requires that the environmental benefits, concerns, and risks associated with their production be quantified. Establishment and management measures to benefit soil and water quality are being identified by ongoing research. Field studies are showing that nutrients are retained within the rooting zone of dedicated feedstocks, subsurface herbicide transport does not occur, and off-site chemical transport is minimal compared with traditional agricultural crops. The amounts and timing of fertilizer application were critical to minimizing off- site transport of nutrients. Maintaining soil cover decreased runoff, sediment losses, and nutrient transport compared with traditional agricultural crops. Conversion of traditional croplands to biomass and no-till crop production improved soil quality and soil carbon storage. Subsurface nutrient losses were less fr...

The need of performing immunity tests with the aim of meeting the functional safety requirements is addressed proposing an approach based upon the statistical data processing of test results, which allows to determine the susceptibility threshold of the device under test (DUT) and its safety margin intended as the distance between the actual DUT performance in the presence of the susceptibility signal and the susceptibility threshold. This represents a clear improvement with respect to the present situation of EMC standards based upon simple qualitative checks, which do not offer any warranty of safety because it is not clear how far the DUT is from its susceptibility threshold: even if the device under test is declared to be immune in normal operative conditions it may happen that a simple environmental effect such as temperature variation has catastrophic consequences.

The vision of the Gulf Coast Carbon Center is to seek to impact global levels of GHG in the atmosphere by doing science and engineering studies that will support reduction of CO2 emissions and enable the development of an economically viable, multifaceted, CO2 sequestration industry in the Gulf Coast. This industrial-academic consortium is investigating issues related to assessing the pathways that would make capture and pipeline transportation economically feasible and environmentally effective within a specific regional context. Key issues considered are capture in the context of the current market, pipeline infrastructure, the role of enhanced oil recovery, and permanence in a basin with many wells. .

The destruction due to computer security incidents warns organizations to adopt security measures. In addition to technological measures, individual’s information security awareness is also necessary. Different psychological theories have been proposed to make an effective information security awareness campaign. These information security awareness campaigns are limited in their ability in raising awareness of the participants of the campaign. Although much research has been done in the area of information security awareness, however, this paper considers the applications of healthcare awareness and environmental awareness strategies to make an effective information security awareness campaign. In this paper, we study some of the useful research work conducted in the healthcare and environmental safety awareness domains. These researches have been carried out by well-known researchers in the field of psychology. Finally, we apply these healthcare and environmental awareness best practices to propose an effective information security awareness campaign.

Iran&apos;s simple and environmentally extended commodity by commodity input-output (IO) model was used to determine the impacts of dietary changes on the Iranian economy and on the environmental load. The original model is based on the status-quo diet and was modified to include the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and Mediterranean alternative dietary scenarios. A range of impacts occurred depending upon the relative changes in food items. The direction of changes was similar in the three alternative scenarios. The greatest and smallest impact occurred in the WHO and the Mediterranean scenarios respectively. Total changes in output in WHO, WCRF and Mediterranean dietary scenarios were calculated to be 7010.1, 4802.8 and 3330.8 billion Rials respectively. The outputs of rice, vegetables, fruit, bread and macaroni decreased, but those of live and other animal products increased. The output of non-food commodities and services increased as well. ...

This paper addresses the thermal performance of the building housing the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, FAU-USP. The interest generated in assessing the environmental performance of such a building is based on its iconic value and the unique architectural composition in which internal spaces were conceived to have physical and environmental features in response

The environmental effect of globalization has been discussed broadly in the last decades. In the European Environ- mental Agency&#x27;s third assessment of Europe&#x27;s Environment they conclude that the EU has stabilized its own resource use at the expense of increased resource use outside the EU. On this background I argue that there is a need for life cycle assessments of different patterns of global production and consumption. This article discusses the system delimi- tation of such &quot;global&quot; LCAs on large material flows in the case of agriculture. The discussion of system boundaries in LCA has been in focus in recent years. The issue of concern is based on the hypothesis, that the approach to system delimitation has a significant effect on the results of a comparative LCA on large material flows on the global scale. More specifically the two approaches of concern are traditional attributional approach and the consequential approach, described in Weidema (2003). Thus, ...

Stuttering is a developmental disorder of speech production that usually emerges in childhood. In this study, a large population-based twin sample from the Australian Twin Registry (1567 pairs and 634 singles aged 17–29 years) was screened to identify twin pairs in which one or both members reported themselves to be affected by stuttering. Telephone interview-based diagnoses were obtained for 457 of these individuals (self-reported affected cases, cotwins, and controls) to determine whether the self-report was correct. To correct ...

The increasing demand for more fuel efficiency and environmentally friendly cars coupled with the consumers&#39; drive for more comfort, safety and luxury has led to the introduction of more electrical and electronic systems in the passenger car. This is further impacted by the current trend in automotive industry to replace mechanical and hydraulic systems with their electrical counterparts. The handling

Greek port cities find themselves in a profound and encompassing change as they try to improve their image and confront the competition for advanced port services and facilities and the need for urban revitalization. As port functions are increasingly relocated towards the outskirts of port cities, disadvantaged neighbourhoods and docks are turned into modern housing and commercial areas or cultural

Transportation projects will have impact on the environment. The general environmental pollution and damage caused by roads is closely associated with the level of economic activity. Although Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) are dependent on geo-spatial information in order to make an assessment, there are no rules per se how to conduct an environmental assessment. Also, the particular objective of each assessment is dictated case-by-case, based on what information and analyses are required. The conventional way of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study is a time consuming process because it has large number of dependent and independent variables which have to be taken into account, which also have different consequences. With the emergence of satellite remote sensing technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this research presents a new framework for the analysis phase of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for transportation projects based on the integration between remote sensing technology, geographic information systems, and spatial modeling. By integrating the merits of the map overlay method and the matrix method, the framework analyzes comprehensively the environmental vulnerability around the road and its impact on the environment. This framework is expected to: (1) improve the quality of the decision making process, (2) be applied both to urban and inter-urban projects, regardless of transport mode, and (3) present the data and make the appropriate analysis to support the decision of the decision-makers and allow them to present these data to the public hearings in a simple manner. Case studies, transportation projects in the State of Florida, were analyzed to illustrate the use of the decision support framework and demonstrate its capabilities. This cohesive and integrated system will facilitate rational decisions through cost effective coordination of environmental information and data management that can be tailored to specific projects. The framework would facilitate collecting, organizing, analyzing, archiving, and coordinating the information and data necessary to support technical and policy transportation decisions.