scholarly journals Baronnies Provençales Regional Nature Park Pilot Action Region The Benefit of Large-Scale Rockfall Modelling for Developing Efficient Forest-Based Integrative Management of an Alpine Territory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Berger ◽  
Benjamin Einhorn ◽  
Jessica Jarjaye ◽  
David Toe ◽  
Jean-Baptiste Barré ◽  
...  

The choice of a natural risk prevention strategy must be considered at the scale of a territory in order to take into account all its components. Since 2015, France has developed integrated natural risk management (INRM) approaches in Alpine territories. The challenge of INRM lies in the definition and implementation of innovative projects for initiating synergies with respect to natural risks while seeking to increase resilience through the new and different involvement of the territorial actors. The Baronnies Provençales Regional Nature Park is one of the pilot territories for the operational implementation of this approach, with a particular focus on forest-based solutions. For this reason it has been chosen as the French Pilot Action Region (PAR) of the Interreg Alpine Space project GreenRisk4Alps. In this article we present an example of good practice related to the benefit of large-scale rockfall risk modeling, the analysis of potential cascading effects and the added value of a territorial perspective.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
C Rossmann ◽  
F De Bock

Abstract The good practice portal of the Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) consists of a nationwide collection of projects and interventions to promote the health of socially disadvantaged groups at community/setting level. An exchange platform (inforo) is also offered via the operating agency, although its use is still limited. The results of the evaluation of the platform suggest that the provision of practical projects and exchange of knowledge alone is not sufficient to support policy makers and practitioners who want to promote health in the community/setting. There is a need for advice on needs assessment, selection and appropriate implementation of health promotion measures. A comprehensive approach currently being tested in the field of activity promotion for older people is the provision of a web-based “toolbox” comprising the following tools: assessment instruments for analysing the need for health promotion measures, a user-friendly intervention/project database and broader evidence synthesis documents, as well as information on project management (organisational, legal, financial). Following the example of other best practice portals, a ranking methodology was developed to make the level of effectiveness of interventions visible and the evaluation requirements transparent. Evidence synthesis documents provide an entry point to learn more generally what works in a particular area of health promotion. In order to make the “toolbox” accessible to policy-makers and practitioners, information from previous studies was used in the development with regard to content and graphical presentation. BZgA is currently working on integrating evidence into the good practice portal. The evaluation of the toolbox in a small area of health promotion will provide initial insights into the inclusion of evidence and its added value. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of possibilities for improvement, challenges and limitations of this approach.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Schreinemachers ◽  
Wiebe Strick

<p>Should a bridge always be functional and accessible? Should it always fulfil its purpose? This seemingly self- evident question is a key question in footbridge design that is oriented towards creating experiences.</p><p>Footbridges are able to successfully enriches our experience of a certain context or landscape, it cannot be functional all the time, under all environmental conditions, weather and seasons. A good example is the Zalige bridge designed as part of the Room for the River, a large-scale national program for inland flood- protection in the Netherlands. Build upon the floodplains within a newly created river-park by the city of Nijmegen, the Zalige bridge’s curved shape stands in direct relationship to the fluctuating water levels of the river. When water levels rise, the bridge partially submerges, becoming only accessible through steppingstones. At peak heights, the bridge disappears completely, becoming a metaphor for our relationship to the water.</p><p>“Building a bridge that fails to fulfil its sole purpose of containing the water; this can only be pulled off in the Netherlands.” – jury Dutch Design Awards about the Zalige bridge.</p><p>The loss of functionality is directly related to the creation of an experience. When the water levels rose in January 2018, the bridge became the prime location to experience the changing landscape. It shows that engineering a bridge is not solely focussed on the most efficient engineering, but for the purpose it fulfils as for society. For most pedestrian bridges where the perception of the user is on a different level as for a highway bridge, functionality provides more than just cost driven or efficiency driven parameters. It is more related to the added value for the community. When design not solemnly derives from the sheer taste and predilection of the designer but is based on the user’s experience, it generates a durable relation with a feeling of ownership of its users. The key is to create this experience in an elegant and natural way and not forced or dictated. It should be people's own unique discovery and should not be imposed.</p>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Sanchini ◽  
Christine Jandrasits ◽  
Julius Tembrockhaus ◽  
Thomas Andreas Kohl ◽  
Christian Utpatel ◽  
...  

AbstractIntroductionImproving the surveillance of tuberculosis (TB) is especially important for multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR)-TB. The large amount of publicly available whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data for TB gives us the chance to re-use data and to perform additional analysis at a large scale.AimWe assessed the usefulness of raw WGS data of global MDR/XDR-TB isolates available from public repositories to improve TB surveillance.MethodsWe extracted raw WGS data and the related metadata of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates available from the Sequence Read Archive. We compared this public dataset with WGS data and metadata of 131 MDR- and XDR-TB isolates from Germany in 2012-2013.ResultsWe aggregated a dataset that includes 1,081 MDR and 250 XDR isolates among which we identified 133 molecular clusters. In 16 clusters, the isolates were from at least two different countries. For example, cluster2 included 56 MDR/XDR isolates from Moldova, Georgia, and Germany. By comparing the WGS data from Germany and the public dataset, we found that 11 clusters contained at least one isolate from Germany and at least one isolate from another country. We could, therefore, connect TB cases despite missing epidemiological information.ConclusionWe demonstrated the added value of using WGS raw data from public repositories to contribute to TB surveillance. By comparing the German and the public dataset, we identified potential international transmission events. Thus, using this approach might support the interpretation of national surveillance results in an international context.


E-Management ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-74
Author(s):  
Ya. V. Miller

In the last decade unprecedented technological changes have taken place, resulting in the emergence of a fundamentally new economic model. Based on the widespread spread of smartphones, the world has become more “connected”. The digitalization of demand and supply contributed to the creation of entirely new digital markets managed by platform enterprises based on an open business model, that enabled external consumers and producers to connect and interact with each other. A more interconnected world generates vast amounts of data, allowing platform companies to invest in machine learning and artificial intelligence and ultimately improve their efficiency. Finally, a steady digitalization of business processes, markets and global value chains is observed. In these circumstances, approaches to value addition are fundamentally changing in the context of new dimensions of the digital economy, the analysis of which was the purpose of our study. It has been identified, that in the absence of a standardized international methodology for measuring the digital economy, the latter is so far possible on disparate development-left and national statistics. Initiatives taken at the international level to overcome national differential approaches are still insufficient, as there is a lack of statistics and variables related to digital data. It has been revealed, that the lack of quality statistics on key indicators of the digital economy makes it difficult to assess the value added in the world economy scale and international comparisons. Much of the challenges of measuring value added in the digital economy, as shown in the article, are related to the principle of “scale without mass,” the intangible nature of capital, the intense growth of large-scale cross-border data flows, and the emergence of new sources of value creation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (12) ◽  
pp. 2505-2516 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Ochando-Pulido ◽  
A. Martinez-Ferez

Direct disposal of the heavily polluted effluent from olive oil industry (olive mill wastewater, OMW) to the environment or to domestic wastewater treatment plants is actually prohibited in most countries, and conventional treatments are ineffective. Membranes are currently one of the most versatile technologies for environmental quality control. Notwithstanding, studies on OMW reclamation by membranes are still scarce, and fouling inhibition and prediction to improve large-scale membrane performance still remain unresolved. Consequently, adequately targeted pretreatment for the specific binomium membrane-feed, as well as optimized operating conditions for the proper membranes, is today's challenge to ensure threshold flux values. Several membrane materials, configurations and pore sizes have been elucidated, and also different pretreatments including sedimentation, centrifugation, biosorption, sieving, filtration and microfiltration, various types of flocculation as well as advance oxidation processes have been applied so far. Recovery of potential-value compounds, such as a variety of polyphenols highlighting oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol, has been attempted too. All this research should constitute the starting point to proceed with OMW purification beyond recycling for irrigation or depuration for sewer discharge, with the aim of complying with standards to reuse the effluent in the olive oil production process, together with cost-effective recovery of added-value compounds.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manolis G. Grillakis

&lt;p&gt;Remote sensing has proven to be an irreplaceable tool for monitoring soil moisture. The European Space Agency (ESA), through the Climate Change Initiative (CCI), has provided one of the most substantial contributions in the soil water monitoring, with almost 4 decades of global satellite derived and homogenized soil moisture data for the uppermost soil layer. Yet, due to the inherent limitations of many of the remote sensors, only a limited soil depth can be monitored. To enable the assessment of the deeper soil layer moisture from surface remotely sensed products, the Soil Water Index (SWI) has been established as a convolutive transformation of the surface soil moisture estimation, under the assumption of uniform hydraulic conductivity and the absence of transpiration. The SWI uses a single calibration parameter, the T-value, to modify its response over time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here the Soil Water Index (SWI) is calibrated using ESA CCI soil moisture against in situ observations from the International Soil Moisture Network and then use Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to find the best physical soil, climate, and vegetation descriptors at a global scale to regionalize the calibration of the T-value. The calibration is then used to assess a root zone related soil moisture for the period 2001 &amp;#8211; 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The results are compared against the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, ERA5 Land reanalysis soil moisture dataset, showing a good agreement, mainly over mid-latitudes. The results indicate that there is added value to the results of the machine learning calibration, comparing to the uniform T-value. This work contributes to the exploitation of ESA CCI soil moisture data, while the produced data can support large scale soil moisture related studies.&lt;/p&gt;


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Svetlana N. Dvoryatkina ◽  
◽  
Arseny M. Lopukhin ◽  

The study actualized the complex and large-scale problem of adapting the theory of risk man-agement for the education system. A comprehensive analysis of domestic and international stud-ies revealed the lack of a theoretical framework, a general methodological vision of the problem of riskiness and risk-taking in the educational sphere. While effective management of education-al activities, ensuring the development of the competitiveness of the individual in the labor mar-ket and its potential for active participation in the life of society is possible on the basis of the modern paradigm of risk management, integrating achievements in pedagogical, economic, mathematical and computer sciences. A new methodology in the study is the fractal approach, which defines the idea of quantitative and qualitative analysis and assessment of the risk of non-formation of professional competencies, complex educational and cognitive constructs of subject activity. The fractal model of assessing the formation of knowledge and competencies, its risk landscape, taking into account the subject and cognitive divergence, will ensure the effective-ness of the structure of knowledge storage in the educational process, minimizing the time for building space and engineering knowledge bases, and the depth of solving the problem of pre-dicting educational risks. New methods of risk modeling based on machine learning algorithms and factor analysis, methods for constructing neural integrators, quantitative methods with and without taking into account the probability distribution will ensure the accuracy and speed of risk assessment and prediction, will allow one to identify new patterns of risk activity and further ways to develop the theory of risk. The presented effective strategies and innovative tools will solve the problem of minimizing unplanned chaos, the cascade of negative consequences of risky situations, including the COVID-19 epidemic.


Author(s):  
Anna Sell ◽  
Mark de Reuver ◽  
Pirkko Walden ◽  
Christer Carlsson

The added value of mobile services is decided by the context in which they are used. In this paper, the authors study how the context-of-use influences the intention to adopt mobile messaging, entertainment and social media services. While doing so, the authors compare the intended use between males and females. The results are based on a large scale survey study among Finnish consumers. According to the findings, the context-of-use matters for mobile entertainment and messaging services, but not for social media services. Fit with social context is only important for social media services, whilst work-related context matters only for messaging services. In general, context-of-use is more decisive for men than women. However, while ubiquitous context-of-use is much more important for males, social and work context are relevant only for females. The results have important implications for service providers on how to develop and implement specific context-aware mobile services.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Friedrich ◽  
Erhan Kenar ◽  
Oliver Kohlbacher ◽  
Sven Nahnsen

Big data bioinformatics aims at drawing biological conclusions from huge and complex biological datasets. Added value from the analysis of big data, however, is only possible if the data is accompanied by accurate metadata annotation. Particularly in high-throughput experiments intelligent approaches are needed to keep track of the experimental design, including the conditions that are studied as well as information that might be interesting for failure analysis or further experiments in the future. In addition to the management of this information, means for an integrated design and interfaces for structured data annotation are urgently needed by researchers. Here, we propose a factor-based experimental design approach that enables scientists to easily create large-scale experiments with the help of a web-based system. We present a novel implementation of a web-based interface allowing the collection of arbitrary metadata. To exchange and edit information we provide a spreadsheet-based, humanly readable format. Subsequently, sample sheets with identifiers and metainformation for data generation facilities can be created. Data files created after measurement of the samples can be uploaded to a datastore, where they are automatically linked to the previously created experimental design model.


Catalysts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1279
Author(s):  
Manuel Checa ◽  
Sergio Nogales-Delgado ◽  
Vicente Montes ◽  
José María Encinar

Once a biorefinery is ready to operate, the main processed materials need to be completely evaluated in terms of many different factors, including disposal regulations, technological limitations of installation, the market, and other societal considerations. In biorefinery, glycerol is the main by-product, representing around 10% of biodiesel production. In the last few decades, the large-scale production of biodiesel and glycerol has promoted research on a wide range of strategies in an attempt to valorize this by-product, with its transformation into added value chemicals being the strategy that exhibits the most promising route. Among them, C3 compounds obtained from routes such as hydrogenation, oxidation, esterification, etc. represent an alternative to petroleum-based routes for chemicals such as acrolein, propanediols, or carboxylic acids of interest for the polymer industry. Another widely studied and developed strategy includes processes such as reforming or pyrolysis for energy, clean fuels, and materials such as activated carbon. This review covers recent advances in catalysts used in the most promising strategies considering both chemicals and energy or fuel obtention. Due to the large variety in biorefinery industries, several potential emergent valorization routes are briefly summarized.


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