“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community     

Dominic?Odwa?AtariEmail author  Isaac?Luginaah  Jamie?Baxter 《GeoJournal》2011,76(5):483-500

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.  相似文献   

Air-based measurements of permeability in pebbly sands     

Conrad CM  Ritzi RW  Dominic DF 《Ground water》2008,46(1):103-112

We considered small-scale measurement of permeability in pebbly sands having coarser grains supported in a finer grained matrix (fine packing). Our central question was whether air-based measurements are representative if made with a permeameter tip seal pressed in the sand matrix. We created pebbly sands and variably sorted sands, with systematic variation in aspects of their fine packing. We made permeability measurements by inserting the tip seal of an air permeameter in the matrix of these samples and compared them to the permeability of the composite sample determined by both water-based methods and theory. The air-permeameter measurements made in this way represent the permeability of the composite mixtures of coarser and finer grains and allow for the discernment of permeability between samples with different matrix compositions, ranging from fine to coarse sand. Furthermore, the collective results show that permeability differences in the pebbly sands and variably sorted sands with fine packing, however measured, are primarily due to differences in matrix permeability and not due to differences in the size or the percentage of the coarser grains.  相似文献   

A simplified model for lateral response of large diameter caisson foundations—Linear elastic formulation     

Varun  Dominic Assimaki  George Gazetas 《Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering》2009

The transient response of large embedded foundation elements of length-to-diameter aspect ratio D/B=2–6 is characterized by a complex stress distribution at the pier–soil interface that cannot be adequately represented by means of existing models for shallow foundations or flexible piles. On the other hand, while three-dimensional (3D) numerical solutions are feasible, they are infrequently employed in practice due to their associated cost and effort. Prompted by the scarcity of simplified models for design in current practice, we here develop an analytical model that accounts for the multitude of soil resistance mechanisms mobilized at their base and circumference, while retaining the advantages of simplified methodologies for the design of non-critical facilities. The characteristics of soil resistance mechanisms and corresponding complex spring functions are developed on the basis of finite element simulations, by equating the stiffness matrix terms and/or overall numerically computed response to the analytical expressions derived by means of the proposed Winkler model. Sensitivity analyses are performed for the optimization of the truncated numerical domain size, the optimal finite element size and the far-field dynamic boundary conditions to avoid spurious wave reflections. Numerical simulations of the transient system response to vertically propagating shear waves are next successfully compared to the analytically predicted response. Finally, the applicability of the method is assessed for soil profiles with depth-varying properties. The formulation of frequency-dependent complex spring functions including material damping is also described, while extension of the methodology to account for nonlinear soil behavior and soil–foundation interface separation is described in the conclusion and is being currently investigated.  相似文献   

Land restoration in food security programmes: synergies with climate change mitigation     

Dominic Woolf  Dawit Solomon  Johannes Lehmann 《Climate Policy》2018,18(10):1260-1270

Food-insecure households in many countries depend on international aid to alleviate acute shocks and chronic shortages. Some food security programmes (including Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program–PSNP – which provides a case study for this article) have integrated aid in exchange for labour on public works to reduce long-term dependence by investing in the productive capacity and resilience of communities. Using this approach, Ethiopia has embarked upon an ambitious national programme of land restoration and sustainable land management. Although the intent was to reduce poverty, here we show that an unintended co-benefit is the climate-change mitigation from reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased landscape carbon stocks. The article first shows that the total reduction in net GHG emissions from PSNP’s land management at the national scale is estimated at 3.4 million?Mg?CO₂e?y^?1 – approximately 1.5% of the emissions reductions in Ethiopia’s Nationally Determined Contribution for the Paris Agreement. The article then explores some of the opportunities and constraints to scaling up of this impact.

Key policy insights

• Food security programmes (FSPs) can contribute to climate change mitigation by creating a vehicle for investment in land and ecosystem restoration.

• Maximizing mitigation, while enhancing but not compromising food security, requires that climate projections, and mitigation and adaptation responses should be mainstreamed into planning and implementation of FSPs at all levels.

• Cross-cutting oversight is required to integrate land restoration, climate policy, food security and disaster risk management into a coherent policy framework.

• Institutional barriers to optimal implementation should be addressed, such as incentive mechanisms that reward effort rather than results, and lack of centralized monitoring and evaluation of impacts on the physical environment.

• Project implementation can often be improved by adopting best management practices, such as using productive living livestock barriers where possible, and increasing the integration of agroforestry and non-timber forest products into landscape regeneration.

  相似文献   

Malta's external security     

Dominic Fenech 《GeoJournal》1997,41(2):153-163

For a small country whose main relevance to the outside world has always been its strategic location and whose known history has been moulded by that fact, security has been remarkably low on the list of priorities on Maltas national agenda since independence. In recent years, security has become an issue of keen political debate, although security per se may not be the real reason why the subject has been brought out into the limelight by both government and opposition. More than just an issue in its own right, security began featuring rather more as a function of the main direction of Maltas foreign policy, which during the past decade has been focused on relations with the European Union.  相似文献   

Fault‐controlled fluid flow inferred from hydrothermal vents imaged in 3D seismic reflection data,offshore NW Australia          下载免费PDF全文

Craig Magee  Oliver B. Duffy  Kirsty Purnell  Rebecca E. Bell  Christopher A.‐L. Jackson  Matthew T. Reeve 《Basin Research》2016,28(3):299-318

Fluid migration pathways in the subsurface are heavily influenced by pre‐existing faults. Although studies of active fluid‐escape structures can provide insights into the relationships between faults and fluid flow, they cannot fully constrain the geometry of and controls on the contemporaneous subsurface fluid flow pathways. We use 3D seismic reflection data from offshore NW Australia to map 121 ancient hydrothermal vents, likely related to magmatic activity, and a normal fault array considered to form fluid pathways. The buried vents consist of craters up to 264 m deep, which host a mound of disaggregated sedimentary material up to 518 m thick. There is a correlation between vent alignment and underlying fault traces. Seismic‐stratigraphic observations and fault kinematic analyses reveal that the vents were emplaced on an intra‐Tithonian seabed in response to the explosive release of fluids hosted within the fault array. We speculate that during the Late Jurassic the convex‐upwards morphology of the upper tip‐lines of individual faults acted to channelize ascending fluids and control where fluid expulsion and vent formation occurred. This contribution highlights the usefulness of 3D seismic reflection data to constraining normal fault‐controlled subsurface fluid flow.  相似文献   

Pivotal principles for digital earth development in the twenty-first century     

Cheryl Desha  Timothy Foresman  Annapurna Vancheswaran  Angela Reeve  John Hayes 《International Journal of Digital Earth》2017,10(4):371-385

ABSTRACT

Reductionist thinking will no longer suffice to address contemporary, complex challenges that defy sectoral, national, or disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, lessons learned from the past cannot be confidently used to predict outcomes or guide future actions. The authors propose that the confluence of a number of technology and social disruptors presents a pivotal moment in history to enable real time, accelerated, and integrated action that can adequately support a ‘future earth’ through transformational solutions. Building on more than a decade of dialogues hosted by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE), and evolving a briefing note presented to delegates of Pivotal 2015, the paper presents an emergent context for collectively addressing spatial information, sustainable development, and good governance through three guiding principles for enabling prosperous living in the twenty-first century. These are: (1) open data, (2) real-world context, and (3) informed visualization for decision support. The paper synthesizes an interdisciplinary dialogue to create a credible and positive future vision of collaborative and transparent action for the betterment of humanity and planet. It is intended that these Pivotal Principles can be used as an elegant framework for action toward the Digital Earth vision, across local, regional, and international communities and organizations.  相似文献   

An investigation of the multi-scale temporal variability of beach profiles at Duck using wavelet packet transforms     

Dominic Reeve  Ying Li  Murray Lark  Dave Simmonds 《Coastal Engineering》2007

In an earlier paper a particular discrete wavelet transform (DWT) was used to study the complex variation of beach profile changes. However, use of the DWT requires that the sequence of spatial and temporal resolution is fixed as a dyadic sequence, which means that the variability over longer intervals is not characterised well. Here we introduce the discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) that uses an adaptive scaling to partition the data variance, according to an entropy cost function. The advantages of this approach are demonstrated by its application to the study of temporal variability of a 22 year record of beach profile data from the Field Research Facility (FRF) at Duck, North Carolina, USA. Time series of beach elevations at three locations across a particular profile are investigated in detail. We conclude that the DWPT provides a superior analysis of non-stationary time series to that of the DWT, with improved resolution of the scale intervals of the variability. The beach elevation around the shoreline is shown to respond at both sub-annual and interannual scales, but variability at an annual scale is weak. Moving seaward into deeper water, the variance is partitioned into fewer and longer scales. It is confirmed that elevation changes around the inner bar at Duck exhibit a strong interannual variation consistent with Plant et al. (Plant, N.G., Holman, R.A. and Freilich, M.H., 1999. A simple model for interannual sandbar behaviour. Journal of Geophysical Research 104(C7), 15755–15776). Around 23% of the variance around the inner bar is explained at the temporal scale of 64–128 months, which is consistent with the bar behaviour of 6 years found by Ruessink et al. (Ruessink, B. G., Wijnberg, K. M., Holman, R. A., Kuriyama, Y. and Van Enckevort, I. M. J., 2003. Intersite comparison of interannual nearshore bar behaviour. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (C8): 1–12). A significant new finding is, however, that about 26% of the variance is attributable to temporal scales of 16–21.3 months. Reconstruction of the wavelet packet components for individual temporal scales is shown to provide a means for identifying the impact and scale of non-stationary events, such as storms, on the beach response. This provides further information that can be used to interpret the morphological changes in terms of the forcing processes and also serves to inform morphodynamic modelling.  相似文献   

Cypermethrin induces glutathione S-transferase activity in the shore crab,Carcinus maenas   总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  

Gowlan BT  Moffat CF  Stagg RM  Houlihan DF  Davies IM 《Marine environmental research》2002,54(2):169-177

Cypermethrin is a synthetic pyrethroid that is particularly toxic to crustacea. It is therefore applied as a chemotherapeutant in the salmonid aquaculture industry for the treatment of sea lice infestations. After use, cypermethrin is released directly into the marine environment, to be diluted by fresh seawater. The shore crab, Carcinus maenas is found in the vicinity of fish farms, and may come into contact with released cypermethrin. The detoxification enzyme, glutathione S-transferase (GST) has been implicated in cypermethrin metabolism in terrestrial arthropods, but this has not yet been demonstrated in crustacea. In this paper we investigate the response of GST activity in Carcinus to cypermethrin exposure, and also the time course of the induction process. GST activity is significantly increased in Carcinus exposed to nominal concentrations of 50 and 500 ng/l of water-borne cypermethrin. Carcinus demonstrate a significant elevation in GST activity following intra-cephalothoracic injection with 10 ng of cypermethrin. GST activity returns to basal levels after 36 h. The potential application of GST activity in Carcinus as a biomarker of cypermethrin exposure is discussed.  相似文献   

Tectonic and oceanographic process interactions archived in Late Cretaceous to Present deep‐marine stratigraphy on the Exmouth Plateau,offshore NW Australia     

Harya D. Nugraha  Christopher A.‐L. Jackson  Howard D. Johnson  David M. Hodgson  Matthew T. Reeve 《Basin Research》2019,31(3):405-430

Deep‐marine deposits provide a valuable archive of process interactions between sediment gravity flows, pelagic sedimentation and thermohaline bottom‐currents. Stratigraphic successions can also record plate‐scale tectonic processes (e.g. continental breakup and shortening) that impact long‐term ocean circulation patterns, including changes in climate and biodiversity. One such setting is the Exmouth Plateau, offshore NW Australia, which has been a relatively stable, fine‐grained carbonate‐dominated continental margin from the Late Cretaceous to Present. We combine extensive 2D (~40,000 km) and 3D (3,627 km²) seismic reflection data with lithologic and biostratigraphic information from wells to reconstruct the tectonic and oceanographic evolution of this margin. We identified three large‐scale seismic units (SUs): (a) SU‐1 (Late Cretaceous)—500 m‐thick, and characterised by NE‐SW‐trending, slope‐normal elongate depocentres (c. 200 km long and 70 km wide), with erosional surfaces at their bases and tops, which are interpreted as the result of contour‐parallel bottom‐currents, coeval with the onset of opening of the Southern Ocean; (b) SU‐2 (Palaeocene—Late Miocene)—800 m‐thick and characterised by: (a) very large (amplitude, c. 40 m and wavelength, c. 3 km), SW‐migrating, NW‐SE‐trending sediment waves, (b) large (4 km‐wide, 100 m‐deep), NE‐trending scours that flank the sediment waves and (c) NW‐trending, 4 km‐wide and 80 m‐deep turbidite channel, infilled by NE‐dipping reflectors, which together may reflect an intensification of NE‐flowing bottom currents during a relative sea‐level fall following the establishment of circumpolar‐ocean current around Antarctica; and (c) SU‐3 (Late Miocene—Present)—1,000 m‐thick and is dominated by large (up to 100 km³) mass‐transport complexes (MTCs) derived from the continental margin (to the east) and the Exmouth Plateau Arch (to the west), and accumulated mainly in the adjacent Kangaroo Syncline. This change in depositional style may be linked to tectonically‐induced seabed tilting and folding caused by collision and subduction along the northern margin of the Australian plate. Hence, the stratigraphic record of the Exmouth Plateau provides a rich archive of plate‐scale regional geological events occurring along the distant southern (2,000 km away) and northern (1,500 km away) margins of the Australian plate.  相似文献