A GIS based planning support system for assessing financial feasibility of urban redevelopment

Urban densification trends combined with redevelopment increasingly moving away from large former industrial and transport sites toward existing town centres and corridors indicate redevelopment is becoming increasingly complex, difficult to plan for and undertake. The interplay between land and property markets and planning frameworks suggest city planners and urban researchers need new tools and methodologies to gain insights into ways to deliver effective responses. Despite the need, there is a limited availability of comprehensive models to fulfil the task. This paper describes a GIS-based tool to assess parcel-level financial feasibility and housing supply associated with urban redevelopment within a precinct. The tool incorporates existing and potential built form and parameters associated with the planning framework and land and property markets. Using a real case study in a workshop, tool performance was evaluated by professional urban planners in terms of its capacity to produce metrics and visualisations of potential scenarios of redevelopment. Results indicate the usefulness of the tool for emulating land market conditions and testing scenarios of planning regulation and market changes for strategic planning purposes.     

SensePlace3: a geovisual framework to analyze place–time–attribute information in social media

SensePlace3 (SP3) is a geovisual analytics framework and web application that supports overview + detail analysis of social media, focusing on extracting meaningful information from the Twitterverse. SP3 leverages social media related to crisis events. It differs from most existing systems by enabling an analyst to obtain place-relevant information from tweets that have implicit as well as explicit geography. Specifically, SP3 includes not just the ability to utilize the explicit geography of geolocated tweets but also analyze implicit geography by recognizing and geolocating references in both tweet text, which indicates locations tweeted about, and in Twitter profiles, which indicates locations affiliated with users. Key features of SP3 reported here include flexible search and filtering capabilities to support information foraging; an ingest, processing, and indexing pipeline that produces near real-time access for big streaming data; and a novel strategy for implementing a web-based multi-view visual interface with dynamic linking of entities across views. The SP3 system architecture was designed to support crisis management applications, but its design flexibility makes it easily adaptable to other domains. We also report on a user study that provided input to SP3 interface design and suggests next steps for effective spatiotemporal analytics using social media sources.     

The role of hydrothermal fluids in sedimentation in saline alkaline lakes: Evidence from Nasikie Engida,Kenya Rift Valley

Saline alkaline lakes that precipitate sodium carbonate evaporites are most common in volcanic terrains in semi‐arid environments. Processes that lead to trona precipitation are poorly understood compared to those in sulphate‐dominated and chloride‐dominated lake brines. Nasikie Engida (Little Magadi) in the southern Kenya Rift shows the initial stages of soda evaporite formation. This small shallow (<2 m deep; 7 km long) lake is recharged by alkaline hot springs and seasonal runoff but unlike neighbouring Lake Magadi is perennial. This study aims to understand modern sedimentary and geochemical processes in Nasikie Engida and to assess the importance of geothermal fluids in evaporite formation. Perennial hot‐spring inflow waters along the northern shoreline evaporate and become saturated with respect to nahcolite and trona, which precipitate in the southern part of the lake, up to 6 km from the hot springs. Nahcolite (NaHCO₃) forms bladed crystals that nucleate on the lake floor. Trona (Na₂CO₃·NaHCO₃·2H₂O) precipitates from more concentrated brines as rafts and as bottom‐nucleated shrubs of acicular crystals that coalesce laterally to form bedded trona. Many processes modify the fluid composition as it evolves. Silica is removed as gels and by early diagenetic reactions and diatoms. Sulphate is depleted by bacterial reduction. Potassium and chloride, of moderate concentration, remain conservative in the brine. Clastic sedimentation is relatively minor because of the predominant hydrothermal inflow. Nahcolite precipitates when and where pCO₂ is high, notably near sublacustrine spring discharge. Results from Nasikie Engida show that hot spring discharge has maintained the lake for at least 2 kyr, and that the evaporite formation is strongly influenced by local discharge of carbon dioxide. Brine evolution and evaporite deposition at Nasikie Engida help to explain conditions under which ancient sodium carbonate evaporites formed, including those in other East African rift basins, the Eocene Green River Formation (western USA), and elsewhere.     

Detailing the impact of the Storegga Tsunami at Montrose,Scotland

The Storegga tsunami, dated in Norway to 8150±30 cal. years BP, hit many countries bordering the North Sea. Run-ups of >30 m occurred and 1000s of kilometres of coast were impacted. Whilst recent modelling successfully generated a tsunami wave train, the wave heights and velocities, it under-estimated wave run-ups. Work presented here used luminescence to directly date the Storegga tsunami deposits at the type site of Maryton, Aberdeenshire in Scotland. It also undertook sedimentological characterization to establish provenance, and number and relative power of the tsunami waves. Tsunami model refinement used this to better understand coastal inundation. Luminescence ages successfully date Scottish Storegga tsunami deposits to 8100±250 years. Sedimentology showed that at Montrose, three tsunami waves came from the northeast or east, over-ran pre-existing marine sands and weathered igneous bedrock on the coastal plain. Incorporation of an inundation model predicts well a tsunami impacting on the Montrose Basin in terms of replicate direction and sediment size. However, under-estimation of run-up persisted requiring further consideration of palaeotopography and palaeo-near-shore bathymetry for it to agree with sedimentary evidence. Future model evolution incorporating this will be better able to inform on the hazard risk and potential impacts for future high-magnitude submarine generated tsunami events.     

Targeting carbon dioxide removal in the European Union

In principle, many climate policymakers have accepted that large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s mitigation targets, but they have avoided proposing by whom CDR might be delivered. Given its role in international climate policy, the European Union (EU) might be expected to lead the way. But among EU climate policymakers so far there is little talk on CDR, let alone action. Here we assess how best to ‘target’ CDR to motivate EU policymakers exploring which CDR target strategy may work best to start dealing with CDR on a meaningful scale. A comprehensive CDR approach would focus on delivering the CDR volumes required from the EU by 2100, approximately at least 50 Gigatonnes (Gt) CO₂, according to global model simulations aiming to keep warming below 2°C. A limited CDR approach would focus on an intermediate target to deliver the CDR needed to reach ‘net zero emissions’ (i.e. the gross negative emissions needed to offset residual positive emissions that are too expensive or even impossible to mitigate). We argue that a comprehensive CDR approach may be too intimidating for EU policymakers. A limited CDR approach that only addresses the necessary steps to reach the (intermediate) target of ‘net zero emissions’ is arguably more achievable, since it is a better match to the existing policy paradigm and would allow for a pragmatic phase-in of CDR while avoiding outright resistance by environmental NGOs and the broader public.

Key policy insights

• Making CDR an integral part of EU climate policy has the potential to significantly reshape the policy landscape.

• Burden sharing considerations would probably play a major role, with comprehensive CDR prolonging the disparity and tensions between progressives and laggards.

• Introducing limited CDR in the context of ‘net zero’ pathways would retain a visible primary focus on decarbonization but acknowledge the need for a significant enhancement of removals via ‘natural’ and/or ‘engineered’ sinks.

• A decarbonization approach that intends to lead to a low level of ‘residual emissions’ (to be tackled by a pragmatic phase-in of CDR) should be the priority of EU climate policy.

     

A framework for testing dynamic classification of vulnerable scenarios in ensemble water supply projections

Climatic Change - Recent water resources planning studies have proposed climate adaptation strategies in which infrastructure and policy actions are triggered by observed thresholds or...     

Fluid fluxes during low-temperature alteration: implications of multi-style alteration assemblages from the Welsh Borderland,UK

Localized (domainal) low-temperature alteration may indicate variations in the chemistry of alteration fluids and/or discrete fluid flow paths during metamorphism. Occurrences of epidote- and pumpellyite-dominated domains are often used as evidence for large fluxes of Ca-rich fluids. However, comparative studies of two domainal alteration styles from basaltic to andesitic lavas and volcaniclastic rocks at Builth Wells, Wales, UK suggest that such interpretations cannot be applied universally. Here, only one set of domains can be attributed to large fluxes of Ca-rich fluids. In contrast, the second set of domains formed where the host rock supplied the necessary Ca, and fluid/rock ratios were relatively low. These domains are hosted by rocks which show a Caledonian regional metamorphic imprint, characterized by the alteration assemblage albite+chlorite+titanite±prehnite±pumpellyite±calcite±muscovite±quartz (considered to have formed at c. 200°C and ≤2.5 kbar). Type 1 domains lie along fluid channelways, such as veins. Pumpellyite is the dominant secondary mineral, but the alteration assemblage is variable with pumpellyite±prehnite±calcite±titanite±chlorite (±quartz). The domains formed at temperatures of 130–230°C during Ordovician hydrothermal activity, before the peak of regional metamorphism. In contrast, Type 2 domains are not associated with obvious fluid channelways. A central prehnite-dominated zone typically has a rim with the assemblage pumpellyite+calcite±prehnite±chlorite±titanite±K-rich phyllosilicate. These domains probably formed from pelitic xenoliths which contained a volcaniclastic component at temperatures of 130–230°C and at relatively low fluid/rock ratios. However, the timing of domain formation is uncertain. Pyrobitumen, in veins and disseminated throughout the rock, may have influenced the formation of both types of domain by stabilizing pumpellyite in preference to epidote and causing metamorphic calcite formation through the release of CO₂ to the alteration fluids. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differential sensitivity of flounder (Platichthys flesus) in response to oestrogenic chemical exposure: an issue for design and interpretation of monitoring and research programmes

This study was conducted as an initial investigation of 'differential response' in one of the main sentinel organisms used for monitoring programmes in United Kingdom estuaries, the flounder Platichthys flesus. It has been hypothesised that monitoring using species with a wide geographical spread and limited migration, such as flounder, might result in the comparison of different genetic stocks and certainly of populations with differing early life stage contaminant exposure histories. Furthermore, it is probable that these pre-exposure and genetic differences could manifest themselves in an ability to respond differently to contaminant exposure, so-called 'differential response'. It is important that the extent and nature of this response is understood, if we want to be able to fully interpret the monitoring data from such programmes. During this study, flounder were collected from four separate sources; wild caught fish from the estuaries of the Rivers Alde, Mersey and Tyne, and farmed flounder from Port Erin Farm, Isle of Man. Under controlled laboratory conditions, groups of fish from each source were exposed to water-borne concentrations of the synthetic oestrogen ethynylestradiol (EE2) at a nominal concentration of 50 ng/l. Plasma was taken from each male fish after 6 and 10 days exposure and analysed for the presence of vitellogenin (VTG) using an ELISA technique. Significant levels of VTG induction were evident in fish from all sources after both 6 and 10 days exposure. Flounder from the Mersey were the only fish with significantly elevated initial background levels of VTG (day 0) and this appeared to be reflected in that these specimens showed the highest induction response after day 6. However, after day 10, fish from all other sites had a slightly higher mean VTG than those from the Mersey which showed significantly (p < 0.05) lower mean plasma VTG. It is suggested that other differential responses may have been masked by the use of a high dose of EE2 which produced maximum induction in nearly all fish. The findings of the study are discussed in terms of implications for further research into the differential response issue and how the initial plasma VTG figures contribute to a time-series from the Mersey, Tyne and Alde estuaries.     

Modeling spatially non-stationary land use/cover change in the lower Connecticut River Basin by combining geographically weighted logistic regression and the CA-Markov model

Simulating land use/cover change (LUCC) and determining its transition rules have been a focus of research for several decades. Previous studies used ordinary logistic regression (OLR) to determine transition rules in cellular automata (CA) modeling of LUCC, which often neglected the spatially non-stationary relationships between driving factors and land use/cover categories. We use an integrated geographically weighted logistic regression (GWLR) CA-Markov method to simulate LUCC from 2001–2011 over 29 towns in the Connecticut River Basin. Results are compared with those obtained from the OLR-CA-Markov method, and the sensitivity of LUCC simulated by the GWLR-CA-Markov method to the spatial non-stationarity-based suitability map is investigated. Analysis of residuals indicates better goodness of fit in model calibration for geographically weighted regression (GWR) than OLR. Coefficients of driving factors indicate that GWLR outperforms OLR in depicting the local suitability of land use/cover categories. Kappa statistics of the simulated maps indicate high agreement with observed land use/cover for both OLR-CA-Markov and GWLR-CA-Markov methods. Similarity in simulation accuracy between the methods suggests that the sensitivity of simulated LUCC to suitability inputs is low with respect to spatial non-stationarity. Therefore, this study provides critical insight on the role of spatial non-stationarity throughout the process of LUCC simulation.