Impacts of urbanisation on hydrological and water quality dynamics,and urban water management: a review

ABSTRACT

As urban space continues to expand to accommodate a growing global population, there remains a real need to quantify and qualify the impacts of urban space on natural processes. The expansion of global urban areas has resulted in marked alterations to natural processes, environmental quality and natural resource consumption. The urban landscape influences infiltration and evapotranspiration, complicating our capacity to quantify their dynamics across a heterogeneous landscape at contrasting scales. Impervious surfaces exacerbate runoff processes, whereas runoff from pervious areas remains uncertain owing to variable infiltration dynamics. Increasingly, the link between the natural hydrological cycle and engineered water cycle has been made, realising the contributions from leaky infrastructure to recharge and runoff rates. Urban landscapes are host to a suite of contaminants that impact on water quality, where novel contaminants continue to pose new challenges to monitoring and treatment regimes. This review seeks to assess the major advances and remaining challenges that remain within the growing field of urban hydrology.

Editor M.C. Acreman; Associate editor E. Rozos     

Hydrological assessment of proposed reservoirs in the Sonora River Basin,Mexico, under historical and future climate scenarios

Abstract

A semi-distributed hydrological model and reservoir optimization algorithm are used to evaluate the potential impacts of climate change on existing and proposed reservoirs in the Sonora River Basin, Mexico. Inter-annual climatic variability, a bimodal precipitation regime and climate change uncertainties present challenges to water resource management in the region. Hydrological assessments are conducted for three meteorological products during a historical period and a future climate change scenario. Historical (1990–2000) and future (2031–2040) projections were derived from a mesoscale model forced with boundary conditions from a general circulation model under a high emissions scenario. The results reveal significantly higher precipitation, reservoir inflows, elevations and releases in the future relative to historical simulations. Furthermore, hydrological seasonality might be altered with a shift toward earlier water supply during the North American monsoon. The proposed infrastructure would have a limited ability to ameliorate future conditions, with more benefits in a tributary with lower flood hazard. These projections of the impacts of climate change and its interaction with infrastructure should be of interest to water resources managers in arid and semi-arid regions.

Editor D. Koutsoyiannis     

Study on the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Germany

Infrastructure for spatial information is an important part of our national information construction that is the subject of essentials on the social of spatial information. As an EU member, Germany has...     

Voronoi图和实景影像在城市POI选址中的应用

以北京西城区为例,通过Voronoi图将兴趣点划分成多个区域;在部件集中且兴趣点少的区域,通过建立基于Voronoi分区的minisum选址模型,得到理论上的新增兴趣点的坐标;然后通过移动道路测量车采集实景影像定位到理论的兴趣点点位上;并在其附近一定范围内寻找最近的有标志意义的地物作为实际位置的兴趣点,达到对兴趣点快速更新的目的,极大提高了城市管理者在日常工作和应对突发事件时的实时性和高效性。     

On generalised and specialised spatial information grids: are geo-services ready?

Abstract

After the set-up of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) and a national information infrastructure (NII) in many countries, the provision of geo-services became one of the most important and attractive tasks. With the integration of global positioning system (GPS), geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS), we can, in principle, answer any geo-spatial related question: when and where what object has which changes? An intelligent geo-service agent could provide end-users with the most necessary information in the shortest time and at the lowest cost. Unfortunately there is still a long way to go to achieve such goals. The central component in such geo-services is the integration of the spatial information system with a computing grid via wire- and wireless communication networks. This paper will mainly discuss the grid technology and its integration with spatial information technology, expounding potential problems and possible resolutions. A novel categorising of information grids in the context of geo-spatial information is proposed: generalised and specialised spatial information grids.     

Conceptual design and implementation of spatial data warehouses integrating regular grids of points

ABSTRACT

Spatial online analytical processing (OLAP) and spatial data warehouse (SDW) systems are geo-business intelligence technologies that enable the analysis of huge volumes of geographic data. In the last decade, the conceptual design and implementation of SDWs that integrate spatial data, which are represented using the vector model, have been extensively investigated. However, the integration of field data (a continuous representation of spatial data) in SDWs is a recent unresolved research issue. Enhancing SDWs with field data improves the spatio-multidimensional analysis capabilities with continuity and multiresolutions. Motivated by the need for a conceptual design tool and relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) implementation, we propose a UML profile for SDWs that integrates a regular grid of points and supports continuity and multiresolutions. We also propose an efficient implementation of a ROLAP architecture.     

The integrated spatial databases of GeoStar

GeoStar is the registered trademark of GIS software made by WTUSM in China. By means of the GeoStar, multi-scale images, DEMs, graphics and attributes integrated in very large seamless databases can be created, and the multi-dimensional dynamic visualization and information extraction are also available. This paper describes the fundamental characteristics of such huge integrated databases, for instance, the data models, database structures and the spatial index strategies. At last, the typical applications of GeoStar for a few pilot projects like the Shanghai CyberCity and the Guangdong provincial spatial data infrastructure (SDI) are illustrated and several concluding remarks are stressed.     

国内外典型工程滑坡灾害比较

在搜集和梳理全球一个多世纪以来灾难性工程滑坡实例的基础上,将人类工程活动诱发的滑坡分为4种基本类型和若干亚类：①采矿工程滑坡（包括地下采空型、露天采场型、尾矿坝及排土场型）;②水利水电工程滑坡（包括库区岸坡型、水库大坝型、灌溉工程型）;③线性基础设施工程滑坡（包括公路及铁路工程型、油气管道工程型）;（鸯城市建设复合型工程滑坡。重点剖析了国内外著名的工程滑坡灾害案例,并兼顾一般工程滑坡的共性特征进行分析,综述了各类典型工程滑坡灾害的发育特征、形成机制及部分处置措施。通过不同类型工程滑坡特征的比较分析,总结了工程滑坡成灾的教训和成功处置的经验,为未来工程项目区和城市化过程中工程滑坡的综合防治及风险减缓提供了参考。     

Advances in Modern Phytolith Research

Phytolith has been widely used as a tool to reconstruct the paleoenvironment, and the investigation of modern phytolith is very crucial to the accurate interpretation of phytolith data in ancient sediments. Studies of modern process of phytolith primarily include the morphological analysis of phytolith in modern plants, and the relationships between the formation and growth of phytolith and environmental factors, as well as the transportation and taphonomy of phytolith in modern soils and sediments. The formation of phytolith in plants is controlled not only by genes but also by environmental factors, such as humidity, precipitation, temperature, CO₂ concentration, soil pH, and nutrient status, etc. The morphology, assemblages, ¹³C and ¹⁸O of phytolith in plants can respond sensitively to environmental variables. The phytolith assemblages can be affected by its taphonomy and transportation that may be different due to phytolith types and soils/sediments texture. It is necessary to investigate the phytolith morphology and types in modern plants, the relationship between its formation and environmental factors, and the impact of transportation and taphonomy on phytolith assemblages under different environmental conditions in order to promote the application of phytolith analysis to paeloenvironment reconstruction.     

Quantifying volcanic ash fall hazard to electricity infrastructure

Quantifying the potential ash fall hazards from re-awakening volcanoes is a topic of great interest. While methods for calculating the probability of eruptions, and for numerical simulation of tephra dispersal and fallout exist, event records at most volcanoes that re-awaken sporadically on decadal to millennial cycles are inadequate to develop rigorous forecasts of occurrence, much less eruptive volume. Here we demonstrate a method by which eruption records from radiocarbon-dated sediment cores can be used to derive forecasting models for ash fall impacts on electrical infrastructure. Our method is illustrated by an example from the Taranaki region of New Zealand. Radiocarbon dates, expressed as years before present (B.P.), are used to define an age-depth model, classifying eruption ages (with associated errors) for a circa 1500–10 500 year B.P. record at Mt. Taranaki (New Zealand). In addition, data describing the youngest 1500 years of eruption activity is obtained from directly dated proximal deposits. Absence of trend and apparent independence in eruption intervals is consistent with a renewal model using a mix of Weibulls distributions, which was used to generate probabilistic forecasts of eruption recurrence. After establishing that interval length and tephra thickness were independent in the record, a thickness–volume relationship (from [Rhoades, D.A., Dowrick, D.J., Wilson, C.J.N., 2002. Volcanic hazard in New Zealand: Scaling and attenuation relations for tephra fall deposits from Taupo volcano. Nat. Hazards, 26:147–174]) was inverted to provide a frequency–volume relationship for eruptions. Monte Carlo simulation of the thickness–volume relationship was then used to produce probable ash fall thicknesses at any chosen site. Several critical electrical infrastructure sites in the Taranaki Region were analysed. This region, being the only gas and condensate-producing area in New Zealand, is of national economic importance, with activities in and around the area depending on uninterrupted power supplies. Forecasts of critical ash thicknesses (1 mm wet and 2 mm dry) that may cause short-circuiting, surges or power shutdowns in substations show that the annual probabilities of serious impact are between ~ 0.5% and 27% over a 50 year period. It was also found that while large eruptions with high ash plumes tend to affect “expected” areas in relation to prevailing winds, the direction impacts of small ash falls are far less predictable. In the Taranaki case study, areas out of normal downwind directions, but close to the volcano, have probabilities of impact for critical thicknesses of 1–2 mm of around half to 60% of those in downwind directions and therefore should not be overlooked in hazard analysis. Through this method we are able to definitively show that the potential ash fall hazard to electrical infrastructure in this area is low in comparison to other natural threats, and provide a quantitative measure for use in risk analysis and budget prioritisation for hazard mitigation measures.