Spatial and temporal quantification of resilience at the community scale

Indicators of natural disaster resilience are factors that impact the ability to cope with and adapt to a natural disaster and climate change events. They can either contribute to or detract from resilience. Existing research has emphasized the importance of quantifying resilience in order to estimate baseline resilience and measure progress toward resilience enhancement. Previous attempts at quantification of resilience have not incorporated place-specific indicators or differential weighting of indicators for prioritization of resilience enhancement actions. Previous research efforts have also not incorporated spatial and temporal contexts when attempting to quantify resilience indicators. This research demonstrates the importance for quantifying resilience place-specific indicators, differential weighting of indicators, and the spatial and temporal contexts of indicators for resilience estimation and quantification through a case study of Sarasota County, Florida. This case study was conducted in four phases: preliminary interviews, plan review, focus group, and spatial analysis. Preliminary interviews were intended to contribute to development of research goals. The plan review process served to identify Sarasota County's planning priorities to determine possible indicators of resilience unique to Sarasota County as well as existing and planned county hazard mitigation strategies. The focus group was concerned with identifying resilience indicators through a workshop with officials from Sarasota County. The spatial analysis portion used findings from all three previous phases to demonstrate spatial patterns of resilience. This research demonstrates that although national resilience quantification metrics are useful, local scale resilience estimates appear more useful if community hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation is the primary goal.     

Impulsion discharge technique and its application in geology casulty control

Impulsion discharge technique is a new technology to prevent geological disasters,such an approach is in a liquid medium into the borehole electrode to gain access to high-voltage,forme discharge,and mechanical wave energy into electrical energy,produce a shockwave and in the same time compact the surrounding soil.Building on the existing foundation of the Act has been applied to engineering and water conservancy projects,the results were very good.     

Sustainable Livelihoods Approach in tropical coastal and marine social–ecological systems: A review

Tropical coastal and marine social–ecological systems (CM-SESs) differ from other social–ecological systems through the higher degree of risk and uncertainty associated with coastal and marine resource extraction, the dynamic nature of aquatic and human resources, and often unclear tenure. CM-SES resource management and poverty-alleviation strategies must be adaptive and holistic. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) provides a framework for understanding and guiding policy-making in CM-SES. Case studies from the past 10 years analyze tropical coastal and marine-resource dependent livelihoods and/or to evaluate current CM-SES management using the SLA. These studies have shown that, despite the rounded and inclusive approach of projects such as the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme, key challenges for researchers and practitioners remain including rights and access allocation, corruption, lack of local financial, intellectual and innovative capacity and centralized governance. Whilst the SLA may increase understanding of local-level dynamics within CM-SES, more consultation at interdisciplinary frontiers is needed in order to formulate practical solutions to the core problems of tropical CM-SES management.     

How complementary are epibenthic assemblages in artificial and nearby natural rocky reefs?

The present study analyses the composition, structure and trophic function of epibenthic assemblages in two artificial reefs (ARs) 16 years after deployment and in nearby natural reefs (NRs), aiming at providing insights on the complementarity between both habitats. Current findings suggest that after 16 years the ARs (concrete blocks), located in southern Portugal, do not act as surrogates for NRs, as epibenthic assemblages differed between reef types in composition, structure and trophic function. NRs showed higher diversity and complementarity (i.e. beta-diversity) than ARs, evidencing higher redundancy. Higher heterogeneity within NRs was also evidenced by the multi-dimensional scaling analysis based on abundance, biomass and trophic composition. NRs presented higher abundance of molluscs and biomass of sponges, resulting in differences in the trophic function: suspension-feeding dominated the NRs, while within ARs there was an ascendency of carnivory. Although not acting as surrogates for NRs and provided that no adverse effects (e.g. establishment of non-native species) were detected, ARs may have a significant contribution for the increase of regional diversity, as evidenced by the highest complementarity levels observed between assemblages in both reefs.     

Mercury in Baltic Sea sediments—Natural background and anthropogenic impact

In total 27 short and one long sediment core, and 278 surface sediment samples from the Baltic Sea were analyzed for mercury (Hg), and organic carbon contents. Thirteen short cores and the long core were dated by radionuclide methods (²¹⁰Pb, ¹³⁷Cs, AMS¹⁴C). The dataset allows discriminating between natural and human induced changes on the Hg levels in Baltic Sea sediments. Preindustrial Holocene background concentrations vary between 20 and 50 μg Hg per kg dry sediment and are positively correlated with organic carbon changes. Strong human induced pollution is recorded for the second half of the past century and caused high Hg concentrations of up to several hundred μg Hg per kg dry sediment even in Baltic Sea basins. Maximum concentrations are found at industrial and war waste dumping sites (local hot spots). An Hg concentration decreasing trend toward the present day is observed at most coring sites, a result of environmental measures undertaken during the last two decades. At sites where it is possible to calculate Hg fluxes, the natural accumulation rates vary between 2.1 and 5.4 μg Hg per m² per year. Anthropogenically sourced Hg accumulation rates vary in a wide range of 30 and 300 μg Hg per m² per year for the time span of maximum pollution. In areas characterized by discontinuous sedimentation only “inventories” of human sourced Hg expressed as the total amount of deposited Hg (above the natural background) per m² can be calculated. The inventories of the investigated cores vary in the range of 1 and 8 mg Hg per m². Additionally, influences of sediment dynamics on spatial distribution pattern of Hg concentrations in surface and subsurface sediments are discussed.     

自然资本思潮与国土资源管理

自然资本是国民财富的一种新分类。自然资本有3个主要特征：自然资本与自然资源有紧密联系;自然资本是自然资源与资本属性的结合;自然资本的权益有社会化的过程。自然资本及其衍生的一些理念可以为国土资源行政管理研究所借鉴。建议关注当代自然资本思潮,继续跟踪研究国有紫宸保护立法动向,关注证券立法、金融立法和投资立法对自然资本的控制和改革方向,在土地管理法、矿产资源法修改中增加有关土地资本和矿产资本的规范内容,启动、推进和加快地质调查立法工作等。     

A six-camera digital video imaging system sensitive to visible,red edge,near-infrared,and mid-infrared wavelengths

This paper describes a six-camera multispectral digital video imaging system designed for natural resource assessment and shows its potential as a research tool. It has five visible to near-infrared light sensitive cameras, one near-infrared to mid-infrared light sensitive camera, a monitor, a computer with a multichannel digitizing board, a keyboard, a power distributor, an amplifier, and a mouse. Each camera is fitted with a narrowband interference filter, allowing the system to obtain imagery in the blue (447 – 455 nm), green (555 – 565 nm), red (625 – 635 nm), red edge (704 – 716 nm), near-infrared (814–826 nm), and mid-infrared (1631 – 1676 nm) regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Analogue video acquired by this system is converted to digital format. Radiometric resolution of the imagery is 8-bit (pixel values range 0 – 255). Images obtained by the system can be evaluated individually and/or in combination with each other to assess natural resources.     

A review of: “National Transfer Format,Release 1.0, January, 1987.” By THE WORKING PARTY TO PRODUCE NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR THE TRANSFER OF NATIONAL DIGITAL MAP DATA. (Southampton: The NTF Secretariat,Ordnance Survey, 1987. [Pp. 191: appendices and looseleaf annex.]

Metonymically used location names (toponyms) refer to other, related entities and thus possess a meaning different from their literal, geographic sense. Metonymic uses are to be treated differently to improve the performance of geographic information retrieval (GIR). Statistics on toponym senses show that 75.06% of all location names are used in their literal sense, 17.05% are used metonymically, and 7.89% have a mixed sense. This article presents a method for disambiguating location names in texts between literal and metonymic senses, based on shallow features.

The evaluation of this method is two‐fold. First, we use a memory‐based learner (TiMBL) to train a classifier and determine standard evaluation measures such as F‐score and accuracy. The classifier achieved an F‐score of 0.842 and an accuracy of 0.846 for identifying toponym senses in a subset of the CoNLL (Conference on Natural Language Learning) data.

Second, we perform retrieval experiments based on the GeoCLEF data (newspaper article corpus and queries) from 2005 and 2006. We compare searching location names in a database index containing both their literal and metonymic senses with searching in an index containing their literal senses only. Evaluation results indicate that removing metonymic senses from the index yields a higher mean average precision (MAP) for GIR. In total, we observed a significant gain in MAP: an increase from 0.0704 to 0.0715 MAP for the GeoCLEF 2005 data, and an increase from 0.1944 to 0.2100 MAP for the GeoCLEF 2006 data.     

Forest cover trends from time series Landsat data for the Australian continent

In perennial and natural vegetation systems, monitoring changes in vegetation over time is of fundamental interest for identifying and quantifying impacts of management and natural processes. Subtle changes in vegetation cover can be identified by calculating the trends of a vegetation density index over time. In this paper, we apply such an index-trends approach, which has been developed and applied to time series Landsat imagery in rangeland and woodland environments, to continental-scale monitoring of disturbances within forested regions of Australia. This paper describes the operational methods used for the generation of National Forest Trend (NFT) information, which is a time-series summary providing visual indication of within-forest vegetation changes (disturbance and recovery) over time at 25 m resolution. This result is based on a national archive of calibrated Landsat TM/ETM+ data from 1989 to 2006 produced for Australia's National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS). The NCAS was designed in 1999 initially to provide consistent fine-scale classifications for monitoring forest cover extent and changes (i.e. land use change) over the Australian continent using time series Landsat imagery. NFT information identifies more subtle changes within forested areas and provides a capacity to identify processes affecting forests which are of primary interest to ecologists and land managers. The NFT product relies on the identification of an appropriate Landsat-based vegetation cover index (defined as a linear combination of spectral image bands) that is sensitive to changes in forest density. The time series of index values at a location, derived from calibrated imagery, represents a consistent surrogate to track density changes. To produce the trends summary information, statistical summaries of the index response over time (such as slope and quadratic curvature) are calculated. These calculated index responses of woody vegetation cover are then displayed as maps where the different colours indicate the approximate timing, direction (decline or increase), magnitude and spatial extent of the changes in vegetation cover. These trend images provide a self-contained and easily interpretable summary of vegetation change at scales that are relevant for natural resource management (NRM) and environmental reporting.