Digital Commons Network^™

Emulating An Integrated Activity Based Land Use €“ Transportation Model To Provide A More Effective Spatial Decision Support Tool, Tomas Crols

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Effective strategic regional planning requires both a capability for forecasting the future state of the system under business as usual conditions, and an ability to test the effect of possible infrastructure developments and policy interventions on the system. We use a comprehensive simulation platform designed to support strategic spatial planning by modelling the long-term spatial dynamics of land use, population, and economic activity. It is being used to evaluate planning and policy options for containing urban sprawl and enhancing environmental quality. Most applications have been to Flanders, Belgium, where it is known as the RuimteModel. Here we describe an extension …

Climate Change Impacts On Streamflow In Two Highly Abstracted English Catchments Under A High Emissions Scenario - Implications For Environmental Flow Protection, Cordula Wittekind

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The spatio-temporal water availability for environmental flows can be severely affected by climate change. Robust water management approaches are urgently required to alleviate pressure on abstracted freshwater ecosystems. Modelling of the impacts of climate change on streamflow and water availability at the catchment scale has become indispensable in informing decision makers. We use the 12 new Hadley Centre climate model regional projections with a resolution of 12km for a high emissions scenario: Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. With the completely revised Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) we simulate natural daily flows until the 2080s in two English catchments. While …

Co-Developing A Knowledge Portal To Support Stakeholders In Utilizing Uncertain Multi-Model Based Information On Freshwater-Related Hazards Of Climate Change, Fabian Kneier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Co-produced climate services are increasingly recognized as a means for effective generation and utilization of relevant climate information to support decision-makers in taking climate change into account in their risk portfolios. However, there is a structural lack of appropriate, tailored climate services and tools, particularly in developing countries. Among the challenges are (1) how to represent uncertainty quantitatively in a way that is both scientifically correct and utilizable to the diverse users of the hazard information and (2) how to integrate global information with quantified uncertainty into regional-scale assessments of water-related climate change risk and adaptation assessments in a participatory …

A Century Later: Rural Public Health's Enduring Challenges And Opportunities., Erika C. Ziller Phd, Carly Milkowski Mph

Population Health

The US public health community has demonstrated increasing awareness of rural health disparities in the past several years. Although current interest is high, the topic is not new, and some of the earliest public health literature includes reports on infectious disease and sanitation in rural places. Continuing through the first third of the 20th century, dozens of articles documented rural disparities in infant and maternal mortality, sanitation and water safety, health care access, and among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities. Current rural research reveals similar challenges, and strategies suggested for addressing rural-urban health disparities 100 years ago resonate …

Psychosocial Influences On Malaria Prevention And Treatment In Sokoto, Kebbi And Zamfara—Slide Deck, Breakthrough Research

Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Choices

Slide deck for Breakthrough RESEARCH webinar held on 17 September 2020.

Wmu Board Of Trustees Formal Session September 17, 2020, Wmu Board Of Trustees

WMU Board of Trustees Meetings

• Formal Agenda
• Proposed Meeting Minutes
• General Fund Budget Fiscal Year 2020-21
• State Capital Outlay – Priority List
• Building Project Priority List
• Parking Permit Fee Adjustment
• Student Code Change
• Personnel Report
• Operating Cash Accounts
• Annuity and Life Income Funds - Public

The George-Anne, Georgia Southern University

The George-Anne

• Eagles Escape Campbell 27-26
• Seen At Southern
• Robots on Campus
• At Risk, At Home
• Prep for the Polls
• Online counseling on the Statesboro campus
• College of Education DEI committee talks about how to become an ally
• 95 cases during fourth week
• The Two Sides of COVID-19
• The COVID-19 Experiences of Georgia Southern
• ALL In: The Fight for Democracy
• Whale buried under Sweetheart Circle
• Eagles escape the Campbell Camels in Season Opener
• SPMB marches on during Covid-19
• Puzzles

Engaging With The Local: Shift In Visitor Profile At [World] Heritage Sites, Catherine Gorman

Conference papers

Engaging with the local: a shift in visitor profile at Heritage Sites

The island of Ireland has three World Heritage Sites (WHS). Two of these sites are located in the Republic of Ireland and are operated by the Office of Public Works (OPW): Skellig Micheal (inscribed 1996), and Bru Na Boinne, the Bend in the Boyne complex of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and wider area (inscribed 1993). In 2018, Skellig Michael attracted 16,792, and the Bru Na Boinne, 321,193. Both sites have been under pressure from visitor numbers over the last number of years with Skellig Micheal, exceeding the annual …

An Efficient Data-Driven Variance-Based Global Sensitivity Analysis For Identifying Dominant Factors That Control Unusual Hydrological Events, Razi Sheikholeslami

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

During the past decades, several distributed and semi-distributed process-based hydrologic models have been developed for simulating water flow dynamics at a range of spatio-temporal scales. Modelling complex hydrologic processes and their interaction with human inevitably introduces a considerable uncertainty associated with forcings, model parameters, and model structure. Adequate characterization of uncertainty is vital to draw appropriate inferences about the system’s behaviour to support decision making. The Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) has proven to be a promising tool for quantifying the model output uncertainty through apportioning the uncertainty to different sources. The sampling-based strategy is a common, yet computationally demanding, approach …

Enabling More Open And Reproducible Environmental Modelling, Jonathan Goodall

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Technical approaches for enabling more open and reproducible computational models are gaining attention in the environmental modelling and software community. We see three main themes emerging from this research: (1) advancing data sharing platforms, (2) using containers and notebooks for encapsulating complete computational environments and analyses, and (3) developing higher-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for simulation models to make them more scriptable and notebook-friendly. In this research, we explore an approach for leveraging these topics into a model agnostic framework able to support open and reproducible environmental modeling. The framework’s design consists of data sharing achieved through online repositories, notebook-based …

Scaling Of Urban Heat Island And No2 With Urban Population: A Meta-Analysis, Yufei Wei

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Due to urban population growth worldwide, thermal anomalies and toxic air pollution are increasing concern for citizens. Despite this increasing challenge and indications that these environmental problems increase with city size, there is still no consolidated understanding of the effect of city size on urban heat island (UHI) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution. Meanwhile, research on urban scaling laws, which formally relates population size and urban characteristics, has been quickly increasing over the past decade but is mostly devoted to the socio-economic outcome of cities rather than pollution or heat stress. Most studies dedicated to UHI or NO2 consider only …

Institutional Fragmentation And Urbanisation In The Eu Cities, Federica Cappelli, Gianni Guastella, Stefano Pareglio

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This article examines the relationship between institutional fragmentation and the spatial extent of cities in Europe’s Functional Urban Areas. European Union planning regulations vary across member states, but in most cases, local authorities determine land use within the more general regulatory frameworks set by national or subnational authorities. More decentralised and fragmented settings may favour urban sprawl, allowing developers to avoid land-use restrictions in one municipality by moving to adjacent ones and providing incentives for municipalities to adopt less strict land-conversion regulations to attract households and workers. The empirical results fully support this hypothesis and unveil significant differences between small …

Issue 357: September 17-October 1, 2020, The Local Voice

The Local Voice

No abstract provided.

Discipline-Oriented Citizenship, Alexander Pope Iv, Sarah Surak

eJournal of Public Affairs

We introduce a framework for considering the particularities of civic engagement in higher education. Colleges and universities make increasing references to civic engagement in mission statements and other guiding documents. The nature of these documents does not allow for distinctions between types of civic engagement activities that might occur in specific academic disciplines. This may suggest a singular approach to civic engagement. We argue that actual pedagogies demonstrate variance and nuance in purposes of and approaches to civic engagement. Supporting faculty considerations of what content and skills are necessary for civic engagement in a particular academic discipline, we adapt and …

A Data Envelopment Analysis And Local Partial Least Squares Approach For Identifying The Optimal Innovation Policy Direction, P Tziogkidis, D Philippas, A Leontitsis, Rc Sickles

Plymouth Business School

The paper proposes a novel two-step approach that evaluates countries’ innovation efficiency and their responsiveness to expansions in their innovation inputs, while addressing shortcomings associated with composite indicators. Based on our evaluations, we propose innovation policies tailored to take into account the diverse economic environments of the many countries in our study. Applying multidirectional efficiency analysis on data from the Global Innovation Index, we obtain separate efficiency scores for each innovation input and output. We then estimate different sensitivities for each country, by applying partial least squares on explanatory and response matrices which are determined by the nearest neighbors of …

A Narrative Study Of Factors Influencing Students’ Academic Achievement: Views Of Parents, Teachers And Union Leaders, Mehmet Karakas

The Qualitative Report

This paper reports on private school teachers, parents, and teacher union leaders’ experiences with middle and high schools in a small city in northeastern Turkey to identify the problems in education and study them to develop some solutions for them. This narrative study was carried out in the Spring semester of 2012 by conducting face-to-face individual in-depth interviews with 47 participants. Personal narratives were analyzed by developing themes. Findings reveal that the success and lack of it in education arises from the upper level management style, from uninterested parents, and the geographical conditions and location of the city create big …

Software For Monitoring Forest Change In Tropical West Africa Using Satellite Remote Sensing, Michael Wimberly

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Satellite remote sensing is an essential source of data on forest landscape change that is necessary for estimating carbon stocks, assessing biodiversity, and developing conservation plans to sustain ecosystem services. The Upper Guinean Forest region of West Africa, a global biodiversity hotspot, currently lacks timely, consistent, and accurate long-term forest monitoring systems suitable for decision support. Major limitations include data gaps due to frequent cloud cover and limited satellite coverage. To address these limitations, we developed the West African Forest Degradation Data System (WAForDD) to use all available Landsat imagery to monitor forest change in the tropical forest zone of …

Silvio - Analyzing Social Vulnerability Under The Influence Of Local Climate Change, Thais Lopez-Inojosa

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper presents the methodology SILVIO (Social Vulnerability Order Methodology), a method for the analysis of social vulnerability. Local knowledge is used to build an index of social vulnerability from demographic, economic and social variables (Social Vulnerability Index - SVI). Social vulnerability is understood here as a multitude of relationships between society and the environment that can impact significantly on the livelihood of residents in a specific geographical area. SILVIO consists of a correlation analysis between the SVI and two selected local climate variables, temperature and precipitation (Local Climate Variables - LCV). The variables of both, the SVI and the …

Local Biogeophysical Effects Of Deforestation, Steven De Hertog

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The impact of deforestation on climate is mostly pronounced through net carbon emissions (biogeochemical effects), leading to a global warming. However, deforestation also alters the water and energy cycles (biogeophysical effects), which can cause a local warming or cooling depending on the region. This additional warming can potentially offset or even exacerbate the initial global warming signal caused by the biogeochemical effect. The results of earth system models show a large spread on the magnitude of biogeophysical effects and can even vary on the sign of these impacts for some regions. Thus, uncovering the uncertainty related to the biogeophysical effect …

Integrated Hydro–Social Modeling At Catchment Scale – A Case For The Rhine Basin, Judith Ter Maat

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Climate change and socio-economical developments are increasing the pressure on available water resources. To realistically simulate changing water availability, natural hydrological processes and human water use need to be modeled following an integrated approach. While physical catchment information and meteorological datasets are readily available on a global scale, the collection of water demand data is often still a tedious exercise. Following Wada et al. (2016) a dataset was developed that integrates water demand information from amongst others EUROSTAT, AQUASTAT and the UN. The dataset is available for a variety of hydrological and water resources models. The dataset will be integrated …

Catalogue Of Collections, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

This is a list of books, pamphlets, maps, relics, and photographs.

Thirty Years Of Spatio-Temporal Modelling With Pcraster, Oliver Schmitz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The open-source PCRaster environmental modelling platform (http://www.pcraster.eu) is a long-time developed toolbox for the construction of earth science simulation models, providing tailored model building blocks with main applications in hydrology, ecology, and environmental health. We present the recent developments of the PCRaster package. The distribution supports the conda package manager for a simplified installation on Linux, macOS and Windows, the usage of PCRaster in Jupyter Notebooks, the "multicore" module providing multithreaded field-based operations, significantly reduced build complexity, and a refactored code basis to recent C and C++ standards. While PCRaster originally started as a raster-based toolbox, it is nowadays required …

Modeling Reductive Dechlorination Of 1,2-Dichloroethane In The Presence Of Chloroethenes And 1,2-Dichloropropane As Co-Contaminants – Using Prior Information And Multi-Objective Optimization, Uwe Schneidewind

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

1,2-Dichloroethane (1,2-DCA) is a major man-made chlorinated organic compound. It can often be found in plumes at sites contaminated with a mix of chlorinated ethenes that warrant some form of remedial treatment or at least monitored natural attenuation. A major attenuation pathway of 1,2-DCA is through reductive dechlorination by organohalide-respiring bacteria (OHRB), which is influenced by other chlorinated contaminants such as chloroethenes and chloropropanes, often co-existing with 1,2-DCA. To assess the effect of chloroethenes and 1,2-dichloropropane (1,2-DCP) on 1,2-DCA dechlorination by a microbial consortium containing ORHB, we simulated the (sequential) reductive dechlorination in a series of enriched batch cultures using …

Modelling Climate Change Impacts On The Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Seleshi Yalew

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Various studies have investigated the potential impacts of future climate on water, energy, or food production separately. However, the impacts of climate change on the nexus between these interacting sectors is only recently gaining attention. At present, no quantitative modelling and global analysis is available to show the impacts of climate change on the water, energy and food (WEF) nexus. Two approaches can be followed to quantify the WEF nexus. The first is to use an integrated assessment model, using a model that includes modules for water, energy, and food. The second approach is to use separate cutting-edge models from …

New Optimization Framework Of Watershed Best Management Practice Scenarios In A Unit-Boundary Adaptive Manner, Liang-Jun Zhu

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Optimization of watershed best management practice (BMP) scenarios based on watershed modeling and intelligent optimization algorithms provides an effective way for watershed management to achieving optimal environmental and economic effectiveness. Existing studies commonly conduct the BMP scenario optimization by allocating diverse BMPs on boundary-fixed spatial units (referred to as BMP configuration units; e.g., subbasins, hydrologic response units, farms). This means the shapes and sizes of each BMP configuration unit cannot be changed and optimized once they have been created through spatial discretization before the optimization process. This sort of “boundary-fixed” method entirely ignores a dimension of solution space search, i.e., …

Open Science For An Interactive Exploration Of Fluvial Futures, Oliver Schmitz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Managing densely populated fluvial areas and adapting to climate-change present major challenges for sustainable development. To democratise the decision-making process it is desired that stakeholders and planning professionals can evaluate common interventions by straightforward access to intervention plans, source data, and model code. We aimed at the creation of an interactive environment based on free and open-source models and software packages for intervention planning and evaluation. This provides benefits as a) the model implementation and therefore scientific reasoning is visible and transparent b) the application of the entire workflow is not hampered by e.g. licensing issues of software tools used …

An Automated Method Of Determining Hydrological Model Structure, Cheng-Zhi Qin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A key step of hydrological modelling is to determine the hydrological model structure adapting to the application context of modelling, such as the modelling purpose, the geographical characteristics of the study area, and the data availability. Such a step is non-trivial for those modellers with limited hydrological modelling knowledge, who are often performers of hydrological modelling in real applications. Although integrated hydrological modelling frameworks have been proposed as important tools of aiding modellers from the burden on hydrological modelling, the determination of hydrological model structure still depends on the modellers. This means that the modellers have to manually select proper …

Bricks Ucc-Approved Courses, September 15, 2020, General Education Committee

General Education Committee

No abstract provided.

Computer Science Principles With Java, Seth D. Bergmann

Open Educational Resources

This textbook is intended to be used for a first course in computer science, such as the College Board’s Advanced Placement course known as AP Computer Science Principles (CSP). This book includes all the topics on the CSP exam, plus some additional topics. It takes a breadth-first approach, with an emphasis on the principles which form the foundation for hardware and software. No prior experience with programming should be required to use this book. This version of the book uses the Java programming language.

The Corona Virus And The Constitution, Unh Communications And Public Affairs

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.