Civil Engineering Commons^™

Linking Bayesian Belief Networks And Gis To Assess The Ecosystem Integrity In The Brazilian Amazon, Peter Verweij, Margareth Simoes, Andrei Alves, Rodrigo Ferraz, Anouk Cormont

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Deforestation and climate change heavily impact the ecosystem of the Amazon rainforest threatening its resilience and the sustainability of many human activities. Land protection may prevent ecosystems and their services to deteriorate from the pressures of agricultural expansion, population growth and wood harvesting. In the Brazilian Amazon land protection occurs in several forms such as environmental conservation, setting biodiversity priority areas and the delineation of indigenous lands. Still, the effects are not clear as understanding of the ecosystems is incomplete and responses to human actions are highly uncertain. Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) are models that probabilistically represent correlative and causal …

Object-Based Analysis Of Multispectral Rs Data And Gis For Detection Of Climate Change Impact On The Karakoram Range Northern Pakistan, Waquar Ui Hassan Chaudhary, Åke Sivertun

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Changing climate has a great impact on northern area of Pakistan's environment and is more prone to environmental change impacts than the rest of the country due to its high elevation. However, the results of melting glaciers effect not only the local environment but also the whole country with frequent and heavy floods. Although recent technological development provided solutions of many problems to mankind, the pace of development in the field of environmental preservation technologies are much slower than needed.

Remote sensing (RS) from Satellites and Airplanes used in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are technologies that can aid in understanding …

Modelling Spatial Relationships Between Ecosystem Services And Agricultural Production In An Agent- Based Model, Changxing Dong, Mark Brady, Yann Clough, Ullrika Sahlin, Christoph Sahrbacher, Martin Stjernman

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The collective impacts of farmers’ land management decisions on above ground ecosystem services (ES) and their implications for agriculture are poorly understood. Managing habitat to provide ES is costly but at the same time it can support higher yields through, e.g., pollination or natural pest control. Due to the mobility of ES-providers (bees, natural enemies) farmers providing habitat might also benefit their neighbours, creating interdependencies among their decisions. Interdependencies among farmers’ land-use decisions and the flow of ES in space can be considered by integrating agent-based modelling and evidence-based ES models. Such integration requires a trade-off between the land-use details …

Web Applications That Share Level-12 Huc Data And Models Of The Conus, Lorne Leonard, Christopher J. Duffy

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

HydroTerre web applications and services provide the Essential Terrestrial Variable (ETV) datasets to create common hydrological models anywhere in the continental United States (CONUS). This service allows web users to download data for their own purposes in their own computing environment. The datasets are provided using standard Geographic Information System formats and the data transformation is dependent on the users own needs, goals, and computing environment. In this article, we demonstrate three web applications and web services that share data and models with users via web interfaces, which automate the data-transformations for United States Geological Survey level-12 Hydrological Unit Codes …

Supporting Environmental Modelling With Taverna Workflows, Web Services And Desktop Grid Technology, Ferenc Horváth, Péter Ittzés, Dóra Ittzés, Zoltán Barcza, Laura Dobor, Dóra Hidy, Attila Marosi, Alex Hardisty

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Ecosystem functioning, climate change, and multiple interactions among biogeochemical cycles, climate system, site conditions and land use options are leading-edge topics in recent environmental modelling. Terrestrial ecosystem models are widely used to support carbon sequestration and ecosystem studies under various ecological circumstances. Our team uses the Biome-BGC model (Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana), and develops an improved model version of it, called Biome-BGC MuSo. Both the original and the improved model estimate the ecosystem scale storage and fluxes of energy, carbon, nitrogen and water, controlled by various physical and biological processes on a daily time-scale. Web services were …

A Simple And Effective Approach To Global Sensitivity Analysis Based On Conditional Output Distributions, Francesca Pianosi, Thorsten Wagener

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Predictions of environmental models are affected by unavoidable and potentially large uncertainty. When models are applied to understand dominant controls of the system under study, uncertainties will reduce our ability to choose between competing hypotheses. When they are used to support decision-making, uncertainties will reduce our ability to discriminate between different management options and undermine the defensibility of the decision-making process. Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) provides quantitative information about the contribution to the uncertainty in the model output arising from different input factors like, for instance, model parameters, boundary conditions or forcing data. GSA thus provides insights into the model …

Are The Driving Forces Of Hydrological Models Really Driving The Model Output?, Jiri Nossent, Willy Bauwens, Fernando Pereira, Toon Verwaest, Frank Mostaert

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Rainfall is very often considered as the driving force of hydrological models. If the rainfall changes, the model output (i.e. flow) is also expected to change. In principal, as long as the values of the model parameters are fixed, rainfall will indeed determine the model output. Yet, uncertainties on the input, the model(parameters) and the output lead to variations of the actual values and can disrupt this rigid hypothesis. Hence, the question could be raised if it would be possible to maintain exactly the same initial model output when the model input changes, by varying the model parameter values? Or, …

Activated Sludge With Total Solids Retention: Modified-Asm1 Modelling And Simulation, Cheikh Fall, Anabel Jimenez-Zarate, Ericka Millan-Lagunas, Yves Comeau

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

There are many new strategies put forward for minimizing excess sludge generation in biological wastewater treatment. Some of them were developed within the context of dynamic activated sludge modelling (ASM). A number of means can be used to eliminate the traditional waste activated sludge flow and the build-up of inert solids in the aeration tanks. This includes the use of fine screens to remove the inert particulate organic fraction (X_I), hydrocyclones to lower the inorganic suspended solids (ISS), and different kinds of on-line digesters to further biodegrade the endogenous residues (X_P), via the return activated sludge …

Qmra Of Intestinal Nematode Infection Via Multimedia Exposure Pathways, Arti Kundu, Hugo R. Poma, Mimi W. Jenkins, Veronica B. Rajal, Stefan Wuertz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The human health risks associated with multimedia exposure pathways of Ascaris lumbricoides (A. lumbricoides) are poorly understood including use of surface water contaminated with untreated wastewater in agriculture, consumption of uncooked raw vegetables irrigated with polluted stream-water, and incidental ingestion of fecally contaminated water by recreators. We analyzed a total of 65 water samples for the presence of helminthes collected from 5 monitoring locations in Salta City over a 13-month period on the Arias-Arenales river in the northwestern region of Salta province in Argentina. The average density of A. lumbricoides in the surface water was 5 eggs/liter. A. lumbricoides was …

Probabilistic Mapping With Bayesian Belief Networks: An Application On Ecosystem Service Delivery In Flanders, Belgium, Dries Landuyt, Seven Broekx, Katrien Van Der Biest, Peter Goethals

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Ecosystem services are gaining more and more attention in decision support applications. Nevertheless, modelling and mapping ecosystem services to support landscape planning decisions remains challenging. Recently, Bayesian belief networks (BBNs), a probabilistic modelling technique, has been introduced in ecosystem service modelling. Major advantages of this modelling approach include high model transparency which enables stakeholder involvement in model development and evaluation, the ability to incorporate expert knowledge on top of data and the possibility to take into account uncertainties. To combine the advantages of BBNs and spatially explicit modelling in the context of ecosystem service modelling, we developed a Quantum GIS …

Norovirus Dose-Response In Sewage-Related Qmra: The Importance Of Virus Aggregation, Graham B. Mcbride

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Norovirus infection and illness are increasingly used as end-points in sewage-related health risk assessments, especially as data from clinical trials outbreak studies have recently become available. The authors of a very recent clinical trial have inferred that the human median infectious dose is higher than previous estimates and similar to that of other RNA viruses. This finding has the potential to cause a revision of previous risk assessments. However, in reaching this conclusion, the potential role of aggregation of these viruses seems not to have been accounted for, although it was accounted for in an earlier trial. In fitting (hypergeometric) …

A Model Component For Simulating The Seasonal Cycle Of Heterotrophic Respiration, G. A. Alexandrov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Heterotrophic respiration, an important item in ecosystem carbon balance, is the process which is addressed in the global carbon cycle models and Earth system models. The seasonal cycle of the het- erotrophic respiration is determined by seasonal changes in climatic conditions and in the storage of litter (i.e., in the amount of organic substrate available as a food source for organisms composing the heterotrophic community). The model component presented in this paper is focussing at effects produced by seasonal depletion in litter storage. The seasonal changes in litter storage are modelled by ordinary differential equa- tions, which are solved analytically …

Global Sensitivity Analysis In Environmental Water Quality Modelling: Where Do We Stand?, Giorgio Mannina, Alida Cosenza, Manandraitsiory Randrianantoandro, Franҫois Anctil, Marc B. Neumann, Peter A. Vanrolleghem

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is a valuable tool to support the use of mathematical models for environmental systems. During the last years the water quality modelling field has embraced the use of GSA. Environmental water quality modellers have tried to transfer the knowledge and experience acquired in other disciplines. The main objective of this paper is to provide an informed problem statement of the issues surrounding GSA applications in the environmental water quality modelling field. Specifically, this paper aims at identifying, for each GSA method, the potential use, the critical issues to be solved and the limits identified in a …

Morphing Techniques For Creating And Representing Spatiotemporal Data In Gis, José Moreira, Paulo Dias, Pedro Mesquita

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

With the development of remote sensing technologies allowing capturing and transmitting geo-referenced data repeatedly along time, there are many applications demanding for efficient tools to deal with spatiotemporal data. However database research on moving objects with extent has mainly focused on spatiotemporal data models and query languages leaving several issues to be solved regarding, for example, the acquisition of spatiotemporal data. This work deals with the application of 2D polygonal morphing techniques to create spatiotemporal data representations of moving objects that may change location, size or shape continuously over time. The aim is to transform a sequence of observations representing …

Swat-Sir Model For Predicting Fate And Transport Of Manure-Borne Pathogens In Fragmented Agriculture-Forest Ecosystems, Andrey K. Guber, David M. Williams, Amy C. Dechen Quinn, Sushil B. Tamrakar, Joan B. Rose, William F. Porter

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The objective of this study was to develop and qualitatively evaluate a model predicting transmission of manure-borne pathogens between co-grazing cattle and wildlife. The developed add- on module SIR that we coupled with SWAT model included the following new components: wildlife population changes, resource selection, dose-response, compartmental susceptible-infectious- recovered (SIR) module and pathogen shedding. Probabilities of the wild and domestic animal infection by pathogens and numbers of infected animals were computed based on a dose-response approach, which included beta-Poisson and exponential models. Land use and plant biomass predicted with watershed-scale model SWAT were used as the input for the deer …

Uncertainty Transfer In Modeling Layers: From Gcm To Downscaling To Hydrologic Surface-Groundwater Modeling, John F. Mejia, Richard G. Niswonger, Justin Huntington

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In this presentation we show how model uncertainty is transferred from GCMs to hydrologic model results for different downscaling strategies. We use a USGS Groundwater and Surface-water FLOW (GSFLOW) model applied to three small catchments in the northeastern Lake Tahoe basin. A framework is developed for assessing the benefits and difficulties associated with using historical and future climate projections from CMIP3 and CMIP5 datasets for hydrologic investigations. Here we downscale 10 km gridded GCM climate data to a 60m grid using daily values from climate stations and PRISM average monthly climate. Hydrologic model results show that an ensemble/probabilistic station- based …

An Overview Of The Nevada Climate Change Portal, Sergiu Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris Jr., Michael Mcmahon Jr., Eric Fritzinger, Scotty Strachan, Richard Kelley

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Created with support from an NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) grant completed in 2013, the Nevada Climate Change Portal (NCCP) serves as a cyberinfrastructure hub that provides data and computing resources for scientists studying the effects of climate change in Nevada. In particular, the NCCP has been designed for data acquisition, storage, access, and processing in support of long-term assessment of climate variability in Nevada and its impact on the state’s ecological and hydrological systems. The NCCP also serves as a central repository of climate-related information for other stakeholders, including educators, students, and the public. In this paper we …

Managing Mine Water Under Extreme Climate Variability Using A Model Predictive Control Approach, Lei Gao, Damian Barrett, Rui Liu, Mingwei Zhou, Luigi Renzullo, Irina Emelyanova

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In Australia, growing water demand, intensifying competition with other water users, and significant climate variability have brought a pressure of securing water use to the mining industry, especially in years of droughts. However, during heavy rainfall periods, unregulated discharges of mine-affected water may put the livelihood of community and the environment at risk. Therefore, a careful balance needs to be struck between securing mine water use during water limited periods, on one hand, and mitigating environmental risk expressed through unregulated discharges when water is in excess, on the other. This paper designs a model predictive controller (MPC) to address this …

Testing Tales: Selection And Evaluation Of A Framework For Interoperable Freshwater Modelling, Alexander Elliot, Gabriella Turek, Valerie Snow, Daniel Rutledge, Alistair Ritchie, Alexander Herzig

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Recent freshwater policy initiatives in New Zealand have highlighted the need for integrated and interoperable freshwater models and data sources. In response, we evaluated a range of software frameworks for interoperable freshwater modelling. A workshop on user needs identified a spectrum of framework users, ranging from ‘indirect users’ such as policy makers, to ‘developers’ such as software engineers concerned with developing and implementing frameworks. To address calls for clearer information on available models and data sources, we developed databases of models and data sources along with an interactive tool to query the database and illustrate potential data-model and model-model couplings. …

A Sequential Participatory Approach To Adapt Livestock Systems To Climate Change, Marion Sautier, Mathilde Piquet, Michel Duru, Roger Martin-Clouaire

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Livestock systems are and will increasingly be impacted by climate change primarily because the feed supply produced on the farm (pastures, forage crops) depends greatly on the climatic conditions experienced. To adapt grassland-based livestock systems to climate change, some transformational redesign of the fanning system may be required. Redesign is basically a matter of reconfiguring land-use for feed production and management practices set up to cope with weather variability. We present a participatory method to design systems adapted to new conditions. It is based on a pre-existing game-like platform (Forage Rummy) in which various year-round forage production and animal feeding …

Leveraging Quality Assurance And Quality Control Processes To Deliver Provenance As A First-Order Scientific Output In Large-Scale Environmental Assessments, William Francis, Nicholas J. Car, Rebecca K. Schmidt, Simon Gallant

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In large-scale environmental assessments, such as the Australian Government Bioregional Assessment Programme, the science is integrated when products (scientific reports) are assembled. Product assembly involves synthesising material written by multiple authors from multiple disciplines and producing standard tables, maps and charts. High-quality products require that quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) procedures are built into the scientific and publication processes.

Further, funders and stakeholders are increasingly demanding that scientists provide sufficient infor- mation to explain and justify the evidence provided, even to the extent that an independent group can repeat the science. Recording an effective lineage of processes and data …

An Extendable Experiment With Gis And Ict To Make Environmental Data And Modeling User-Friendly And Accessible, Saurav Kumar, Adil N. Godrej, Thomas J. Grizzard, Harold E. Post

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory (OWML), has been monitoring the Occoquan Reservoir and its tributary watershed in Washington DC suburb for over 40 years. OWML has also developed and maintained a state-of-the-art water quality and quantity model for the region based on seven HSPF and two CE-QUAL-W2 software. To make the data and modeling tools easily accessible to stakeholders, OWML has embarked on an experiment to use modern Information Communication Technology (ICT) along with web-mapping systems. As a result the web-portal https://wqdata.owml.vt.edu has been developed to provide easy access to the real-time and historic water resources data for the Occoquan watershed …

Enabling Water Science At The Cuahsi Water Data Center, Alva Couch, Richard Hooper, Jon Pollak, Marie Martin, Martin Seul

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The CUAHSI Water Data Center (WDC) is a community-governed, multi-disciplinary data center focused upon the needs of water-related science in all academic disciplines. The WDC build upon the successes of the 10-year effort to develop the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS), and looks beyond HIS toward providing next-generation water data services. In partnership with the National Science Foundation, the WDC seeks to set the standard for data publication, persistence, and reliability, by providing formal user support services, using cloud-based abstractions and services, building new and accessible user interfaces to data, and establishing and sustaining data curation processes centered around optimizing …

Coupled Simulation Of Human-Driven And Natural Land Cover Change In The Front Range Corridor, Co, Zhihua Liu, Michael C. Wimberly, Aashis Lamsal, Terry L. Sohl, Todd J. Hawbaker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Colorado Front Range Corridor is a mixture of urban, agricultural, grassland, and diverse forest types, making it an ideal natural laboratory to investigate feedbacks and interactions of coupled human and natural systems. We explored future scenarios of human-driven land use change and natural vegetation dynamics using the CHANGE model, which integrates a demand-allocation land use change module, a succession module for natural vegetation dynamics, and a spatially explicit fire initiation and spread module. We used the model to project landscape change over an approximately 48000 km² study area from 2005 through 2050 under A2 and B1 emission scenarios. …

Model Structure Sensitivity Of River Water Quality Models For Urban Drainage Impact Assessment, Frank Blumensaat, Jana Seydel, Peter Krebs, Peter A. Vanrolleghem

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Numerical modeling of physicochemical conditions in rivers influenced by urban drainage and other pressures is increasingly used as supportive method for an integrative environmental impact assessment. In various European countries, protocols for water quality based impact assessment (WQA protocols) are in use, of which many propse the use of water quality models. Despite the increased effort to study uncertainty issues in river water quality modeling in recent years, identifying and differentiating model structure uncertainty remains a challenging task. This study elaborates upon a key conflict in model development: the need to simplify and to still ensure structural adequacy to obtain …

Vulnerability And Adaptation Of Crop Production To Future Climate Change: A Case Study For Representative Farms In Flathead Valley, Montana, Usa, Tony Prato, Zeyuan Qui

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Future climate change has the potential to adversely impact crop production. This study evaluates the potential impacts of future climate change on crop yields, crop enterprise net returns, and net farm income and the extent to which two forms of adaptation--flexible scheduling of field operations and crop irrigation--alleviate potential negative impacts of climate change on crop production and income in the Flathead Valley of Montana, USA during the evaluation period 2006-2050. Crop yields are simulated using the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model. Net farm income is assessed for small and large representative farms and two common soil types. Without …

A Proposed Approach To The Development Of Federated Model Sets, Kenneth M. Bryden

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Integrated modelling is a critical environmental modelling tool that brings together sets of models and data to describe the impacts of various management practices and choices within the environment. Although each model may (or may not) run on separate hardware, typically these model sets are organized together as a large integrated, centralized model. These integrated models share a single conceptual schema and semantic framework. Additionally, information flow and convergence of boundary conditions between the models are generally built on a fixed framework. Although this is a logical approach that has proven to be effective, it has several limitations. The models …

Nesll Modular, High Performance Lnfrastructure For Earth System Modeling, Cecelia Deluca, Peggy Li, Gerhard Theurich

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The mission of the NOAA Environmental Software lnfrastructure and lnteroperability (NESll) group is to advance understanding and improve predictions of the Earth system by delivering infrastructure software that enables new scientific discoveries, fosters collaborations, and promotes resource efficiency. NESll software supports environmental modeling, data search and analysis, and metadata services. A core capability is the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), a comprehensive object-oriented framework for building and coupling models. However, new development has focused on modular packages that can easily be combined with other software elements to form solutions to complex problems. Such modular packages include ESMPy, a Python grid …

Web Service And Plug-In Architecture For Flexibility And Openness Of Environmental Data Sharing Platforms, Stephen Knox, Philipp Meier, Julien Harou

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The sharing, comparison and maintenance of computer model input and result data for real-world projects is a challenge. In collaborative research projects, particularly when collaboration occurs between multiple institutions in different locations, the complications are greater still. The co-development of water resource network simulation and optimization models is one field that faces this challenge. There is a need for ways to allow multiple users to build and apply models collaboratively. This paper argues that a web service architecture is an appropriate approach for multi-institution maintenance of resource network models. We describe the design of a prototype system that allows developers …

Use Of Near Real Time Earth Observation Data Infrastructures And Open Source Tools For Water Resources Monitoring And Assessment, Chris M. Mannaerts, Ben H.P. Maathuis, Petra E. Budde

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Since several years, a rapid and ever increasing public use of geo-information data derived from earth observation satellites is noted. The use of Google and Microsoft Virtual Earth engines can be seen as generic examples of this trend. For hydrology, water resources research and professional practice, we also note a growing availability of earth observation (EO) data and products, needed for operational land and water management. Many of these data are public domain and made freely available using low-cost global data dissemination infrastructures like GEONETCast, managed by the spaces agencies EUMETSAT and NOAA amongst others, within the context of the …