Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Dealing With Uncertainty: An Innovative Method To Address Climate Change Adaptation In The Whale Watch Industry, Jan-Olaf Meynecke, Russell Richards, Oz Sahin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Impacts of climate change on natural and human ‘systems’ are often difficult to assess due to high uncertainty and the need to integrate trans-disciplinary knowledge. This includes the worldwide, billion-dollar whale watching industry that depends on some key species such as the humpback whale. The migratory corridors, feeding, resting and calving sites, which are used for whale watching may be influenced by changing ocean currents and water temperatures. Whales are responding through a shift in migration time, behavior, abundance and distribution impacting on whale watching. To address these challenges, the authors developed a participatory model to understand and evaluate the …

New Approach To Interactive Use Of Energy System Models For Policy Support, Evelina Trutnevyte, Phillip Bernsten

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A typical approach of producing a handful of energy scenarios with energy system models is limited because these scenarios cover only patches of the vast uncertainties and complexities inherent in the energy transition. Such a handful of scenarios is inflexible to serve the needs of the variety of policy makers and stakeholders in a rapidly changing policy arena. Interactive use of energy system models has proved effective for enabling users to browse through many scenarios for insight. Existing interactive tools, such as UK DECC2050 Calculator or Swiss Energyscope, ask users to choose one or several preferred energy scenarios. However, focus …

Modelling Of Nitrogen Removal In A Free Water Surface Constructed Wetlands Of Tibet, China, Lixiao Zhang, Shoujuan Tang, Alexey Voinov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The construction of free-water surface constructed wetland (FWSCW) for wastewater treatment at high altitude region has being tried in Tibet Autonomous Region, an area with extremely cold weather and low air pressure. The FWSCW was designed to receive nitrogen loading of about 8.00 kg/ha/d and hydraulic loading of 546m3/ha/d. This study aims to develop a model for estimating nitrogen (N) dynamics in this constructed wetland situated in Maizhokunggar county alongside Lhasa river. To ensure stable temperature for healthy biological actions, a passive solar house was built. The major nitrogen transformation processes considered in this study were mineralization, nitrification, denitrification, plant …

The Global Geo Health Data Centre (Gghdc): A Web Service For Human Environmental Exposures, D. Karssenberg, I. Soenario, O. Schmitz, K. De Jong, H. De Raaff, I. Vaartjes, G. Hoek, M. Strak, B. Brunekreef, P. Hessels, F. J. De Groot, D. E. Grobbee, M. J. Dijst

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

To study environmental health effects, information is required on human environmental exposures, which encompass a wide range of attributes, for instance air pollution, water quality, or fast food restaurant density. Often it is preferable to assess exposure of each individual in a cohort or population, which requires assessment of exposures for large numbers of people. As direct measurement of personal exposure for entire populations is not feasible, exposure needs to be estimated by mapping environmental attributes, integrating observations and statistical or processbased modelling. This spatially and temporally continuous information is then aggregated over the space-time path of each individual resulting …

Challenges With Maintaining Legacy Software To Achieve Reproducible Computational Analyses: An Example For Hydrologic Modeling Data Processing Pipelines, Bakinam T. Essawy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Tanu Malik, Hao Xu, Michael Conway, Yolanda Gil

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In hydrology, like many other scientific disciplines with large computational demands, scientists have created a significant and growing collection of software tools for data manipulation, analysis, and simulation. While core computation model software are likely to be well maintained by the groups that develop these codes, other software such as data pre- and post-processing tools, used less often but still critical to scientists, may receive less attention. These codes will become “legacy” software, simply meaning that the software is out of date by modern standards. A challenge facing the scientific community is how to maintain this legacy software so that …

Advances In Probabilistic And Parallel Agent-Based Simulation: Modelling Climate Change Adaptation In Agriculture, Christian Troost, Thomas Berger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

MPMAS is a software package for farm-level and agent-based simulation in agriculture that has been applied to a variety of agro-economic and bioeconomic case studies around the world in the last twenty years. We present recent advances to the software and its application that focus on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, massive parallel computing, land market interactions and farm succession. These extensions improve the applicability of agent-based simulation for ex ante assessments of climate adaptation in agriculture.

Methane Extraction From Lake Kivu: A Case Study For Model-Based Policy, Martin Schmid, Alfred Wüest

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Lake Kivu in East Africa contains enormous amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane. The dissolved methane is increasingly used as a resource to produce electricity, with two power plants currently in operation and several additional facilities in planning. The design of such gas extraction facilities needs to take into account possible negative impacts: if badly designed, the extraction could disturb the lake’s permanent density stratification and thus risk to create a catastrophic gas eruption; and it could increase nutrient fluxes from the deep water to the surface layers, leading to eutrophication and related negative consequences for the ecosystem, fisheries …

Uncertainty And Resilience Assessment Of Critical Infrastructures: Application Of Mcda To Fiumicino Airport, Carlo Giupponi, Juliana Bernhofer, Vahid Mojtahed

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The flooding of La Guardia airport after Hurricane Sandy and other airports around the world due to extreme events and the associated high social and economic costs of disruption in such services have shifted the attention of decision-makers to assessing the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and considering the resiliency of the future development plans. However, future climate and socio-economic changes as the main drivers of uncertainty has made the risk and resilience assessment a challenging task for analysts and decision makers. The level of uncertainty of these drivers is known to be deep, since we haven’t yet undergone those …

Health Impact Of Air Pollution On Italy: Main Findings Of Viias And Med Hiss Projects, Antonio Piersanti, Carla Ancona, Giovanna Berti, Ennio Cadum, Luisella Ciancarella, Ilaria D’Elia, Francesco Forastiere, Gaia Righini

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The effects of air pollution on human health in Italy have been recently estimated in two different projects with complete national coverage, VIIAS and EU LIFE+ MED HISS. The projects share the methodological approach of the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and the combined use of dispersion models and monitoring networks data, but differ on the exposure assessment and the overall objectives. VIIAS, using sub-municipal census data of population projected on the dispersion model grid, has estimated health outcomes on baseline years (2005 and 2010) and on three scenarios for 2020, in order to evaluate trends and effects of alternative policies. …

Agent-Based Modelling: What Matters Is Action, Franҫois Guerrin, Zoubida Afoutni, Rémy Courdier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Computer-aided management tools or models of production systems in the manufacturing or agricultural domains generally rely implicitly on the theory of planned action. Every action is assumed to be part of an anticipated sequence leading from a current state to a predetermined goal. The main limits of this classical view are due to the difficulty to deal with unexpected changes and disturbances. To overcome these limits, we developed an agent model based on the theory of situated action. Whereas the classical approach puts the emphasis on actor’s decision (action being assumed to straightforwardly follow), situated action is viewed as a …

The Case For Standardizing Procedural Knowledge Models For Cross-Discipline Data And System Integration, Aaron R. Byrd, David G. Tarboton

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Scientifically consistent and coherent systems for model and data discovery and integration rely on a shared body of concepts that describe the data and systems. The standardization of these disciplines is critical to the effectiveness of their ability to integrate data and systems across disciplines. There is, however, a significant shortcoming with most current approaches to creating these bodies of concepts. This is that the are designed to target only one type of knowledge--propositional knowledge--and neglect the other key type of knowledge--procedural knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is at the heart of the actual process of integrating data and systems across disciplines. …

Pasture Degradation As A Consequence Of Non-Compliance With Social Norms: Exploring Behavioral Strategies With An Agent-Based Simulation Model, Gunner Dressler, Karin Frank, Jürgen Groeneveld, Birgit Müller

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Pasture resting as a key strategy for sustainable grazing management has been in place for centuries in the form of social norms in rangeland systems. Most of these areas are drylands, characterized by low and variable rainfall and scarce resources that require well-adapted resource use strategies to avoid pasture degradation. However, in many areas such traditional norms are at stake as new management strategies are introduced by government authorities, new herders belonging to different ethnic groups enter the system, or former communal grazing land is converted into private property or agricultural land. As a result, compliance with traditional norms declines, …

The Sherpa Methodology And Implementation To Explore Potential Air Quality Improvements At The Regional/Local Scales, Enrico Pisoni, Philippe Thunis, Bart Degraeuwe, Alain Clappier, Giuseppe Maffeis, Roberta Gianfreda, Fabrizio Ferrari

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This work presents the SHERPA tool (Screening for High Emission Reduction Potentials on Air quality), a simplified air quality model that has been recently developed at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, to simulate the effect of local emission reduction policies on air pollution.

The SHERPA methodology is based on the concept of source-receptor models, that is to say on the use of simplified models able to mimic the link between emissions and concentrations as simulated by a complex deterministic Chemical Transport Model. As “family” of source-receptor models in SHERPA we used “linear regressions”, designed to simulate yearly PM25, PM10 …

Autoflow© - A Novel Application For Water Resource Management And Climate Change Response Using Smart Technology, Khoi Anh Nguyen, Oz Sahin, Rodney Anthony Stewart, Hong Zhang

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Urban areas are increasingly at risk from climate change, with negative impacts predicted for human health, the economy and ecosystems. These risks require responses from cities to improve their resilience. Several analysis platforms have been developed worldwide to help effectively control and response to these impacts from different angles, including water resources management, energy production and consumption management, air pollution control, or other natural resources management. To contribute to this goal, Griffith University in Australia has developed Autoflow^©, a smart application for water demand analysis and carbon emission monitoring and prediction. Various advanced mathematical models have been …

An Agent-Based Model Of Jordan Highland Farmer Decision Making, Phil Selby, Josue Medellin-Azuara, Christian Klassert, Jim Yoon, Julien Harou

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We build a hydro-economic behavioural model of groundwater irrigated agriculture to help understand and analyse the impact of institutional and biophysical changes on land and water use in the Jordan Highlands. The model sits within a Multi-Agent-Simulation (MAS) framework representing the physical and institutional components of the wider national water resources system, which are being modelled by an interdisciplinary team, including a tanker water market and a groundwater model which interact with the farmer model. The MAS is designed to evaluate climate change scenarios and policy interventions to test whether reform of institutional rules that govern water usage in Jordan …

Mathematical Modelling Of Sustainable Fisheries Management In Morocco, H. Essekhyr, K. Elkalay, K. Khalil

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Moroccan Atlantic coast is considered as one of the richest fishing areas in the world that support a rich assortment of aquatic biological diversity. In the past decade, the fisheries sector has achieved considerable growth. However, the sector suffers from many serious problems that need to be resolved to ensure their sustainable development. Such problems include over-fishing in the coastal, degradation of the marine environment and coastal resources. In this study, a mass-balance Ecopath Model of the Moroccan Atlantic coast is constructed, for improving fisheries management and attaining sustainable development of coastal fisheries in this ecosystem. The results indicate that …

Sobol’ Sensitivity Analysis For Stressor Impacts On Honeybee Colonies, Carmen Kuan, Robert Curry, Gloria Degrandi-Hoffman, Kris Garber, Andrew Kanarek, Marcia Snyder, Tom Purucker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We employ Monte Carlo simulation and nonlinear sensitivity analysis techniques to describe the dynamics of a bee exposure model, VarroaPop. Daily simulations are performed of hive population trajectories, taking into account queen strength, foraging success, mite impacts, weather, colony resources, population structure, and other important variables. This allows us to test the effects of defined pesticide exposure scenarios versus controlled simulations that lack pesticide exposure. The daily resolution of the model also allows us to conditionally identify sensitivity metrics. We use the variancebased global decomposition sensitivity analysis method, Sobol’, to assess firstand secondorder parameter sensitivities within VarroaPop, allowing us to …

A Scalable Approach To Modelling Health Impacts Of Air Pollution Based On Globally Available Data, Gregor Kiesewetter, Wolfgang Schöpp, Markus Amann

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Integrated assessment of air pollution and its impacts typically requires pre-calculated atmospheric transfer relations on a fine spatial resolution. While such concepts have been applied successfully for Europe and other regions with high data coverage, extending calculations to world regions with low local data availability is challenging and needs to be based on globally available data sets. Here we introduce a scalable approach which has been developed to expand the calculations of health impacts from exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) in the Greenhouse Gas-Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) integrated assessment model to (almost) any desired …

Documenting Models For Interoperability And Reusability, Rajbir Parmar, Kurt Wolfe, Gene Whelan, Gerard F. Laniak, Mike Galvin, Jonathan L. Goodall

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Many modeling frameworks compartmentalize science via individual models that link sets of small components to create larger modeling workflows. Developing integrated watershed models increasingly requires coupling multidisciplinary, independent models, as well as collaboration between scientific communities, since component-based modeling can integrate models from different disciplines. Integrated Environmental Modeling (IEM) systems focus on transferring information between components by capturing a conceptual site model; establishing local metadata standards for input/output of models and databases; managing data flow between models and throughout the system; facilitating quality control of data exchanges (e.g., checking units, unit conversions, transfers between software languages); warning and error handling; …

Elicitation Of Farmers’ Information Sources And Use In Operational Decision Making, Charlotte Dayde, Stephane Couture, Roger Martin-Clouaire

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The current trend is towards increasing the amount of raw data regarding agricultural practices (e.g., through experimentation, availability of measurement devices, etc.). Consequently, the amount of information that farmers can use to make operational decisions is growing at an impressive rate. The issue of imbalance between the richness of available information and the ability of farmers to harness it in their decision-making process has received little attention so far. In this study, a descriptive approach based on interviews is adopted. It explores the origin (i.e., internal knowledge or external sources) and the nature of information used by farmers …

Webxtreme: A Simple Web Tool For Calculating Agroclimatic Indicators Of Extreme Events, Tommy Klein, Argyris Samourkasidis, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Gianni Bellocchi, Pierluigi Calanca

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Extreme events such as frost, drought or excessive heat occurring during a critical plant stage can cause extensive and sometimes irreversible damages to agricultural production. Tools for gauging the occurrence of extreme events can thus play an important role in the context of agricultural decision problems. Agroclimatic indicators offer simple means to discriminate between favourable and unfavourable conditions. Their evaluation can be supported by dedicated software tools, even though this typically requires local installation of the proposed solution. Here we present webXTREME, a new web-based tool to characterize the occurrence and intensity of extreme events in agriculture (available through www.modextreme.org/webxtreme, …

Assessing The Economic Value Of A Regional Air Quality Plan, Elisabetta Angelino, Claudio Carnevale, Roberta Gianfreda, Giorgio Guariso, Guido Lanzani, Guiseppe Maffeis, Enrico Turrini, Marialuisa Volta

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

When developing an air quality plan, environmental authorities usually devise a number of individual actions, constituted by the application of both technical (end-of-pipe) and energy efficiency measures. They may range from the incentives to buy less polluting vehicles, to the enforcement of stricter rules on domestic heating. The assessment of the economic effectiveness for the society as a whole of the individual measures and of the overall plan requires a flexible support system able to quickly perform air quality impact evaluations on the specific area. One such system is RIAT+, a software package developed and tested during a series of …

Water Demand Forecasting With Autoflow© Using State-Space Approach, Khoi Anh Nguyen, Oz Sahin, Rodney Anthony Stewart, Hong Zhang

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The authors have recently developed an intelligent application, Autoflow©, which is a powerful tool to autonomously categorise residential water consumption data into a registry of single and combined events. This tool was developed using data collected in several cities in Australia, and when applied on standalone properties, the achieved accuracy ranged from 86% and 96% in terms of number of correctly classified events. Taking advantage of the analysis results from Autoflow©, the aim of this study is to propose a short-term water demand forecasting model that not only allows water utilities to predict the overall …

Institutional Analysis For Flood Risk Reduction: A Coupled Agent-Based – Flood Model Method, Yared Abayneh Abebe, Amineh Ghorbani, Zoran Vojinovic, Igor Nikolic, Arlex Sanchez

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Flood risk results from flood hazard interacting with vulnerability and exposure of human and natural systems. Though many associate flooding as just a natural phenomenon, it is also attributed to the economic, social, political, institutional and governance factors of affected areas. Institutions such as rules, laws, policies and norms that shape and constrain human interaction drive the hazard, vulnerability and exposure components of flood risk. In this study, we conduct an institutional analysis of rules, norms and strategies for flood risk reduction. Based on the institutional analysis, we build an agent-based model that is coupled with a hydrodynamic flood model. …

Towards Multifunctionality Of Landscapes – A Multi- Objective Land Use Optimization Framework For Exploring Interaction Between Ecosystem Services And Biodiversity, Michael Strauch, Anna Cord, Andrea Kaim, Carola Pätzold, Christian Schweitzer, Ralf Seppelt, Martin Volk

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The sustainable appropriation of resources and the design of multifunctional landscapes requires the finding of solutions that minimize trade-offs between contrasting goals of land use, ecosystem services and biodiversity. Substantial progress has been made in the model-based quantification of land-use effects on ecosystem services and biodiversity over the past years, but finding ‘optimal' land use patterns is still one of the challenges. Existing implementations of multi- objective land use optimization often have shortcomings or are not well designed for meeting multiple demands. For example, users may wish to include computationally extensive and complex process- based or statistical models to define …

Determining The Variability Of Population Exposure To Air Pollution While Taking Into Account Personal Mobility – A Case Study For The Uk, S. Reis, M Vieno, R. Beck, E. Carnell, D. Leaver

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The quantification of population level exposure to ambient air pollution is typically based on static population distributions inferred from the postcode of residence, and annual average concentrations of priority air pollutants at that location. Contemporary atmospheric chemistry transport models (ACTMs) are capable of providing air pollution concentration fields with high spatial and temporal resolution, for instance generating 1 km × 1 km gridded maps at hourly time steps. In addition, the 2011 UK Census has generated a novel population data product accounting for the location of the workplace, the so-called ‘workday population’ distribution, which accounts for the location of individuals …

Evaluating Model Structure Uncertainty By A New Approach To Sensitivity Analysis Utilizing Hydrological Signatures, Jiri Nossent, Mahyar Shafii, Willy Bauwens

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Model structure uncertainty is one of the most significant sources of uncertainty in traditional hydrological modelling and, above all, challenging to quantify. Structurally flexible models have recently become very popular in hydrology as they tend to allow a reduction of this uncertainty due to their flexibility in the mathematical representation of the hydrological response of a catchment. Reducing structural uncertainty within the flexible framework requires identifying (using top-down or bottom-up approaches) the most suitable (hydrologically consistent) model structure for a given watershed. To assess the models’ hydrological consistency, diagnostic model evaluation techniques are employed to test their capability of reproducing …

Semantic Data Integration From Multi Linked Model Framework, Binh Thanh Nguyen, Gregor Kiesewetter, Wolfgang Schöpp

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Model integration is becoming increasingly important due to the requirements for multi-scale and multi-objective assessment and decision making. Moreover, instead of incorporating all complex related information system models that are relevant for different related aspects into one super-model, a multi linked model framework has been proposed to extract data and output from multiple linked models into the coherent data warehouse, which respects the interdependency of data from different model as well as additional knowledge already contained in its existing data cubes.

In this paper, first the multi linked model framework is defined in a very formal manner. The mathematical abstract …

Advances In The Spatially Distributed Ages-W Model: Parallel Computation, Java Connection Framework (Jcf) Integration, And Streamflow/Nitrogen Dynamics Assessment, James Ascough Ii, Nathan P. Lighthart, Holm Kipka, Timothy R. Green, Gregory S. Mcmaster, Olaf David

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

AgroEcoSystem-Watershed (AgES-W) is a modular, Java-based spatially distributed model which implements hydrologic and water quality (H/WQ) simulation components under the Java Connection Framework (JCF) and the Object Modeling System (OMS) environmental modeling framework. AgES-W is implicitly scalable from field to regional scales, has a unique four-compartment surface-groundwater (vertical/lateral) routing scheme, and has recently been enhanced with various science components and tools for improved prediction of H/WQ response across large gauged and ungauged areas. Science component improvements include both new and enhanced modules for infiltration, water conveyance (e.g., ditches and diversions), conservation practice effects, and water table tracking. Recent AgES-W modeling …

A Conceptual Framework For An Agricultural Agent- Based Model With A Two-Level Social Component: Modeling Farmer Groups, Tatjana Kuznecova, Alexey A. Voinov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the last decade, collective actions within smallholder groups and cooperatives have been promoted by various development programs and projects. However, to develop appropriate programs and policies aimed at supporting cooperation among farmers, an approach may be required able to reflect the dynamics of an agricultural system resulting from decision-making and interactions between elements at different levels and scales.

In this study, we are focusing on the groups of smallholders organizing for collective crop production and/or marketing. Our aim is to provide an approach and a tool to gain a deeper insight in how cooperative groups emerge and perform under …