Search results for "Science and technology"
showing 10 items of 1592 documents
MAJOR AND TRACE ELEMENTS GEOCHEMISTRY IN THE GROUND WATERS OF A VOLCANIC AREA: MOUNT ETNA (SICILY, ITALY)
1998
Thirty-five ground-water samples have been collected from wells, springs and drainage galleries on Mt Etna volcano for the determination of major, minor and trace elements in solution. Attention has been focused in particular on dissolved minor and trace elements, for most of which no data were available in the studied area. In general, dissolution of solids into Etna's ground waters follows from strong interaction between water of meteoric origin, CO2 gas of magmatic origin and the volcanic rocks of the aquifers. However, the R-mode analysis allowed to distinguish several sources of solutes: Al, Co, Ni, Fe, Si, As would derive mainly from alteration of the volcanic rocks of Etna; SO4=, K, …
Measuring and Modelling Evaporation Losses from Wet Branches of Lemon Trees
2022
Evaporation losses of rainfall intercepted by canopies depend on many factors, including the temporal scale of observations. At the event scale, interception is a few millimetres, whereas at a larger temporal scale, the number of times that a canopy is filled by rainfall and then depleted can make the interception an important fraction of the rainfall depth. Recently, a simplified interception/evaporation model has been proposed, which considers a modified Merrian model to compute interception during wet spells and a simple power-law equation to model evaporation from wet canopy during dry spells. Modelling evaporation process at the sub hourly temporal scale required the two parameters of …
Sedimentology and vertebrate fossils of the Frasnian Ogre Formation, Gurova outcrops, eastern Latvia
2020
Combined sedimentological and palaeontological study of the siliciclastic sequence of the Ogre Formation in the easternmost area of its distribution in Latvia was aimed at the facies analysis of the deposits and at detailed observation of the taxonomical and taphonomical peculiarities of the fossil vertebrate assemblage. Two facies associations, tidally-influenced fluvial channels and lateral tidal bars, have been identified in exposures along the Gurova River. Sedimentological evidences suggest that the studied deposits were formed in the fluvial environment with strong tidal influence. The sedimentary concentrations of vertebrate remains, dominated by the antiarch Bothriolepis maxima, por…
Influence of bed roughness on flow and turbulence structure around a partially-buried, isolated freshwater mussel
2023
The present study uses eddy-resolving numerical simulations to investigate how bed roughness affects flow and turbulence structure around an isolated, partially-buried mussel (Unio elongatulus) aligned with the incoming flow. The rough-bed simulations resolve the flow past the exposed part of a gravel bed, whose surface is obtained from a laboratory experiment that also provides some additional data for validation of the numerical model. Results are also discussed for the limiting case of a horizontal smooth bed. Additionally, the effects of varying the level of burial of the mussel inside the substrate and the discharge through the two mussel siphons are investigated via a set of simulatio…
Automated Plankton Classification With a Dynamic Optimization and Adaptation Cycle
2022
With recent advances in Machine Learning techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), automated plankton image classification is becoming increasingly popular within the marine ecological sciences. Yet, while the most advanced methods can achieve human-level performance on the classification of everyday images, plankton image data possess properties that frequently require a final manual validation step. On the one hand, this is due to morphological properties manifesting in high intra-class and low inter-class variability, and, on the other hand is due to spatial-temporal changes in the composition and structure of the plankton community. Composition changes enforce a frequent updating…
A cost efficiency analysis of flood proofing measures for hydraulic risk mitigation in an Urbanized riverine area
2020
Non-structural measures for flood risk mitigation are often more economically accessible, easier to implement, and are highly effective, especially in view of the pursuit of risk resilience objectives. Among the non-structural measures, more importance is increasingly being attributed to flood proofing interventions. There are two main types of flood proofing: dry proofing and wet proofing. An example of dry proofing is shielding, which involves the use of flood barriers that can be installed in the entrances of buildings or outside the buildings in order to avoid contact with the houses and deviate the water flow. Their use must be supported by a detailed hydraulic analysis to ensure the c…
The FLO Diffusive 1D-2D Model for Simulation of River Flooding
2016
An integrated 1D-2D model for the solution of the diffusive approximation of the shallow water equations, named FLO, is proposed in the present paper. Governing equations are solved using the MArching in Space and Time (MAST) approach. The 2D floodplain domain is discretized using a triangular mesh, and standard river sections are used for modeling 1D flow inside the section width occurring with low or standard discharges. 1D elements, inside the 1D domain, are quadrilaterals bounded by the trace of two consecutive sections and by the sides connecting their extreme points. The water level is assumed to vary linearly inside each quadrilateral along the flow direction, but to remain constant …
Effects of Boulder Arrangement on Flow Resistance Due to Macro-Scale Bed Roughness
2023
Flow resistance in gravel-bed channels is not only affected by the shape and size of the roughness elements, but also by their arrangement on the channel bed surface (position to flow streamlines, spacing between elements, and their protrusion from the channel bed). Many investigations proved that open channel flow resistance can be obtained by integrating the power velocity profile. For a macro-scale roughness condition, this study aims to investigate the effect of different boulder arrangements on flow resistance. First, for each arrangement, the equation relating Γ function of the power velocity profile, the Froude number, and the channel slope was calibrated using available measur…
Anti-inflammatory activity in selected Antarctic benthic organisms
2014
Antarctic benthos was prospected in search for anti-inflammatory activity in polar benthic invertebrates, in two different geographical areas: deep-bottoms of the Eastern Weddell Sea and shallow-waters of the South Shetland Islands. A total of 36 benthic algae and invertebrate species were selected to perform solubility tests in order to obtain extracts that were soluble at an innocuous ethanol concentration (0.2%) for cell culture, and further test them for anti-inflammatory activity. From these, ethanol extracts of ten species from five different phyla resulted suitable to be studied in cell macrophage cultures (RAW 264.7). Cytotoxicity (MTT method) and production of inflammatory mediator…
Global-Scale Environmental Niche and Habitat of Blue Shark (Prionace glauca) by Size and Sex: A Pivotal Step to Improving Stock Management
2022
25 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables, supplementary material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.828412/full#supplementary-material.-- Data Availability Statement: The blue shark habitat data are available on the JRC Data Catalogue (https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset?q=fish%20habitat) (or upon request) and habitat maps are available online (https://fishreg.jrc.ec.europa.eu/web/fish-habitat/habitatmapping). Chlorophyll-a data are available online (https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi/l3). The abiotic environmental and mesopelagic micronekton data are available online (https://marine.copernicus.eu/access-data).