Search results for "geoscience"
showing 10 items of 58 documents
The assessment of environmental pollution caused by mining and metallurgy wastes from highly polluted post-industrial regions in Southern Poland
2012
Stored metallurgy and mining wastes contain relatively high amounts of potentially toxic elements. To monitor the distribution of contaminants originating from dumps, the chemical and physical properties of the wastes must be characterised. In this study, the chemical properties of wastes deposited in two different locations in Southern Poland (Szklary and Zloty Stok) were evaluated. Heaps located in Zloty Stok contain wastes from gold mineralisation comprising arsenic while wastes in Szklary originate from a factory that produced an iron-nickel alloy. In Szklary the total concentrations of Ca, Mg, Fe, Zn, Mn, Cr, Co, Cu, Ni, Tl, Ag, Cd and Pb were determined, while in Zloty Stok also As is…
Lessons from the 2018-2019 European droughts : a collective need for unifying drought risk management
2022
Funding Information: This open-access publication was funded by the University of Freiburg. Funding Information: Financial support. The project is supported by the Wassernetzwerk Baden-Württemberg (Water Research Network of the State Baden-Württemberg), which is funded by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg (Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State Baden-Württemberg) (grant no. AZ. 7532.21/2.1.6) and Maa-ja vesitekniikan tuki ry foundation. Doris E. Wendt acknowledges her support as part of the NERC-funded Groundwater Drought Initiative (NE/R004994/1). Lucy J. Barker was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/R016429/1) a…
Long-Term Consequences of Water Pumping on the Ecosystem Functioning of Lake Sekšu, Latvia
2020
Cultural eutrophication, the process by which pollution due to human activity speeds up natural eutrophication, is a widespread and consequential issue. Here, we present the 85-year history of a small, initially Lobelia&ndash
KOSMOS 2017 Peru mesocosm study: overview data
2020
Eastern boundary upwelling systems (EBUS) are among the most productive marine ecosystems on Earth. The production of organic material is fueled by upwelling of nutrient-rich deep waters and high incident light at the sea surface. However, biotic and abiotic factors can mod- ify surface production and related biogeochemical processes. Determining these factors is important because EBUS are considered hotspots of climate change, and reliable predic- tions of their future functioning requires understanding of the mechanisms driving the biogeochemical cycles therein. In this field experiment, we used in situ mesocosms as tools to improve our mechanistic understanding of processes con- trolling…
Geoscience Teaching and Student Interest in Secondary Schools-Preliminary Results from an Interest Research in Greece, Spain and Italy.
2013
The results of a topic-interest study on geosciences among 14- to 17-year-old school students are reported. The research was organized in the framework of the European project Geoschools to investigate the interest of students in the context of teaching strategies for geosciences in secondary schools. A questionnaire was designed as the main data-collection tool, based on the results of a comparison on geosciences curricula among the five European countries (Austria, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain) which are the partners in the GEOschools project. The present study focuses on results from Greece and Spain but also includes preliminary results from Italy, for comparison purposes. Questio…
Scaling carbon fluxes from eddy covariance sites to globe: synthesis and evaluation of the FLUXCOM approach
2020
FLUXNET comprises globally distributed eddy-covariance-based estimates of carbon fluxes between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Since eddy covariance flux towers have a relatively small footprint and are distributed unevenly across the world, upscaling the observations is necessary to obtain global-scale estimates of biosphere–atmosphere exchange. Based on cross-consistency checks with atmospheric inversions, sun-induced fluorescence (SIF) and dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), here we provide a systematic assessment of the latest upscaling efforts for gross primary production (GPP) and net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of the FLUXCOM initiative, where different machine learning methods…
A comparison of HONO budgets for two measurement heights at a field station within the boreal forest in Finland
2015
Atmospheric concentrations of nitrous acid (HONO), one of the major precursors of the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the troposphere, significantly exceed the values predicted by the assumption of a photostationary state (PSS) during daytime. Therefore, additional sources of HONO were intensively investigated in the last decades. This study presents budget calculations of HONO based on simultaneous measurements of all relevant species, including HONO and OH at two different measurement heights, i.e. 1 m above the ground and about 2 to 3 m above the canopy (24 m above the ground), conducted in a boreal forest environment. We observed mean HONO concentrations of about 6.5 × 108 molecules cm−3 (26 p…
Nitrous oxide emission budgets and land-use-driven hotspots for organic soils in Europe
2014
Organic soils are a main source of direct emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), an important greenhouse gas (GHG). Observed N2O emissions from organic soils are highly variable in space and time, which causes high uncertainties in national emission inventories. Those uncertainties could be reduced when relating the upscaling process to a priori-identified key drivers by using available N2O observations from plot scale in empirical approaches. We used the empirical fuzzy modelling approach MODE to identify main drivers for N2O and utilize them to predict the spatial emission pattern of European organic soils. We conducted a meta-study with a total amount of 659 annual N2O measurements, which was…
Morphological determination of the phototrophic community composition of biological soil crusts in coastal sand dunes in northern Germany
2022
This dataset comprises the microbial community composition of biological soil crusts in north-German sand dunes. For this we obtained enrichment cultures of phototrophic microorganisms, by placing fragments of biocrusts of the same Petri dishes as used for sequencing, in Petri dishes with Bold Basal (1N BBM) agarized medium (Bischoff and Bold 1963). Cultures were grown under standard laboratory conditions: with a 12-hour alteration of light and dark phases and irradiation of 25 μmol photons m-2 s-1 at a temperature 20 ± 5 ºС. Microscopic study of these raw cultures began in the third week of cultivation. Morphological examinations were performed using Olympus BX53 light microscope with Noma…
Resource or waste? A perspective of plastics degradation in soil with a focus on end-of-life options.
2018
‘Capable-of-being-shaped’ synthetic compounds are prevailing today over horn, bone, leather, wood, stone, metal, glass, or ceramic in products that were previously left to natural materials. Plastic is, in fact, economical, simple, adaptable, and waterproof. Also, it is durable and resilient to natural degradation (although microbial species capable of degrading plastics do exist). In becoming a waste, plastic accumulation adversely affects ecosystems. The majority of plastic debris pollutes waters, accumulating in oceans. And, the behaviour and the quantity of plastic, which has become waste, are rather well documented in the water, in fact. This review collects existing information on pla…