Search results for "natural resource"
showing 10 items of 482 documents
Similarities and Differences in the Evaluative Methods
2016
The awareness in the last few years surrounding the use of natural resources and landscape transformations has led to the development of several tools designed to evaluate the effects of human actions on them. The environmental evaluation methods, born in the USA, have known different disciplinary evolutions according to the following factors: firstly, regarding the object to assess; secondly, pertaining to the national juridical framework; and thirdly, relating to the progress in this field. Today we can affirm that we have, more or less, as many assessment techniques as countries. In fact, other than the Environmental Assessment Impact and Strategic Environmental Assessment, common to dif…
Scaling Consultative Selling with Virtual Reality: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Enhanced Services
2018
Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies allow creation of powerful customer experiences and illustrative demonstrations especially in use cases that benefit from spatial visualizations. Our study focuses on the natural resource management sector and digitalizing of consultative selling process. More specifically, we look at how to improve customer engagement with the use of virtual reality (VR) and thus digitally scale consultative selling. In this process, a VR application is used to demonstrate various management operations and their economic results. Design research methodology is applied to a pre-development phase and three application development iterations between 2016 and …
Spatial and temporal changes in Actinobacterial dominance in experimental artificial groundwater recharge.
2008
Abstract Artificial groundwater recharge (AGR) is used in the drinking water industry to supplement groundwater resources and to minimise the use of chemicals in water treatment. This study analysed the spatial and temporal changes of microbial communities in AGR using two test systems: a nutrient-amended fluidized-bed reactor (FBR) and a sand column. Structural changes in the feed lake water (Lake Roine), FBR, and sand column bacterial communities were determined by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and the length heterogeneity analysis of amplified 16S rRNA genes (LH-PCR). Two clone libraries were created to link the LH-PCR results to the dominant bacterial groups. The lake w…
BORRELIA BURGDORFERI SENSU LATO DETECTED IN SKIN OF NORWEGIAN MOUNTAIN HARES (LEPUS TIMIDUS) WITHOUT SIGNS OF DISSEMINATION
2011
The mountain hare (Lepus timidus) population in southern Norway appears to be in decline. Necropsy and laboratory examinations of 36 hares found dead or diseased during 2007-2009 in Vest- and Aust-Agder counties showed that disease and deaths were attributed to multiple causes, with no specific etiology emerging as a cause for population decline. To investigate whether Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) infection is associated with mortality in mountain hares, tissues and ticks collected from hares were investigated for infection with the spirochete. Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. DNA was not detected in samples from internal organs, whereas Borrelia afzelii, B. burgdorferi sensu stricto (s.…
Phytochemical Constituents, Antioxidant Activity, and Toxicity Assessment of the Aerial Part Extracts from the Infraspecific Taxa of Matthiola frutic…
2021
In a project designed to investigate the specific and infraspecific taxa of Matthiola endemic to Sicily (Italy) as new potential sources of bioactive compounds in this work, the infraspecific taxa of Matthiola fruticulosa were studied, namely, subsp. fruticulosa and subsp. coronopifolia. HPLC–PDA/ESI–MS and SPME–GC/MS analyses of hydroalcoholic extracts obtained from the aerial parts of the two subspecies led to the detection of 51 phenolics and 61 volatile components, highlighting a quite different qualitative–quantitative profile. The antioxidant properties of the extracts were explored through in vitro methods: 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), reducing power and Fe2+ chelating activ…
Heritage and knowledge: apparatus, logic and strategies in the formation of heritage
2016
Heritage as a category reflects diverse political positions. All heritagisation processes imply the creation of hierarchies, selection, ranking, and categorization of what is worthy or unworthy of being heritage, and all heritage creation involves certain disciplinary processes that confer legitimacy. As a modern invention, heritage was built on two closely-related cornerstones: the distinction between nature and culture and the difference between normalized knowledge and marginal knowledge. As a result, refining processes were applied which became strategies to legitimise political domination. In this paper the constituent process of heritage creation and its links to normative knowledge a…
The Indian-French Trishna Mission: Earth Observation in the Thermal Infrared with High Spatio-Temporal Resolution
2018
International audience; The monitoring of the water cycle at the Earth surface which tightly interacts with the climate change processes as well as a number of practical applications (agriculture, soil and water quality assessment, irrigation and water resource management, etc...) requires surface temperature measurements at local scale. Such is the goal of the Indian-French high spatio-temporal TRISHNA mission (Thermal infraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural resource Assessment). The scientific objectives of the mission and research work conducted to consolidate the mission specifications are presented. Progress in modelling of surface fluxes is then discussed. The main spec…
Optimal Sustainable Policies Under Pollution Ceiling: the Demographic Side
2014
AD; International audience; We study optimal sustainable policies in a benchmark logistic world (where both population and technological progress follow logistic laws of motion) subject to a pollution ceiling. The main policy in the hands of the benevolent planner is pollution abatement, ultimately leading to the control of a dirtiness index as in the early literature of the limits to growth literature. Besides inclusion of demographic dynamics, we also hypothesize that population size affects negatively the natural regeneration or assimilation rate, as a side product of human activities (like increasing pollution, deforestation, ...). We first characterize optimal sustainable policies. Und…
The effectiveness of rural versus urban nonprofit organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo
2017
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a country with high natural resources, but it has suffered from decades of civil wars and social turmoil, being heavily aid-dependent. In the DRC, several Nonprofit Organisations (NPOs) are major players in fighting poverty and enhancing welfare. This research aims to analyse the effectiveness of small NPOs in improving poor peoples’ lives through health, education, and economic activities. Two NPOs working in the DRC, one in a rural and the other in an urban area, are compared by researching the aid sites and surveying 201 households (aid beneficiaries). Our case observations and the survey results facilitate analysing the mission accomplishment, e…
The Physical Economy of France (1830–2015). The History of a Parasite?
2019
Abstract This article explores long-term trends and patterns of material use in France for a 185-year period. It is the first long-term study of material flows for France with national and yearly data for most of the period. Based on a material flow analysis (MFA) that is fully consistent with current standards of economy-wide MFAs and covers domestic extraction, imports, and exports of materials, we investigated the evolution of the French metabolism from industrialization to financialized capitalism. Over the whole period, there is a 9-fold increase in domestic material consumption, an expansion of material use per capita, and a spectacular addition of abiotic resources (fossil fuels and …