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Topic Review
Factors Affecting Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning
The high levels of biodiversity found in natural ecosystems have positive effects on ecosystem functions (EFs), though the intensity and direction of such effects can vary. This is associated with the impacts of other EF-driving factors.
  • 2.5K
  • 27 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Subsistence Farming of Smallholder Agroforestry Systems in Indonesia
Subsistence farming is defined as self-sufficient farming in which farmers focus on cultivating sufficient quantities of food for their families. However, there are still many cases of poverty among farmers due to a lack of ability to adopt advanced technology. Small land tenure, low literacy rates, and lack of forest maintenance are the main causes of the subsistence of small agroforestry farmers. Another reason is that subsistence-oriented agroforestry practices are considered a strong form of smallholder resilience. To reduce the subsistence level of farmers, government intervention is needed, especially in providing managerial assistance packages, capital assistance, and the marketing of forest products. 
  • 2.5K
  • 20 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Environmental Scenario Analysis
Scenario analysis is a useful tool to facilitate discussions about the main trends of future change and to promote the understanding of global environmental changes implications on relevant aspects of sustainability.
  • 2.5K
  • 16 Sep 2020
Topic Review
Climate Emergency Declarations in Australia
Climate Emergency is being declared in Australia similarly to many other jurisdictions across the world (actions known as Climate emergency declaration). One such jurisdiction in Australia, Darebin City Council, was the first one in the world to declare a climate emergency in 2016. This page lists all known climate emergency declarations within Australian jurisdictions across all three levels of government in Australia (Local, State, and Federal).
  • 2.5K
  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Environmental Monitoring
Human activities and climate change constitute the contemporary catalyst for natural processes and their impacts, i.e., geo-environmental hazards. Globally, natural catastrophic phenomena and hazards, such as drought, soil erosion, quantitative and qualitative degradation of groundwater, frost, flooding, sea level rise, etc., are intensified by anthropogenic factors. Thus, they present rapid increase in intensity, frequency of occurrence, spatial density, and significant spread of the areas of occurrence. The impact of these phenomena is devastating to human life and to global economies, private holdings, infrastructure, etc., while in a wider context it has a very negative effect on the social, environmental, and economic status of the affected region. Geospatial technologies including Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing—Earth Observation as well as related spatial data analysis tools, models, databases, contribute nowadays significantly in predicting, preventing, researching, addressing, rehabilitating, and managing these phenomena and their effects. 
  • 2.5K
  • 20 Apr 2021
Topic Review
Artificial Intelligence in Phytopathology
Plant diseases annually cause 10–16% yield losses in major crops, prompting urgent innovations. Artificial intelligence (AI) shows an aptitude for automated disease detection and diagnosis utilizing image recognition techniques, with reported accuracies exceeding 95% and surpassing human visual assessment. Forecasting models integrating weather, soil, and crop data enable preemptive interventions by predicting spatial-temporal outbreak risks weeks in advance at 81–95% precision, minimizing pesticide usage. Precision agriculture powered by AI optimizes data-driven, tailored crop protection strategies boosting resilience. Real-time monitoring leveraging AI discerns pre-symptomatic anomalies from plant and environmental data for early alerts. These applications highlight AI’s proficiency in illuminating opaque disease patterns within increasingly complex agricultural data. 
  • 2.5K
  • 28 Feb 2024
Topic Review
Zeolite/Pharmaceuticals System
Zeolites belong to aluminosilicate microporous solids, with strong and diverse catalytic activity, which makes them applicable in almost every kind of industrial process, particularly thanks to their eco-friendly profile. Another crucial characteristic of zeolites is their tremendous adsorption capability. Therefore, it is self-evident that the widespread use of zeolites is in environmental protection, based primarily on the adsorption capacity of substances potentially harmful to the environment, such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, or other industry pollutants. On the other hand, zeolites are also recognized as drug delivery systems (DDS) carriers for numerous pharmacologically active agents. The enhanced bioactive ability of DDS zeolite as a drug carrying nanoplatform is confirmed, making this system more specific and efficient, compared to the drug itself. These two applications of zeolite, in fact, illustrate the importance of (ir)reversibility of the adsorption process. 
  • 2.5K
  • 11 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Carbon Sequestration
Carbon sequestration or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is the long-term removal, capture or sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow or reverse atmospheric CO2 pollution and to mitigate or reverse global warming. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is naturally captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical, and physical processes. These changes can be accelerated through changes in land use and agricultural practices, such as converting crop and livestock grazing land into land for non-crop fast growing plants. Artificial processes have been devised to produce similar effects, including large-scale, artificial capture and sequestration of industrially produced CO2 using subsurface saline aquifers, reservoirs, ocean water, aging oil fields, or other carbon sinks, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, ocean fertilization, enhanced weathering, and direct air capture when combined with storage. The likely need for CDR has been publicly expressed by a range of individuals and organizations involved with climate change issues, including IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri, the UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres, and the World Watch Institute. Institutions with major programs focusing on CDR include the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and the Climate Decision Making Center, an international collaboration operated out of Carnegie-Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy.
  • 2.5K
  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Piezo-Photocatalysis
Piezocatalysis is a technique that relies on the conversion of mechanical energy to trigger chemical reactions that can be utilized to catalyze the degradation of pollutants in water. By combining piezoelectric materials with photocatalytic materials, the built-in electric field generated by the piezoelectric effect promotes the separation and migration of photogenerated carriers, thereby enhancing the efficiency, selectivity, and stability of photocatalytic reactions.
  • 2.5K
  • 07 Oct 2023
Topic Review
Climate of the Alps
The climate of the Alps is the climate, or average weather conditions over a long period of time, of the exact middle Alpine region of Europe. As air rises from sea level to the upper regions of the atmosphere the temperature decreases. The effect of mountain topography on prevailing winds is to force warm air from the lower region into an upper zone where it expands in volume at the cost of a proportionate loss of heat, often accompanied by the precipitation of moisture in the form of snow, rain or hail. The position of the Alps in the central European continent profoundly affects the climate of all the surrounding regions. The accumulation of vast masses of snow, which have gradually been converted into permanent glaciers, maintains a gradation of very different climates within the narrow space that intervenes between the foot of the mountains and their upper ridges; it cools breezes that waft to the plains on either side, but its most important function is to regulate the water supply of the large region which is traversed by the streams of the Alps. Nearly all the moisture that is precipitated during fall, winter, and spring is stored in the form of snow and gradually diffused in the course of the succeeding summer; even in the hottest and driest seasons the reserves accumulated during a long preceding period of years in the form of glaciers are available to maintain the regular flow of the greater streams. Nor is this all; the lakes that fill several of the main valleys on the southern side of the Alps are somewhat above the level of the plains of Lombardy and Venetia, and afford an inexhaustible supply of water, which, from a remote period, has been used for that system of irrigation to which they owe their proverbial fertility. Six regions or zones, which are best distinguished by their characteristic vegetation, are found in the Alps. It is an error to suppose that these are indicated by absolute height above sea level. Local conditions of exposure to the Sun, protection from cold winds, or the reverse, are of primary importance in determining the climate and the corresponding vegetation.
  • 2.5K
  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Barriers to Industrial Symbiosis
Industrial symbiosis (IS) can contribute to achieving a win-win situation between industry and environment for local and regional circular economies. Many authors have recognized that a variety of barriers can hinder the implementation of industrial symbiosis (IS). It is imperative to understand and prioritize the barriers which will provide guidance for the realization of IS projects and assist practitioners and stakeholders with more effective implementation. This, in turn, will contribute to development of circular economies. 
  • 2.4K
  • 01 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Education for Sustainable Development
Education can serve the purpose of trying to mitigate catastrophes, from the climate change education perspective. Therefore, understanding how teachers are engaging with sustainability issues can help to reveal how they cope with it. In a school context, teachers can have a role in enacting an interconnection between critical thinking (CT) as a potentially useful tool and education for sustainable development (ESD), in terms of educating and communicating the importance of sustainability to future generations.
  • 2.4K
  • 14 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Bioethanol Production of Distillery Stillage
Distillery stillage has a high energy potential (13.6 MJ/kg TS, 10.4 MJ/kg COD), which indicates that it can be processed via anaerobic digestion and is a suitable substrate for conversion into energy.
  • 2.4K
  • 16 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Exploring Coastal Access in South Africa
Coastal spaces have been highly contested terrains in South Africa, dating from the colonial period to the present time. Inclusive documentation of the history of coastal access in South Africa is inadequate. The alienation of the African majority from coastal access in South Africa has been systematically executed through various legislations. Although 1994 (democratic era) ushered in a political change, coastal spaces in South Africa still reflect historical racial divide, with former Caucasian areas well-endowed with facilities whilst others are still underdeveloped. The lack of access to coastal resources remains a challenge to many previously disadvantaged communities, owing to South Africa’s history of Apartheid. Apartheid spatial planning remains a factor that undermines equitable access to the coast.
  • 2.4K
  • 07 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-waste, faces significant sustainability challenges. Characterised by high economic elasticity, i.e. a close correlation between WEEE generation and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), WEEE is one of the fastest growing waste streams worldwide. Hazardous components require attention, while at the same time the potential to implement circular economy schemes with recuperation of valuable components is particularly high for e-waste. An overview on key aspects related to sound management of e-waste is provided in the following.
  • 2.4K
  • 05 Nov 2020
Topic Review
Valorization of Bread Waste into Value-Added Products
Bread is a universal food that is sold and consumed across the entire social and geographical spectrum. Bread waste is currently of increasing interest, as it is considered a huge global issue with serious environmental impacts and significant economic losses that have become even greater in the post-pandemic years due to an increase in cereal prices, which has led to higher production costs and bread prices. Meanwhile, many efforts have been initiated in the past decades to investigate methods of repurposing bread residues into fuel and chemicals such as bioethanol, biohydrogen, succinic acid, and various added-value products that can be exploited in versatile industries.
  • 2.4K
  • 09 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Trends in Bioenergy Production
A wide range of studies have been performed in the field of the usage of biomass for energy production, in order to contribute to the green transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies. Over the past 20 years (from 2000 to 2019), approximately 10,000 articles have been published in the “Agricultural and Biological Sciences” field on this theme, covering all stages of production—from the harvesting of crops to the particular type of energy produced. Articles were obtained from the SCOPUS database and examined with a text mining tool in order to analyze publication trends over the last two decades. Publications per year in the bioenergy theme have grown from 91 in 2000 to 773 in 2019. In particular the analyses showed how environmental aspects have increased their importance (from 7.3% to 11.8%), along with studies related to crop conditions (from 10.4% to 18.6%). Regarding the use of energy produced, growing trends were recognized for the impact of biofuels (mentions moved from 0.14 times per article in 2000 to 0.38 in 2019) and biogases (from 0.14 to 0.42 mentions).
  • 2.4K
  • 28 Aug 2020
Topic Review
Solid Adsorbents for CO2 Capture
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is considered to be a promising technology in reducing atmospheric CO2 concentration. Among the CO2 capture technologies, adsorption has grabbed significant attention owing to its advantageous characteristics discovered in recent years. Solid adsorbents have emerged as one of the most versatile CO2 adsorbents. 
  • 2.4K
  • 23 Feb 2023
Topic Review
Phosphogypsum
Phosphogypsum is an almost unused by-product of phosphate fertilizer production, which includes several valuable components—calcium sulphates and rare-earth elements such as silicon, iron, titanium, magnesium, aluminum, and manganese, as well as toxic elements such as heavy metals and others.
  • 2.4K
  • 25 Feb 2021
Topic Review
Radar-based Rainfall Information
Radar-based rainfall information has been widely used in hydrological and meteorological applications, as it provides data with a high spatial and temporal resolution that improve rainfall representation. However, the broad diversity of studies makes it difficult to gather a condensed overview of the usefulness and limitations of radar technology and its application in particular situations. 
  • 2.4K
  • 22 Feb 2021
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