Topic Review
Payment for Ecosystem Services
Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is a market-based policy approach intended to foster land use practices, such as forest conservation or restoration, that protect and improve the social benefits from healthy, functioning ecosystems. While PES programs are used globally, they are an especially prominent environmental policy tool in Latin America, where the vast majority are payment for hydrological services (PHS) programs. PHS programs incentivize the conservation and restoration of ecosystems associated with water production and clean water for clearly defined water users, such as household water users, industries and farmers. As a market mechanism, PHS approaches involve a transactional relationship between upstream water producers and downstream water users who are connected by a shared watershed.
  • 502
  • 22 Nov 2021
Topic Review
SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in Livestock Industry and Agro-environment
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a public health emergency that turns the year 2020–2021 into annus horribilis for millions of people across international boundaries. The interspecies transmission of this zoonotic virus and mutated variants are aided by exposure dynamics of infected aerosols, fomites and intermediate reservoirs. The spike in the first, second and third waves of coronavirus confirms that herd immunity is not yet reached and everyone including livestock is still vulnerable to the infection. Of serious concern are the communitarian nature of agrarians in the livestock sector, aerogenous spread of the virus and attendant cytocidal effect in permissive cells following activation of pathogen recognition receptors, replication cycles, virulent mutations, seasonal spike in infection rates, flurry of reinfections and excess mortalities that can affect animal welfare and food security. As the capacity to either resist or be susceptible to infection is influenced by numerous factors, identifying coronavirus-associated variants and correlating exposure dynamics with viral aerosols, spirometry indices, comorbidities, susceptible blood types, cellular miRNA binding sites and multisystem inflammatory syndrome remains a challenge where the lethal zoonotic infections are prevalent in the livestock industry, being the hub of dairy, fur, meat and egg production. This entry provides insights into the complexity of the disease burden and recommends precision smart-farming models for upscaling biosecurity measures and adoption of digitalised technologies (robotic drones) powered by multiparametric sensors and radio modem systems for real-time tracking of infectious strains in the agro-environment and managing the transition into the new-normal realities in the livestock industry.
  • 588
  • 22 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Denitrification in Groundwater Vulnerability Assessment
The assessment of groundwater vulnerability to nitrate is a valuable tool for the implementation of sustainable groundwater management plans. However, the standard intrinsic vulnerability assessment methods can lead to unreliable results, since they often neglect important attenuation processes, such as denitrification, occurring in the unsaturated and saturated zones.
  • 485
  • 19 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Extremophilic Microorganisms in Central Europe
“Extremophiles”, first introduced in 1974, describes organisms that thrive in environments where one or more physical or chemical parameters are beyond most organisms’ normal optimal range. They can be broadly separated into two categories: extremophilic organisms that require one or more extreme conditions to grow and extremotolerant organisms that can tolerate harsh conditions but grow optimally in a milder environment
  • 639
  • 19 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Single Point Mooring (SPM) Systems with Buoys
The SPM system consists of four main components, namely, the body of the buoy, the anchoring and mooring components, the fluid transfer system and the ancillary elements. Static legs linked to the seabed underneath the surface keep the buoy body in place. Above the water level, the body has a spinning portion that is attached to the offloading/loading tanker. A roller bearing, referred to as the main bearing, connects these two portions. Due to this array, the anchored tanker can easily weather-vane around the buoy and find a steady position. The concept of the buoy is determined by the type of bearing utilized and the divide between the rotating and geostatic sections. The buoy’s size is determined by the amount of counter buoyancy required to keep the anchor chains in place, and the chains are determined by environmental conditions and vessel size.
  • 10.0K
  • 19 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Wind Speed Analysis of Hurricane Sandy
The database of the HWind project sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for hurricanes between 1994 and 2013 is analysed. Moreover, the wind speed of Hurricane Sandy is studied.
  • 982
  • 18 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Microplastics Contamination of the Yenisei River
This study is a pioneering attempt to count microplastics (MPs) in the Yenisei River system to clarify the role of Siberian Rivers in the transport of MPs to the Arctic Ocean. The average MPs content in the surface water of the Yenisei large tributary, the Nizhnyaya Tunguska River, varied from 1.20 ± 0.70 to 4.53 ± 2.04 items/m3, tending to increase along the watercourse (p < 0.05). Concentrations of MPs in bottom sediments of the two rivers were 235 ± 83.0 to 543 ± 94.1 with no tendency of downstream increasing. Linear association (r = 0.952) between average organic matter content and average counts of MPs in bottom sediments occurred. Presumably MPs originated from the daily activities of the in-situ population. Further spatial-temporal studies are needed to estimate the riverine MPs fluxes into the Eurasian Arctic seas. 
  • 547
  • 18 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Artificial Intelligence and Agricultural Sustainability
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one innovation emerging from the digitalization trend, often being used for precision agriculture and to enhance smart farming techniques. The digitalization of agricultural systems is aimed at the technological optimization of production, value chains, and food systems, as well as minimizing the environmental impacts of agriculture. 
  • 1.7K
  • 18 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Carbon Polygons and Carbon Offsets
The most important area of study concerning carbon polygons is the problem of assessing the reserves and trends in the stability of organic matter in the soil of natural ecosystems. An adequate assessment of these stocks should be based on verified methods for determining the content of organic matter (direct and indirect methods and the problem of the correlation of results) and on unified ideas about the depth and regularity of sampling within soil profiles and monitoring sites. This problem is particularly relevant to the development of a spatial network of carbon polygons in the Russian Federation.
  • 460
  • 17 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Wastewater Treatment Using Constructed Wetland
Constructed wetlands (CW) is an environmentally friendly technique for removing pollutants from wastewater and has been applied to municipal wastewater, petroleum refinery wastewater, agriculture drainage, acid mine drainage, etc.
  • 733
  • 17 Nov 2021
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