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Topic Review
Kuroshio Current
The Kuroshio (黒潮), also known as the Black or Japan Current (日本海流, Nihon Kairyū) or the Black Stream, is a north-flowing, warm ocean current on the west side of the North Pacific Ocean. Like the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, the Kuroshio is a powerful western boundary current and forms the western limb of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
  • 2.8K
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Lactic Acid Bacteria as an Emerging Group
Increasing awareness of the problems caused by synthetic agrochemicals, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, makes it crucial to discover substitute approaches that can guarantee competitive plant production and protect the environment while maintaining the natural balance in agroecosystems. One of the leading alternatives is utilizing rhizobacterial strains named plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR).
  • 247
  • 04 Mar 2024
Topic Review
Lagosuchus
Lagosuchus is an extinct genus of avemetatarsalian archosaur from the Late Triassic of Argentina . The type species of Lagosuchus, Lagosuchus talampayensis, is based on a small partial skeleton recovered from the early Carnian-age Chañares Formation. The holotype skeleton of L. talampayensis is fairly fragmentary, but it does possess some traits suggesting that Lagosuchus was a probable dinosauriform, closely related to dinosaurs. A second potential species of Lagosuchus, L. lilloensis, is based on an assortment of slightly larger and more well-preserved fossils. These larger specimens have been considered much more diagnostic and informative than the original small L. talampayensis skeleton. As a result, some paleontologists have placed the larger specimens into a new genus, Marasuchus. Marasuchus is generally considered one of the more complete early dinosauriforms, useful for estimating ancestral traits for the origin of dinosaurs. This would also render Lagosuchus a nomen dubium, simply a name referring to a fossil which is too fragmentary to have a formal genus. However, other paleontologists support the argument that Lagosuchus is a valid genus, and that Marasuchus is a junior synonym of it.
  • 783
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Lahar
A lahar ( /ˈlɑːhɑːr/, from Template:Lang-jv) is a violent type of mudflow or debris flow composed of a slurry of pyroclastic material, rocky debris and water. The material flows down from a volcano, typically along a river valley. Lahars are extremely destructive: they can flow tens of metres per second, they have been known to be up to 140 metres (460 ft) deep, and large flows tend to destroy any structures in their path. Notable lahars include those at Mount Pinatubo and Nevado del Ruiz, the latter of which killed thousands of people in the town of Armero.
  • 1.9K
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Lake Rotoma
Lake Rotoma is the fourth largest lake of the 11 lakes in the Rotorua Lakes district, or the Hot Lakes district as it was known in the early decades of the 20th century. The Rotorua lakes are located in New Zealand's North Island in the Bay of Plenty Region. Lake Rotoma is the easternmost in the chain of three lakes to the northeast of Lake Rotorua The other two are Lake Rotoiti and Lake Rotoehu. Rotoma is located halfway between the city of Rotorua and town of Whakatane. Lake Rotoma has a high water quality with visibility up to around 13 metres deep. The lake has a maximum depth of 83 metres in the northern part and 73.5 metres in the southern part.
  • 879
  • 24 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Lake Taupo
Lake Taupo, often spelled Taupō, is a lake in the North Island of New Zealand. It is in the caldera of the Taupo Volcano. The lake is the namesake of the town of Taupō, which sits on a bay in the lake's north-eastern shore. With a surface area of 616 square kilometres (238 sq mi), it is the largest lake by surface area in New Zealand, and the second largest freshwater lake by surface area in geopolitical Oceania after Lake Murray in Papua New Guinea. Motutaiko Island lies in the south east area of the lake. Lake Taupo has a perimeter of approximately 193 kilometres and a maximum depth of 186 metres. It is drained by the Waikato River (New Zealand's longest river), and its main tributaries are the Waitahanui River, the Tongariro River, and the Tauranga Taupo River. It is a noted trout fishery with stocks of introduced brown and rainbow trout. The level of the lake is controlled by Mercury Energy, the owner of the eight hydroelectric dams on the Waikato River downstream of Lake Taupo, using gates built in 1940–41. The gates are used to reduce flooding, conserve water and ensure a minimum flow of 50 m3/s (1,800 cu ft/s) in the Waikato River. The resource consent allows the level of the lake to be varied between 355.85 and 357.25 metres (1,167.5 and 1,172.1 ft) above sea level.
  • 1.4K
  • 08 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Lake-Level Fluctuations
Recent decades of warmer climate have brought drying wetlands and falling lake levels to southern Alaska. These recent changes can be placed into a longer-term context of postglacial lake-level fluctuations that include low stands that were as much as 7 m lower than present at eight lakes on the Kenai Lowland. Closed-basin lakes on the Kenai Lowland are typically ringed with old shorelines, usually as wave-cut scarps, cut several meters above modern lake levels; the scarps formed during deglaciation at 25–19 ka in a kettle moraine topography on the western Kenai Lowland. These high-water stands were followed by millennia of low stands, when closed-basin lake levels were drawn down by 5–10 m or more. Peat cores from satellite fens near or adjoining the eight closed-basin lakes show that a regional lake level rise was underway by at least 13.4 ka. At Jigsaw Lake, a detailed study of 23 pairs of overlapping sediment cores, seismic profiling, macrofossil analysis, and 58 AMS radiocarbon dates reveal rapidly rising water levels at 9–8 ka that caused large slabs of peat to slough off and sink to the lake bottom.
  • 522
  • 25 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Land Administration and Blockchain Technology
Transparency of processes is very crucial across all institutions. In land administration processes, this is particularly important given the multi-stakeholder involvement. This paper argues that transparency of land administration processes involves carrying out and sharing up-to-date information on ownership, value, and the use of land and all of its associated resources among related institutions, right holders and other stakeholders, including third parties, as well as, acting on the information in an open manner. To achieve this in Ghana, blockchain technology has been identified as a complementary tool to the Ghanaian land administration system. Blockchain technology refers to a fully distributed crypto-graphical system that captures and stores a consistent, immutable and linear event log of the transactions between networked actors. The study identifies that given the potentials of blockchain technology which include; decentralization of transaction to all connected stakeholders, the immutability of records, hashing of records that allows for quick access to both historical and current land transactions' data, as well as the blockchain smart contract among others, land administration processes of land tenure, land valuation, land use planning, and land development will benefit from openness, and transparency, and human error elimination. It will also eliminate fraud, and double sales of land among other land challenges identified in the Ghanaian land sector.  The study proposes that for real-time land up-date in land information across all the land sector divisions; land valuation division, land title registration, survey and mapping division, and the public and vested land management division, a permisionless public blockchain architecture be adopted for the Ghanaian land system. This is because, in comparison to the other blockchain architecture types, the permisionless public blockchain allows more transparency, decentralization, openness, integration, and also adheres to privacy and data protection laws. This study and its results are particularly important not only to the Ghanaian land sector and its stakeholders, but to all other land administration systems in the sub-Saharan Africa region given the similarities in land administration across the region. In the Ghanaian context however, the study's findings if implemented will affect the institutional relations and shared authorities between all stakeholders which include government agencies, local chiefs and individual landowners. This is because, land decisions and land data will not become shared responsibility of all stakeholders and not dependent on just some few stakeholders. A successful implementation of blockchain in Ghana's land administration will however depend on negotiations and consensus amongst the different land stakeholder, education of all stakeholders on the technology, and its impacts, as well as standardization in the land administration processes across the different land divisions. This is because, where there is no such standardization, there is a high possibility of inconsistencies and irregularities in the processes which can affect the efficient working of the blockchain system.
  • 2.6K
  • 07 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Land Change in Ethiopian Basins
Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes analysis is one of the most useful methodologies to understand how the land was used in the past years, what types of detections are to be expected in the future, as well as the driving forces and processes behind these changes. In Ethiopia, Africa, the rapid variations of LULC observed in the last decades are mainly due to population pressure, resettlement programs, climate change, and other human- and nature-induced driving forces. Anthropogenic activities are the most significant factors adversely changing the natural status of the landscape and resources, which exerts unfavourable and adverse impacts on the environment and livelihood. The main goal of the present work is to review previous studies, discussing the spatiotemporal LULC changes in Ethiopian basins, to find out common points and gaps that exist in the current literature, to be eventually addressed in the future. A total of 25 articles, published from 2011 to 2020, were selected and reviewed, focusing on LULC classification using ArcGIS and ERDAS imagine software by unsupervised and maximum likelihood supervised classification methods. Key informant interview, focal group discussions, and collection of ground truth information using ground positioning systems for data validation were the major approaches applied in most of the studies. All the analysed research showed that, during the last decades, Ethiopian lands changed from natural to agricultural land use, waterbody, commercial farmland, and built-up/settlement. Some parts of forest land, grazing land, swamp/wetland, shrubland, rangeland, and bare/ rock out cropland cover class changed to other LULC class types, mainly as a consequence of the increasing anthropogenic pressure. 
  • 834
  • 15 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Land Cover Change Detection
Land cover patterns in sub-Saharan Africa are rapidly changing. This study aims to quantify the land cover change and to identify its major determinants by using the Drivers, Pressures, State, Impact, Responses (DPSIR) framework in the Ethiopian Gozamin District over a period of 32 years (1986 to 2018). Satellite images of Landsat 5 (1986), Landsat 7 (2003), and Sentinel-2 (2018) and a supervised image classification methodology were used to assess the dynamics of land cover change. Land cover maps of the three dates, focus group discussions (FGDs), interviews, and farmers’ lived experiences through a household survey were applied to identify the factors for changes based on the DPSIR framework. Results of the investigations revealed that during the last three decades the study area has undergone an extensive land cover change, primarily a shift from cropland and grassland into forests and built-up areas. Thus, quantitative land cover change detection between 1986 and 2018 revealed that cropland, grassland, and bare areas declined by 10.53%, 5.7%, and 2.49%. Forest, built-up, shrub/scattered vegetation, and water bodies expanded by 13.47%, 4.02%, 0.98%, and 0.25%. Household surveys and focus group discussions (FGDs) identified the population growth, the rural land tenure system, the overuse of land, the climate change, and the scarcity of grazing land as drivers of these land cover changes. Major impacts were rural to urban migration, population size change, scarcity of land, and decline in land productivity. The outputs from this study could be used to assure sustainability in resource utilization, proper land use planning, and proper decision-making by the concerned government authorities.
  • 851
  • 27 Oct 2020
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