Summary

Environmental science emerged from the fields of natural history and medicine during the Enlightenment. Today, it provides an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental systems. Environmental studies are incorporating more of the social sciences in order to understand human relationships, perceptions and policies towards the environment. This entry collection features information about design and technology for improving environmental quality in every aspect.

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Topic Review
Vitamin D on Skin Aging
The normal vitamin D3 status is important for a general prevention of premature aging maintaining a healthful skin aging. Vitamin D3metabolites including its classical (1,25(OH)2D3) and novel (CYP11A1-intitated) D3hydroxyderivatives exert many beneficial protective effects on the skin, which could influence the process of premature aging via many different mechanisms, leading to a delay or attenuation of both chronological skin aging and photoaging. Skin-resident cells (keratinocytes, fibroblasts, and sebocytes) are capable of locally activating vitamin D3and exhibiting a diverse biological effect such as photoprotection and immunosuppression, similar to the UVR-induced one.
  • 769
  • 29 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Precision Agriculture for Farming
Precision agriculture (PA) is a technology-enabled, data-driven approach to farming management that observes, measures, and analyzes the needs of individual fields and crops. Precision livestock farming (PLF), relying on the automatic monitoring of individual animals, is used for animal growth, milk production, and the detection of diseases as well as to monitor animal behavior and their physical environment, among others.
  • 944
  • 18 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Time Series Aggregation for ESMs
Due to the high degree of intermittency of renewable energy sources and the growing interdependences amongst formerly separated energy pathways, the modeling of adequate energy systems is crucial to evaluate existing energy systems and to forecast viable future ones. However, this corresponds to the rising complexity of energy system models (ESMs) and often results in computationally intractable programs. To overcome this problem, time series aggregation is frequently used to reduce ESM complexity. As these methods aim at the reduction of input data and preserving the main information about the time series, but are not based on mathematically equivalent transformations, the performance of each method depends on the justifiability of its assumptions.
  • 955
  • 29 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Papaya Flavour Profiling
A major challenge to the papaya industry is inconsistency in fruit quality and, in particular, flavour, which is a complex trait that comprises taste perception in the mouth (sweetness, acidity, or bitterness) and aroma produced by several volatile compounds. Current commercial varieties vary greatly in their taste, likely due to historical prioritised selection for fruit appearance as well as large environmental effects. Therefore, it is important to better understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms and biosynthesis pathways underpinning preferable flavour in order to select and breed for better tasting new commercial papaya varieties. As an initial step, objectively measurable standards of the compound profiles that provide papaya’s taste and aroma, together with ‘mouth feel’, are required. This review presents an overview of the approaches to characterise the flavour profiles of papaya through sugar component determination, volatile compound detection, sensory panel testing, as well as genomics-based studies to identify the papaya flavour. 
  • 1.2K
  • 27 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Insects as Novel Ruminant Feed
In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in using edible insects as animal feed due to their high nutritive value and environmental advantages over the conventional livestock feeds. Insects have been used in the diets of some animals (poultry, fish, and swine) however, their evaluation in ruminants is still limited. The current in vitro study evaluated the usage of four different kinds of edible insects to partially substitute soybean meal as an example to the conventional high-quality expensive protein sources in ruminants’ diets. This study showed that the evaluated insects had high protein and fat contents. Substitution of 25% of soybean meal with the tested insects in a ruminant diet had no adverse effect on rumen fermentation profile or nutrient digestibility. Moreover, the inclusion of some species in the diet led to reduction of the methane production up to 16-18% which is an additional environmental benefit. The findings of this study are encouraging for further work in this promising area to improve the sustainability of livestock industry.  
  • 470
  • 27 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Driver's age and road crash
It has been widely reported that younger and older drivers have an excess risk of causing a road crash. Two casual hypotheses may coexist: the riskier driving behaviors and age-related mechanisms in extreme age groups (direct path) and the different environmental and vehicle circumstances (indirect path). Our aim was to quantify, through a mediation analysis, the percentage contribution of both paths. A case-control study was designed from the Spanish Register of Road Crashes with victims from 2014 to 2017. Assuming a quasi-induced exposure approach, controls were non-responsible drivers involved in clean collisions between two or more vehicles (n = 52,131). Responsible drivers for these collisions plus drivers involved in single crashes constituted the case group (n = 82,071). A logit model in which the outcome was the log (odds) of causing a road crash and the exposure was age groups was adjusted for driver, vehicle and environmental factors. The highest crash risk was observed in extreme age groups, compared to the 35-44 year old age group: the youngest (18-24 years old, odds ratio = 2.14, 95% confidence interval: 2.06-2.24) and the oldest drivers (>74 years old, odds ratio = 3.30, 95% confidence interval: 3.04-2.58). The mediation analysis identified the direct path as the main explanatory mechanism for these increases: 89% in the youngest and 93% in the oldest drivers. These data support the hypothesis that the excess crash risk observed for younger and older drivers is mainly related to their higher frequency of risky driving behaviors and age-related loss of capabilities. Preventive strategies in extreme-aged drivers should focus on decreasing these behaviors.
  • 779
  • 05 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Soundscape archaeology
Through an approach that aims to recognise and investigate the religious and public spaces of the past as “embodied spaces” and “sensory artefacts”, we can raise hypotheses on the sound experience in the ancient world and on the complex relationship between spaces and social interactions, making use of the potential provided by the application of 3D technology to virtual acoustics.  
  • 1.0K
  • 27 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Bacterial Cellulose in Wastewater Treatment
Bacterial cellulose membranes have been shown to be efficient as filters for the removal of various contaminants, including biological and chemical agents or heavy metals. Therefore, their use could make an important contribution to bio-based technological development in the circular economy. Moreover, they can be used to produce new materials for industry, taking into consideration current environmental preservation policies aimed at a more efficient use of energy.
  • 2.3K
  • 28 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Intelligent Transport Systems
Intelligent transport systems enable vehicles to communicate with each other and with the environment, ensuring road safety. Their implementation can help reduce the number of accidents, especially in stretches of s-curves, where speed control is essential to ensure the safety of drivers, and under hazardous weather conditions. Such systems promptly notify drivers about potentially dangerous road conditions, such as fog, so that they can better adapt their driving behavior.
  • 723
  • 24 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Wind Turbine Icing Modelling Approaches
In this entry, a comprehensive review of wind turbine icing modelling is presented. The commonly applied approaches and the recent advances have been reported based on a systematic and concise literature review. The paper presents a panorama of the current modelling and simulation studies dealing with different aspects of ice accretion on wind turbines.
  • 780
  • 24 Sep 2021
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