Hasil untuk "Geography"

Bogusław Wacławik, Joanna Popławska, Arkadiusz Sułek et al.

ESG reporting is a key process through which companies provide detailed information regarding their impact on the environment (E), society (S) and corporate governance (G). The aim of the article is to present the authors' research results on the reporting of environmental information in the field of ESG among companies from the energy sector and the defence industry, represented by the example of PIT-RADWAR, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2022-2023. The methodology was based on a review of the literature on the subject, legal acts and own research, which used non-financial reports of listed companies regarding ESG information. According to the authors, the article adds value to the literature on the subject, in particular in terms of gathering source material and discussing it. Considering the growing importance of ESG factors in the defence sector, the article also highlights the emerging trend of ESG reporting in this industry using the example of PIT-RADWAR S.A., emphasising its growing importance and the sector's first steps towards increasing the transparency of non-financial reporting. The subject matter of the article can form the basis for further detailed empirical research on ESG reporting.

Zeng Hao, Gonzalez-Blanco Laura, Romero Enrique

Granular bentonite (GB), offering better pourability and workability than traditional powder bentonites, has been proposed as a candidate material for engineered barriers in deep geological repositories of radioactive waste. During service, involving complex hydro-mechanical (HM) stress paths, GB barriers are expected to seal technological gaps within the system. However, few studies have examined the HM behaviour of GB related to gap sealing. To address this, a technological gap was initially fabricated within the compacted GB samples used for HM testing. The gap enhanced the compressibility of the sample, promoting a hardening effect under high stress and thereby reducing the volumetric collapse during subsequent wetting. Under low stress, the gap accelerated the hydration swelling, while the final swelling strain depended on the sample’s initial global dry density. Similarly, gap sealing had little effect on the development of swelling pressure when the sample was wetted under constant volume. Furthermore, the water permeability after saturation at a comparable global void ratio was higher in the initially gapped sample than in the intact one. These findings are anticipated to support a long-term safety assessment of GB barriers.

Deren Li, Mi Wang, Haonan Guo et al.

China’s Earth Observation(EO) System has undergone significant development since the 1970s, as China has dedicated substantial efforts to advancing remote sensing technology. With fifty years of development, China has successfully narrowed the remote sensing technology gap with foreign countries through collaborative endeavors of the government and enterprises. At present, China has constructed a comprehensive EO system that has been proven indispensable for driving economic growth and facilitating sustainable development. This paper provides an overview of the development, missions, andapplications of China’s EO system, while also exploring future directions and technical trends of China’s EO system.

Poleshchuk Olga

The goal of the paper is to develop a regression model under the initial Z-information based on an alternative method to the least squares method, and free from the assumptions regarding probability distributions of initial data. Formalization of input and output information is carried out on the basis of Z-numbers and linguistic variables, followed by the construction of a multidimensional quintile regression model with fuzzy coefficients. The optimization function is defined as the sum of the loss functions for the differences between the weighted output fuzzy numbers and the weighted model fuzzy numbers. To determine the parameters of the unknown regression coefficients, a linear programming problem is solved to find the minimum of the optimization function. The developed Z-regression is free from the shortcomings of existing models and provides new opportunities for solving tasks in problem areas with the active participation of experts, taking into account the reliability of information received from them.

Vesna Lukić, Suzana Lović Obradović, Radoslav Ćorović

Internal migration is an essential part of regional population change. Driven by various determinants, internal migration has been unequal across time and space. Migration responses to the changes in societal circumstances make it relevant to investigate the spatial and temporal dimension of internal migration in Serbia before and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The research aims to identify to what extent and in what way the pandemic has changed the magnitude and geographical patterns of internal migration in Serbia. The study is based on additionally processed official statistics on internal migration for the period 2018–2020, from March to December for each year, at the municipal, district (oblast, plural—oblasti), and regional levels. These are aggregate administrative data on usual residence registration by month. The derived data on the net migration rate is cartographically presented using the classification method natural Breaks (Jenks). Spatial dependence was assessed applying the spatial autocorrelation method, based on the Local Moran statistic. The results revealed that the pandemic affected not only the volume of internal migration but also its spatial patterns. The findings present new insights on the role of internal migration in reallocation of population across Serbia before and during the COVID-19 pandemic while underlying the importance of further research to deepen the understanding of internal migration trends upon the COVID-19 outbreak.

Stanislav S. Mishustin, Galina V. Polynova

One of the aspects of studies of micropopulations of ( Eremias arguta deserti Gmelin, 1789) and ( Phrynocephalus guttatus guttatus Gmelin, 1789) in the conditions of the southeastern part of the Lower Volga region was the observation of inter-seasonal fluctuations in body weight of individuals. Males of Eremias arguta deserti are consistently heavier in the spring than females. In the autumn periods, the results turned out to be contradictory and do not make it possible to conclude which individuals of which sex have the greatest mass. Statistical processing of materials using the Kruskal - Walli’s criterion (H) did not reveal significant differences in Eremias arguta deserti when comparing the mass of all females and males both for all periods and separately in spring and autumn periods. Phrynocephalus g. guttatus also showed no statistical significance when comparing all males and females for the entire period. However, the results obtained when comparing between females and males during the 2018 season, as well as when comparing females of different years, were statistically significant. In addition, the body weight of fingerlings of both groups, between the autumn seasons of 2017 and 2018, revealed statistical significance. Individuals of both Phrynocephalus g. guttatus and Eremias arguta deserti steadily gain body weight, despite the slowdown or complete stop of the growth of individuals in the former and autotomy in the latter. Regeneration of the tail or its absence obviously affects the growth of the trunk of Eremias arguta deserti.

Ting Lei, Chenxi Jin, Chen Qi

The growing demand for air transportation has led to increased air traffic and airline operations at airports worldwide, while hazardous weather conditions have a considerable impact on the efficiency and safety of air traffic. The long-term and high-resolution state-of-art fifth-generation reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) (ERA5) and ERA5-land provide us a perspective on the climatological characteristics of hazardous weather conditions affecting Chinese airports. These hazardous weather conditions include low-level wind shear (LLWS), limited visibility (LIMV), thunderstorms (TSTMs), and snowfall (SNOW). The LLWS is frequent in winter but rare in summer. At the airports in the north of eastern China, managers should take more precautions about LLWS from February to March and October to November. LIMV is major hazardous weather in the south of eastern China that should be carefully monitored in winter, especially from December to January. In northwestern China, LIMV is rare, especially at Yinchuan and Lanzhou airports. TSTMs frequently occur in South China and Southwest China, especially in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guangdong, and eastern Tibet. The corresponding active period is summer. SNOW frequently occurs over the Tibet Plateau and parts of Xinjiang province. SNOW is generally active in early winter (December–January) at Urumchi airport but at Lhasa airport in late winter (February–March). There is no SNOW throughout the year in the south of eastern China. The observations also verify such characteristics of the annual cycles of the four hazardous weather conditions. The trend analysis does not express many warnings on hazardous weather conditions except the SNOW. The SNOW at Lhasa airport shows an increasing trend. Considering the frequent SNOW in Lhasa, more attention should be put to monitoring this weather here.

Samiksha Srichandan, Ram Sateesh Pasupuleti, Anindya Jayanta Mishra

A cultural route represents a spatial link between different cultural groups, which co-influenced their mutual development, also enriched their relationship with the natural environment, resulting in a vast body of knowledge. First recognized on a world platform in 1993 by UNESCO, the concept is on its evolutionary stage, and there are several developing viewpoints expressed on its meaning and constituents. However, the small-scale routes with predominantly intangible characters are overlooked in discussion compared to the large expanse, trans-national routes that possess a significant amount of tangible resources. As a preliminary step in this endeavor of recognizing local routes with intangible aspects, the paper attempts to analyze the transhumance route of Pithoragarh, India, and explore the possibilities of the route being identified as a Cultural Route. It adopts a qualitative, ethnographic research approach for investigating the route and the associated Johar, Darma, Chaudans, and Byans valley and collects data through semi-structured interviews with experts and community members. The results indicate that the routes connected the highlands with the lowlands and created a vertical model that facilitated constant movement, brought together many cultures, and enabled fluid socio-cultural and economic interactions. It suggests that a richer understanding of the cultural assets could emerge by exploring the route's significance as a 'cultural route' and with further in-depth investigation, it can qualify to be recognized and protected as a cultural route.

Maryam Fallah, Ahmad Reza Pirali Zefrehei, Seyyed Aliakbar Hedayati et al.

Urgent is growing to have reliable information from the country's water resources. In recent years, data mining models such as artificial neural network (ANN), gene expression programming, Bayesian network, machine algorithms, such as a support vector machine (SVM), and Random Forest have found widespread use in the field of simulation and prediction of components in aquatic ecosystems. Variables vary greatly on water quality parameters (due to nonlinear and complex relationships). Therefore, conventional methods are not eligible to solve water resource quality management problems. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of simulating the spatial and temporal alterations in water quality parameters during the period 1985-2014 in Anzali Wetland using a SVM model. Based on principal components analysis (PCA), the parameters EC, TDS, pH and BOD5 were selected for analysis in this study. Spearman correlation was calculated to determine the inputs of the model and the correlation coefficient(CC) between the water quality parameters. According to the results of the correlation table analysis, 8 types of structures including different inputs were used to predict the parameters with machine vector. In the next stage, 70% of the data were used to train, while the rest were used for analyzing the models. Criteria for determination coefficient (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used for evaluation and model performance. The results revealed that in verification stage among different used models, the pH had the highest accuracy (0.95), while the lowest RMSE (0.20). Trend of alterations for optimal model of each parameter on a time scale, indicated an adequate estimation at most points. In general, the results exhibited the appropriate accuracy and acceptable performance of the SVM model in simulating water parameters.

Ming Luo, Ngar‐Cheung Lau

Abstract More than half of the total population in China are living in cities. Especially, the people in highly developed and spatially integrated city clusters, i.e., urban agglomerations (UAs), are facing increasing human‐perceived heat stress that describes the combined effects of hot temperature, high humidity, and lowered surface wind speed. By analyzing multiple indicators over 20 major UAs across China, we demonstrate that summer heat stress has been significantly intensifying in nearly all UAs during 1971–2014. This intensification is more profound in northern than southern regions and is especially stronger in more urbanized and densely populated areas (e.g., Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei and the Yangtze River Delta). Based on a dynamic classification of weather stations using time‐varying land use/land cover maps, we find that urban core areas exhibit distinctly stronger increasing heat stress trends than their surrounding rural areas. On average, urbanization contributes to approximately one‐quarter of the total increase in mean heat stress over urban core areas of UAs and nearly half of the total increase in extreme heat stress events. The urbanization effect is also dependent on the geographical region within China. Urbanization tends to have stronger intensifying effects on heat stress in UAs with higher population density in low‐altitude areas, while it has a relatively weaker intensifying and even weakening effect in some arid and high‐altitude regions. Moreover, as various heat stress metrics may yield different estimations of long‐term trend and urbanization contribution, the particular choice of heat stress indicator is of critical importance for investigations on this subject matter.

Paloma Mara de Lima Ferreira, Adriano Rolim da Paz, Juan Martín Bravo

ABSTRACT Hydrological models (HMs) can be applied for different purposes, and a key step is model calibration using objective functions (OF) to quantify the agreement between observed and calculated discharges. Fully understanding the OF is important to properly take advantage of model calibration and interpret the results. This study evaluates 36 OF proposed in the literature, considering two watersheds of different hydrological regimes. Daily simulated streamflow time-series, using a distributed hydrological model (MGB-IPH), and ten daily streamflow synthetic time-series, generated from the observed and calculated streamflows, were used in the analysis of each watershed. These synthetic data were used to evaluate how does each metric evaluate hypothetical cases that present isolated very well known error behaviors. Despite of all NSE-derived (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency) metrics that use the square of the residuals in their formulation have shown higher sensitivity to errors in high flows, the ones that use daily and monthly averages of flow rates in absolute terms were more stringent than the others to assess HMs performance. Low flow errors were better evaluated by metrics that use the flow logarithm. The constant presence of zero flow rates deteriorate them significantly, with the exception of the metrics TRMSE (Transformed root mean square error) did not demonstrate this problem. An observed limitation of the formulations of some metrics was that the errors of overestimation or underestimation are compensated. Our results reassert that each metric should be interpreted specifically thinking about the aspects it has been proposed for, and simultaneously taking into account a set of metrics would lead to a broader evaluation of HM ability (e.g. multiobjective model evaluation). We recommend that the use of synthetic time series as those proposed in this work could be useful as an auxiliary step towards better understanding the evaluation of a calibrated hydrological model for each study case, taking into account model capabilities and observed hydrologic regime characteristics.

João Vitor Mendes de Jesus, Anderson Costa dos Santos, Júlio Cezar Mendes et al.

O Banco Davis pertence à Cadeia Vitória-Trindade (CVT) que está situada na porção offshore da região sudeste do Brasil, no Atlântico Sul. Neste trabalho foram feitas análises petrográficas e químicas de rocha e minerais, difratometria de raios X (DRX) e comparação de dados com a literatura. O Banco Davis é caracterizado litologicamente por um basanito, holocristalino, composta essencialmente por microfenocristais de clinopiroxênio e plagioclásio, por vezes apresentando aspecto glomeroporfírítico, uma matriz microlítica com plagioclásio e foides, além de opacos. O enriquecimento em elementos incompatíveis (La/SmN ~ 4,1) e (La/YbN ~ 21,7) superior aos outros montes e bancos da CVT, aliado a análise mineralógica modal (nefelina ± leucita), o alto teor de K2 O (2,9 wt.%), o conteúdo baixo de MgO (4,0 wt.%) e as anomalias negativas de K e Ba em diagrama multielementar, sugerem, a partir de diagramas petrogenéticos comparativos, uma evolução a partir de um melt isobárico gerado a ±2,6 GPa de um lherzolito fértil contendo anfibólio fortemente fracionado em olivina e clinopiroxênio, principalmente.

A. Maiti, P. Acharya

The Indo-Gangetic basin is one of the productive rice growing areas in South-East Asia. Within this extensive flat fertile land, lower Gangetic basin, especially the south Bengal, is most intensively cultivated. In this study we map the rice growing areas using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) derived 8-day surface reflectance product from 2014 to 2015. The time series vegetation and wetness indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI) were used in the decision tree (DT) approach to detect the rice fields. The extracted rice pixels were compared with Landsat OLI derived rice pixels. The accuracy of the derived rice fields were computed with 163 field locations, and further compared with statistics derived from Directorate of Economics and Statistics (DES). The results of the estimation shows a high degree of correlation (<i>r</i>&thinsp;=&thinsp;0.9) with DES reported area statistics. The estimated error of the area statistics while compared with the Landsat OLI was &plusmn;15%. The method, however, shows its efficiency in tracing the periodic changes in rice cropping area in this part of Gangetic basin and its neighboring areas.

Abdulrahman Musaiger, Faiza Kalam

introduction. Dietary and lifestyle behaviours among adolescents are risk factors for several chronic diseases in adulthood. objective. To examine the differences in dietary habits and lifestyle between male and female adolescents in Syria. materials and method. A cross-sectional multi-stage stratified sampling study was carried out on adolescents, 15–18-years-old, in Damascus, Syria. The total sample selected was 365 (178 males and 187 females). Data were collected with a pretested questionnaire. results. There were significant differences between males and females in the frequency of intake of vegetables, milk and dairy products, red meat, sugary beverages and fast foods. Females were more likely to skip breakfast than males (52.4% vs. 43%), but the difference was not statistically significant. Males were significantly more likely to consume larger portions of fast foods and soft drinks. Significant differences were found between genders in eating while watching television, hours using Internet, practicing physical activity and emotional eating. conclusion. A significant variation between male and female Syrian adolescents in their food habits and lifestyle was observed. Interventions should consider the gender differences to promote a healthy lifestyle for schoolchildren in Syria.

E. J. Taaffe, H. Gauthier

Stefan Muthesius

This article is based on what has been outlined in ‘Part I’ and on additional references to other new German work, as well as to articles by two of the protagonists of the 1870s and 1880s, Anton Springer and Moritz Thausing. The central issue is the nineteenth century’s desire for a Verwissenschaftlichung of the subject, to render the subject ‘purely scientific’. Principally this concerns the way in which older kinds of connoisseurship were juxtaposed to the new claims of a strictly ‘historical’ approach. Much shorter sections touch on aspects of style, iconography and form, as well as on the history of the provision of illustrations.

H. Carter

J. Entrikin

M. Domosh

K. Anderson, F. Gale