Introduction to Environment & Sustainability
Ohio Wesleyan University, Department of Environment & Sustainability
In a world-first, the extent of human development in oceans has been mapped. An area totalling approximately 30,000 square kilometres—the equivalent of 0.008 percent of the ocean—has been modified by human construction.
The extent of oceanmodified by human construction is, proportion-wise, comparable to the extent of urbanised land, and greater than the global area of some natural marine habitats, such as mangrove forests and seagrass beds.
Source: Phys.org News
Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.
..in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.
Source: ArsTechnica
The National Science Foundation is awarding Ohio Wesleyan University a one-year, $86,735 grant to oversee the creation of online teaching tools that advance field ecology and data science.
Laurel J. Anderson, Ph.D., OWU’s Morris Family Professor of Natural Sciences, is the principal investigator on the federal grant. She also is president of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a consortium of colleges and universities that will work together to create the new teaching tools. Dr. Anderson will partner with Dr. Tim McCay from Colgate University to administer the project.
“The pandemic has created an urgent need to reimagine our teaching of field ecology, which is usually done with in-person field trips,” said Dr. Anderson, who helped to found EREN in 2010.
“However, field ecologists also use computer technology extensively to explore natural patterns at large scales,” she continued. “These projects allow us to meet our need to socially distance and have students collecting data wherever they happen to be. Then, we use online tools and datasets to see how their data fits into large-scale patterns.”
In a world first, University of Hong Kong marine institute scientists lay clay tiles in marine park where coral was wiped out in twin ecological catastrophes
Seeded with living corals, the tiles quickly increased biodiversity. If found to work, they could transform reefs damaged by pollution, fishing and bleaching
Source: Tiles to restore corals, designed and 3D printed in Hong Kong, may be key to saving the world’s threatened reefs (South China Morning Post)
Source:
“The public wants a Green New Deal. The public wants green stimulus. The public wants to address inequality.”
Amid persistent calls for a green and just recovery from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests against systemic racism and injustice, researchers on Friday detailed recent studies showing “policy packages that address the climate crisis alongside income inequality, racial injustice, and the economic crisis are more popular among voters.”
There probably is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at anytime in 3 million years
The coronavirus pandemic’s economic downturn may have set off a sudden plunge in global greenhouse gas emissions, but another crucial metric for determining the severity of global warming — the amount of greenhouse gases actually in the air — just hit a record high.
According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.
Source: Keeping Seeds In Our Hands: The Rise of Seed Activism (The Journal of Peasant Studies)
Every seed makes a political statement.
— Moudgil (2017)
Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmers’ rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems – from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies – are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments.
Search “Seed Activism” on Google
Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. (source)
“In some cities, the amount of one pollutant, ozone, has barely decreased compared with levels over the past five years, despite traffic reductions of more than 40%. Ground-level ozone, or smog, occurs when the chemicals emitted by cars, trucks, factories and other sources react with sunlight and heat.”
Tropospheric Ozone Pollution
Health Effects of Tropospheric Ozone Pollution
“NPR analyzed more than half a million air pollution measurements reported to the EPA from more than 900 air monitoring sites around the country. We compared the median ozone levels detected this spring with levels found during the comparable period over the past five years.”
“Our analysis revealed that, in the vast majority of places, ozone pollution decreased by 15% or less, a clear indication that improving air quality will take much more than cleaning up tailpipes of passenger cars.”
“In cities such as Los Angeles, stubbornly poor air quality during the coronavirus lockdown underscored how vast fleets of trucks are a dominant source of pollution. In industrial cities like Houston, refineries and petrochemical plants spew considerable air pollution. And in Pittsburgh and across a swath of the eastern U.S., much of the air pollution still comes from burning coal.”
Talk about social distancing: drones are a means of remote sensing – in essence, gathering information (visible energy, non-visible energy, temperature, sound, computer vision and facial and body recognition, and so on) remotely, without being in contact with the object. Technological distancing.
Some of this is very advanced – but much of it can be done with a drone and camera purchased in a store or online.
Source: HIT Consultants: ‘Pandemic Drone’ Could Detect Virus Symptoms Like COVID-19 in Crowds
The ‘pandemic drone’ will be equipped with a sensor and computer vision system that can monitor temperature, heart and respiratory rates, as well to detect:
- people sneezing and coughing in crowds
- offices
- airports
- cruise ships
- aged care homes
- other places where large groups congregate
Professor Chahl and his research team achieved global recognition in 2017 when they demonstrated image-processing algorithms that could extract a human’s heart rate from drone video. Since then they have demonstrated that heart rate and breathing rate can be measured with high accuracy within 5-10 meters of people, using drones and at distances of up to 50 meters with fixed cameras. They have also developed algorithms that can interpret human actions such as sneezing and coughing.
The research has previously looked at using drones to monitor and react to elderly falls, look for signs of life in war zones or following a natural disaster and monitoring the heart rate of babies in neonatal incubators.
(source of above graphic here)
Drones are among a range of devices for collecting environmental data: including handheld devices to airplanes and satellites.
More applications of drone remote sensing are summarized in this graphic, from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Remote Sensing Applications — A Review (Huang Yao, Rongjun Qin, and Xiaoyu Chen, Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 1443)
As part of a strategy of testing for Covid-19…
…passive forms of disease surveillance, like monitoring our sewers, could get us that information sooner.
The approach holds promise because a number of studies have shown high levels of viral shedding in fecal samples from Covid-19 patients. Since that shedding happens early in the disease’s progression, well before patients show any symptoms, there’s reason to suspect evidence of the virus might show up in a city’s wastewater, even before the residents of that city have been tested.
Last week, researchers at the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands were the first to publicly report they had detected SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater samples. The group started testing in early February in cities across the country, before the Netherlands had identified any Covid-19 cases. As the first cases emerged and then spread in early March, the researchers found the viral concentration in sewer water went up in tandem.
Source: Wired: One Way to Potentially Track Covid-19? Sewage Surveillance
Google Sewage Surveillance