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The article contains laboratory data comparing the rate of gasification of five types of woody plants—beech, oak, willow, poplar and rose. The gasification rate was determined thermogravimetrically. Carbon dioxide and steam were used as gasification gases. Willow wood was the most gasifiable, whereas rose wood the least.

Abstract Natural resources exist independent of human intervention. Although these interventions can and do affect the balance between ecological and biological diversity conditions these resources support, and their use to promote economic development. Currently, the unsustainable use of these resources threatens this balance, calling for more sustainable patterns of natural resource use and conservation. The primary responsibility for ensuring the proper balance lies with governments, leading to various policies and programs to preserve natural resources. The ultimate goal is to make the masses aware of natural assets’ importance and encourage their sustainable use. To successfully implement, however, these government practices require public communication and participation, and the full consideration of public opinion at various levels of governance. A predictive analytics framework is proposed for understanding public opinion on government policies to improve sustainable water governance. An integrated policy initiative to balance water resources use and conservation launched by the Indian government served as a test case for applying the framework in an attempt to accurately classify the opinion polarity related to the policy. The conventional feature extraction is applied to pre-processed datasets to extract the relevant features. Subsequently, swarm-based feature selection is applied to filter out optimal features. Lastly, opinion mining and textual analysis are performed to determine the most relevant water management factors that need immediate attention. The proposed framework serves as a policy evaluation strategy in the water management domain. The paper closes with a discussion of the general applicability of the proposed framework.

The basins of the Indus and Ganges rivers cover 2.20 million km2 and are inhabited by more than a billion people. The region is under extreme pressures of population and poverty, unregulated utilization of the resources and low levels of productivity. The needs are: (1) development policies that are regionally differentiated to ensure resource sustainability and high productivity; (2) immediate development and implementation of policies for sound groundwater management and energy use; (3) improvement of the fragile food security and to broaden its base; and (4) policy changes to address land fragmentation and improved infrastructure. Meeting these needs will help to improve productivity, reduce rural poverty and improve overall human development.

AbstractAutotrophs play an essential role in the cycling of carbon and nutrients, yet disease‐ecosystem relationships are often overlooked in these dynamics. Importantly, the availability of elemental nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus impacts infectious disease in autotrophs, and disease can induce reciprocal effects on ecosystem nutrient dynamics. Relationships linking infectious disease with ecosystem nutrient dynamics are bidirectional, though the interdependence of these processes has received little attention. We introduce disease‐mediated nutrient dynamics (DND) as a framework to describe the multiple, concurrent pathways linking elemental cycles with infectious disease. We illustrate the impact of disease–ecosystem feedback loops on both disease and ecosystem nutrient dynamics using a simple mathematical model, combining approaches from classical ecological (logistic and Droop growth) and epidemiological (susceptible and infected compartments) theory. Our model incorporates the effects of nutrient availability on the growth rates of susceptible and infected autotroph hosts and tracks the return of nutrients to the environment following host death. While focused on autotroph hosts here, the DND framework is generalizable to higher trophic levels. Our results illustrate the surprisingly complex dynamics of host populations, infection patterns, and ecosystem nutrient cycling that can arise from even a relatively simple feedback between disease and nutrients. Feedback loops in disease‐mediated nutrient dynamics arise via effects of infection and nutrient supply on host stoichiometry and population size. Our model illustrates how host growth rate, defense, and tissue chemistry can impact the dynamics of disease–ecosystem relationships. We use the model to motivate a review of empirical examples from autotroph–pathogen systems in aquatic and terrestrial environments, demonstrating the key role of nutrient–disease and disease–nutrient relationships in real systems. By assessing existing evidence and uncovering data gaps and apparent mismatches between model predictions and the dynamics of empirical systems, we highlight priorities for future research intended to narrow the persistent disciplinary gap between disease and ecosystem ecology. Future empirical and theoretical work explicitly examining the dynamic linkages between disease and ecosystem ecology will inform fundamental understanding for each discipline and will better position the field of ecology to predict the dynamics of disease and elemental cycles in the context of global change.

Detailed analysis of ground rods and their influence on horizontal ground conductors, such as those forming grounding grids, is performed assuming a two layer soil stratification. The study starts with a discussion about the adequacy of uniform and two-layer soils as equivalent models for actual soil structures. Following this, a typical ground rod is analysed, while it is progressively associated with other ground rods, and ultimately, with horizontal conductors. The same procedure is also applied to an horizontal conductor. The results, shown using numerous charts which can be used conveniently for practical design purposes, lead to several interesting conclusions, many of which are new or still unpublished.

Abstract The co-pyrolysis of Single-use low density polyethylene (LDPE) and Eucalyptus biomass (EuBm) can be considered as a sustainable waste management technique to produce viable byproducts. This study elucidates the effects of variable temperatures (300–600 °C), residence times (90–150 minutes), and proportions of LDPE (0.25, 0.33 (w/w)) on physicochemical characteristics of LDPE - EuBm char composites. The interference of liquified polymer coating on the surface with degradation of biomass could be the reason for low nutrient extractability of chars synthesized at 300 and 400 °C. These chars were rich in volatile matter (> 68 %) and their pores were filled with partially pyrolyzed products. Interestingly however, substantial changes in properties were observed at 500 °C due to the likely synergetic effect between the feeds. The highest plant-extractable concentrations of major nutrients (Na, K, Ca, Mg, NO3−, PO43-), electrical conductivity (4.73 mS/cm), and cation exchange capacity (50.5 Cmolc/kg) of char were observed at this temperature. The optimization through regression modeling identified 524 °C, 118 min, and 31 % (w/w) of LDPE as optimal process parameters to obtain char suitable for application in soil. Soil incubation test fortified the benefits of char to soil with 3.5 times improvement in soil fertility index at 5 % (w/w) rate of application.

National environmental protection through law is a relatively recent initiative. The written national constitutions of federal countries, such as Canada, did not originally provide for which level of government would enjoy the primary constitutional authority to regulate for environmental protection. Today, a legal jurisdiction must be interpreted and declared from an old imperial document that did not foresee the environment as a discrete subject for regulation. This article describes the experience of how each of two exclusively sovereign levels of government in the same country, the courts and the constitution have combined over the last half century to establish a unique regime of environmental protection in Canada, and how that regime continues to be developed.

AbstractAgeratum conyzoides, an herb found throughout the year, is generally considered as a weed: it causes reduction in soil productivity and leads to health hazards for cattle and humans. However, its biomass can easily represent a cost‐effective source, which can be used for lignocellulosic biofuel production. The conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to ethanol has drawn much attention in recent times due to abundance of biomass. In the present study, the cellulose and hemicellulose biomass of the leaf and stem of A. conyzoides was converted to sugars using acid hydrolysis.146.01 ± 02 mg/g of fermentable sugar was obtained from A. conyzoides. The maximum ethanol concentration 11.89 g/L was obtained after 7 days. Scanning electron microscopy was used to characterize the surface morphology after acid hydrolysis of biomass. In the current study, the residues of acid hydrolysis and fermented wastewater was used for biogas production through anaerobic digestion. The yield of biogas from the residues of acid hydrolysis and fermented wastewater was 204 L kg−1VS. The results obtained indicate that A. conyzoides may be considered as a promising feedstock for bioethanol and biogas production.