Establishing a Large-Scale Field Experiment to Assess the Effects of Artificial Light at Night on Species and Food Webs

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is one of the most obvious hallmarks of human presence in an ecosystem. The rapidly increasing use of artificial light has fundamentally transformed nightscapes throughout most of the globe, although little is known about how ALAN impacts the biodiversity and food webs of illuminated ecosystems. We developed a large-scale experimental infrastructure to study the effects of ALAN on a light-naïve, natural riparian (i.e., terrestrial-aquatic) ecosystem. Twelve street lights (20 m apart) arranged in three rows parallel to an agricultural drainage ditch were installed on each of two sites located in a grassland ecosystem in northern Germany. A range of biotic, abiotic, and photometric data are collected regularly to study the short- and long-term effects of ALAN on behavior, species interactions, physiology, and species composition of communities. Here we describe the infrastructure setup and data collection methods, and characterize the study area including photometric measurements. None of the measured parameters differed significantly between sites in the period before illumination. Results of one short-term experiment, carried out with one site illuminated and the other acting as a control, demonstrate the attraction of ALAN by the immense and immediate increase of insect catches at the lit street lights. The experimental setup provides a unique platform for carrying out interdisciplinary research on sustainable lighting

The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201

Smart system signalization prototype for flow control of people in crosswalks

Mestrado de dupla diplomação com a UTFPR - Universidade Tecnológica Federal do ParanáBad lighting conditions on crosswalks is a common problem on the urban environment. This scenery entail a large number of pedestrians fatalities and it shows a demand for solutions able to ensure their safety using lighting resources. The present work proposes a crosswalk’s crossing process oriented by a system which is compound for a pair of Smart Devices that fit themselves in the Smart City idea. Inside this propose, they are capable to signalize for pedestrians the safe moment to enter on the crosswalk. These devices are a prototype of a system programmed in Python language and based in the Raspberry Pi and LoRa technologies. The work is split, mainly, on the hardware and software components development. In hardware level, it shows a circuit schematic design based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module operating with the RFM95W LoRa module. In software level, it shows the incremental development of a Embedded System which reads inputs, gives lighting outputs and implements the communication, with encrypted messages, between the devices. Finally, this thesis shows a circuit schematic implementation wiled in KiCAD software and a embedded system focused in ensure well lighting and signalization on crosswalks. To validate the system are made hypothetical tests toward pedestrians behavior to cross the street on crosswalks.As más condições de iluminação em passadeiras são um problema recorrente no ambiente urbano. Esse cenário implica em um grande número de fatalidades e deixa evidente a demanda por uma solução capaz de garantir a segurança do pedestre usando recursos de iluminação. O presente trabalho propõe um processo de travessia em faixas de pedestres orientado por um sistema composto por um par de dipositivos inteligentes que se encaixam na ideia de cidades inteligentes. Dentro dessa proposta, eles são capazes de sinalizar para os pedestres o momento seguro para entrar na passadeira. Esses dispositivos são um protótipo de sistema programado em linguagem Python e baseado nas tecnologias Raspberry Pi e LoRa. O trabalho é dividido, principalmente, no desenvolvimento das componentes de hardware e software. A nível de hardware, ele mostra um projeto esquemático do circuito baseado no Raspberry Pi Compute Module que opera com o módulo LoRa RFM95W. A nível de software, ele mostra o desenvolvimento incremental de um sistema incorporado que lê entradas, fornece saídas de iluminação e implementa a comunicação, com mensagens criptografadas, entre os dispositivos. Finalmente, esta tese mostra a implementação do esquemático de um circuito usando o software KiCAD e um sistema embarcado focado em garantir iluminação e a sinalização nas passadeiras. Para validar o sistema são feitos testes hipotéticos em relação ao comportamento dos pedestres para atravessar a rua em faixas de pedestres

Best Environmental Management Practice in the Tourism Sector

The tourism sector has a large potential to reduce its environmental impacts and many measures are already effectively implemented by companies of this sector. This document describes what are the best practices employed by frontrunners in all aspects under their direct control or on which they have a considerable influence. They cover cross-cutting issues, destination management, tour operators and travel agents, water and energy consumption and waste production in accommodation, restaurant and hotel kitchens, and campsites management. The document also contains sector-specific environmental performance indicators and benchmarks of excellence. These can be used by all the actors involved in the tourism sector to monitor their environmental performance and to benchmark it against the performance of frontrunners in each given specific area. Overall, this document aims at supporting all actors in the tourism sector who intend to improve their environmental performance and seek for reliable and proven information on how best to do it.JRC.J.5-Sustainable Production and Consumptio

Seamless Navigation, 3D Reconstruction, Thermographic and Semantic Mapping for Building Inspection

We present a workflow for seamless real-time navigation and 3D thermal mapping in combined indoor and outdoor environments in a global reference frame. The automated workflow and partly real-time capabilities are of special interest for inspection tasks and also for other time-critical applications. We use a hand-held integrated positioning system (IPS), which is a real-time capable visual-aided inertial navigation technology, and augment it with an additional passive thermal infrared camera and global referencing capabilities. The global reference is realized through surveyed optical markers (AprilTags). Due to the sensor data’s fusion of the stereo camera and the thermal images, the resulting georeferenced 3D point cloud is enriched with thermal intensity values. A challenging calibration approach is used to geometrically calibrate and pixel-co-register the trifocal camera system. By fusing the terrestrial dataset with additional geographic information from an unmanned aerial vehicle, we gain a complete building hull point cloud and automatically reconstruct a semantic 3D model. A single-family house with surroundings in the village of Morschenich near the city of Jülich (German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia) was used as a test site to demonstrate our workflow. The presented work is a step towards automated building information modeling