Effects of recycled aggregate growth substrate on green roof vegetation development: a six year experiment

Green roofs have the potential to address several of the environmental problems associated with urbanisation, and can be used as mitigation for habitats lost at ground level. Brown roofs (a type of green roof) can be used to mitigate for the loss of brownfield habitat, but the best way of designing these habitats remains unclear. This paper reports an experiment to test the effects of different types of recycled aggregate on the development of vegetation assemblages on brown roof mesocosms. Five recycled aggregates were tested: (1) crushed brick, (2) crushed demolition aggregate, (3) solid municipal waste incinerator bottom ash aggregate, (4) a 1:1 mix of 1 and 2, and (5) a 1:1 mix of 3 and 2. Each was seeded with a wildflower mix that also included some Sedum acre and vegetation development was studied over a six-year period. Species richness, assemblage character, number of plants able to seed, and plant biomass were measured. Drought disturbance was the key factor controlling changes in plant assemblage, but effects varied with substrate treatment. All treatments supported a similar plant biomass, but treatments with a high proportion of crushed brick in the growth substrate supported richer assemblages, with more species able to seed, and a smaller amount of Sedum acre. Crushed brick, or recycled aggregates with a high proportion of crushed brick, are recommended as good growth substrate materials for encouraging brown roof plant diversity. This investigation demonstrates the importance of multi-year studies of green roof development for the generation of robust findings

Effects of varying organic matter content on the development of green roof vegetation: a six year experiment

Green roofs can potentially be used to tackle a variety of environmental problems, and can be used as development mitigation for the loss of ground-based habitats. Brown (biodiversity) roofs are a type of green roof designed to imitate brownfield habitat, but the best way of engineering these habitats requires more research. We tested the effects of altering organic matter content on the development of vegetation assemblages of experimental brown (biodiversity) roof mesocosms. Three mulch treatments were tested: (1) Sandy loam, where 10mm of sandy loam mulch (about 3% organic matter by dry weight) was added to 100mm of recycled aggregate; (2) Compost, where the mulch also contained some garden compost (about 6% organic matter by dry weight); and (3) No mulch, where no mulch was added. Mesocosms were seeded with a wildflower mix that included some Sedum acre, and vegetation development was investigated over a six-year period. Species richness, assemblage character, number of plants able to seed, and above-ground plant biomass were measured. Drought disturbance was an important control on plant assemblages in all mulch treatments, but there were significant treatment response interactions. The more productive Compost treatment was associated with larger plant coverage and diversity before the occurrence of a sequence of drought disturbances, but was more strongly negatively affected by the disturbances than the two less productive treatments. We suggest that this was due to the over-production of plant biomass in the more productive treatment, which made the plants more vulnerable to the effects of drought disturbance, leading to a kind of 'boom-bust' assemblage dynamic. The 'ideal' amount of added organic matter for these green roof systems was very low, but other types of green roof that have a larger water holding capacity, and/or more drought resistant plant floras, will likely require more organic matter or fertiliser. Nonetheless, nutrient-supported productivity in green roof systems should be kept low in order to avoid boom-bust plant assemblage dynamics. Research into the best way of engineering green roof habitats should take place over a long enough multi-year time period to include the effects of temporally infrequent disturbances

Lessons learned from urgent computing in Europe: Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), an international not-for-profit association that brings together the five largest European supercomputing centers and involves 26 European countries, has allocated more than half a billion core hours to computer simulations to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside experiments, these simulations are a pillar of research to assess the risks of different scenarios and investigate mitigation strategies. While the world deals with the subsequent waves of the pandemic, we present a reflection on the use of urgent supercomputing for global societal challenges and crisis management.Peer Reviewed"Article signat per 18 autors/es: Núria López, Luigi Del Debbio, Marc Baaden, Matej Praprotnik, Laura Grigori, Catarina Simões, Serge Bogaerts, Florian Berberich, Thomas Lippert, Janne Ignatius, Philippe Lavocat, Oriol Pineda, Maria Grazia Giuffreda, Sergi Girona, Dieter Kranzlmüller, Michael M. Resch, Gabriella Scipione, and Thomas Schulthess"Postprint (author's final draft

CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING THE REORGANIZATION OF A UNIVERSITY: LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY OF SIBIU

The world is in crisis. The academic system, its core, too. It has to reorganise, to reform itself. Several steps were taken by developed countries but also the emerging ones or the new comers. In Romania, a new Education Low has settled a deep reform for universities. Observing the academic autonomy, each university has to find its new way according to the principles of the Education Low. Our case study refers on a middle seize university of regional vocation. The paper investigate the main factors to be considered on general context, national context and the university’s one in the process of reforming and restructuring the university.academic reform, universities’ ranking, reorganization of universities

THE UNINTENDED PERVERTED EFFECTS OF THE RANKING OF UNIVERSITIES WITHIN THE POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTS WITHIN COUNTRIES IN TRANSITION. CASE STUDY: ROMANIA

Ranking has arrived to be compulsory for all countries as a tool to compete in the global world. The ranking’s rules are settled by some couples of global rankers. When their practices are implemented into national environments, mainly in countries under transition, some perverted effects might appear. The paper focuses on effects on politic environments and their follow up on academic communities, students and parents, and civil society as an effect of mass media involvement. The theoretical issues are illustrated by the outcomes in Romania particularly as a consequence of the application of the Educational Law since January 2011.academic reform in Romania, universities’ ranking, reorganization of universities

The new Tourism Communication: from 3S to 3E with case study on Romania

It is obvious that tourism has changed and keeps transforming itself deeply. We prove that tourism is under mutation and this process is only an earlier symptom of the renascence of the economic structures, a new human life stile, in fact a real rebirth of the human existence. The microelectronics and the biotechnologies have separated the socialist system from the capitalist one and segregate the last. In the developed countries a few 3-4% of the population yield the whole agricultural production and overfill the domestic and export needs; 10-12% of it fabricate all the merchandises required on the market. As a result, the majority of the population might be considered as throwaway for production, valuable only as consumers. More, it might be a menace for the society if it does not manage fruitfully its resulted “free time”. To “keep peace under the olives” the new post-industrial societies have had to develop the “management of the disposal time” that has turn on the course of the tourism from 3S to 3E, and further more to the life style concept that was extended over the hole individual and social life, not only its economic side. The former socialist countries were the losers of the huge challenge started after the 2 nd WW as the socialist system’s economy has remained on the classic bases. They have integrated the EU, a post-industrial economy. Their people expect to join the Western life style, the 3E tourism. Is it possible? How? What are the costs? Can they find the required resources? What are the preliminary results? Romania is a fascinating case. “The transition” as a manner of conversion highlights peculiar situations that might be found unusual for a Western. Some examples (the Black See Coast, the Fagaras mountains and the new agro tourism) will bring particular explanations. Classical economics operate with its overall accepted concepts such as: capital, labour force, offer, demand, money, unemployment, market, development, crises, equilibrium, productivity, monopole, liberalism, interventionism, global economy, etc. The real life of the last years, may be the last decade proves that the classic concepts do not fit, are not suitable for workable explanations and proper procedures to keep the economies in a durable development, the poor and the rich peoples in peace, people save and healthy and conserve the “hand made environment” workable for future generations. The cause might be we are handling old tools for a new reality: the Ancients use to say that doctor, in order to save the patience, has to cure not only the disease but his whole body and mind. The new Life can not be broken down on “slides” - for researches or scientific purposes – but has to be understood as a whole in order to control its transformation, as the entropy or the bio structural theory have proved. We need an appropriate apparatus, suitable insights to handle the nearly future: to rewrite the economics. As we have done in tourism theory

Reverse-time analysis and boundary classification of directional biological dynamics with multiplicative noise

The dynamics of living systems often serves the purpose of reaching functionally important target states. We previously proposed a theory to analyze stochastic biological dynamics evolving towards target states in reverse time. However, a large class of systems in biology can only be adequately described using state-dependent noise, which had not been discussed. For example, in gene regulatory networks, biochemical signaling networks or neuronal circuits, count fluctuations are the dominant noise component. We characterize such dynamics as an ensemble of target state aligned (TSA) trajectories and characterize its temporal evolution in reverse-time by generalized Fokker-Planck and stochastic differential equations with multiplicative noise. We establish the classification of boundary conditions for target state modeling for a wide range of power law dynamics, and derive a universal low-noise approximation of the final phase of target state convergence. Our work expands the range of theoretically tractable systems in biology and enables novel experimental design strategies for systems that involve target states

Modelling the spatial organization of cell proliferation in the developing central nervous system

How far is neuroepithelial cell proliferation in the developing central nervous system a deterministic process? Or, to put it in a more precise way, how accurately can it be described by a deterministic mathematical model? To provide tracks to answer this question, a deterministic system of transport and diffusion partial differential equations, both physiologically and spatially structured, is introduced as a model to describe the spatially organized process of cell proliferation during the development of the central nervous system. As an initial step towards dealing with the three-dimensional case, a unidimensional version of the model is presented. Numerical analysis and numerical tests are performed. In this work we also achieve a first experimental validation of the proposed model, by using cell proliferation data recorded from histological sections obtained during the development of the optic tectum in the chick embryo