227,612 research outputs found
Determinants of access patterns to goods and services from wetlands in Tanzania and the impact on sustainable wetland management
Wetlands perform vital role in providing useful goods and services to mankind. Because of their
importance, human beings interactions with the wetlandsâ physical environment have caused some of
them to be highly degraded. Due to characteristic nature of wetlands being a common pool resource
(CPRs), most researchers claim their degradation to be a result of poor institutions governing the
interactions. Wetlands in Tanzania are very useful especially, in areas where agriculture is most
prevalent. High pressure to exploit fertile and moist land in those areas has caused wetlands to be
highly degraded. This study focused on the rules and regulations governing the resources access from
the wetlands using Kilombero Valley as a case study. The study used choice modelling to identify the
determinants of the access patterns and their impacts on wetland sustainable management. The results
showed that physical nature of resources and characteristics of the users such as location, income and
education determine what type of access one chooses to accrue products and services from the
wetlands. To ensure wetland sustainable management, the policy makers and conservationists should
consider these factors in enacting rules and regulation which would govern human interactions in the
wetlands. Payment for environmental services could be used to enhance such options
A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain
Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to
collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real
world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This
heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain
applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to
develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been
proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of
sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects
of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors
for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for
drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies
to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight
the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and
context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the
existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also
identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a
stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT
domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of
Thing
Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges
Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular
operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall
environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in
cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network
operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring
improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present
a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks,
explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to
enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations
consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we
will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy
savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment
based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since
cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in
this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more
energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a
"green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table
A Critical Scan of Four Key Topics for the Philanthropic Sector: A study by the Rockefeller Foundation and Accenture Development Partnerships
The study aims to identify problem areas in the developing and developed world, as well as areas of dynamism and convergence that will, over the next five to 10 years, present opportunities to make a greater impact in the development sector. The study, which made use of a consultative process, investigates four key topics central to human wellbeing. These are: natural ecosystems, health, livelihoods, and urban environments. In each of the four identified topic areas there is a greater need to foster innovation and shift paradigms in order to expand opportunity for the vulnerable and those living in poverty, and strengthen their resilience
Managing Water under Uncertainty and Risk: The United Nations World Water Development Report 4
This report introduces new aspects of water issues: 1) it reintroduces the 12 challenge area reports that provided the foundation for the first two World Water Development Reports (WWDR); 2) 4 new reports on water quality, groundwater, gender, and desertification, land degradation and drought; 3) in recognition that the global challenges of water can vary considerably across countries and regions, a series of 5 regional reports have been included; 4) a deeper analysis of the main external forces of freshwater resources and possibilities for their future evolution; 5) managing water under uncertainty and risk
From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet
This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communitiesâ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)
Industrial symbiosis and urban areas: A systematic literature review and future research directions
This paper proposes a systematic literature review concerning the implementation of industrial symbiosis (IS) within urban areas, a concept that has been defined by the literature as "urban symbiosis" and "urban-industrial symbiosis", indifferently. 26 papers published between 2009 and 2018 are analyzed. This review is aimed at highlighting: (1) the specific research goals addressed; (2) the IS synergies currently implemented within urban areas; and (3) barriers and enablers to the implementation of IS within urban areas. Suggestions for future research are also proposed
SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks
The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying
cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to
offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management
costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework,
communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services,
providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services
function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC
services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner.
According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can
indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication
systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic
ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in
a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service
provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density
of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging
Telecommunications Technologie
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