Integrating Green Infrastructure Into Stormwater Policy: Reliability, Watershed Management, and Environmental Psychology as Holistic Tools for Success

As cities continue to expand, the issues of flood control and urban water quality have become major modern sustainability challenges. Green infrastructure—the use of nature-based solutions to target, treat, and store stormwater at its source—has emerged as a possible solution. While green infrastructure does offer multiple benefits for urban users, its performance is also highly variable. This Article addresses a key gap in existing literature by explicitly addressing how uncertainty in environmental and anthropogenic factors affects green infrastructure performance and integration within the Clean Water Act’s municipal separate storm sewer (MS4) regulatory program

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Energy rating of a water pumping station using multivariate analysis

Among water management policies, the preservation and the saving of energy demand in water supply and treatment systems play key roles. When focusing on energy, the customary metric to determine the performance of water supply systems is linked to the definition of component-based energy indicators. This approach is unfit to account for interactions occurring among system elements or between the system and its environment. On the other hand, the development of information technology has led to the availability of increasing large amount of data, typically gathered from distributed sensor networks in so-called smart grids. In this context, data intensive methodologies address the possibility of using complex network modeling approaches, and advocate the issues related to the interpretation and analysis of large amount of data produced by smart sensor networks. In this perspective, the present work aims to use data intensive techniques in the energy analysis of a water management network. The purpose is to provide new metrics for the energy rating of the system and to be able to provide insights into the dynamics of its operations. The study applies neural network as a tool to predict energy demand, when using flowrate and vibration data as predictor variables