Annual Progress Report of the European and Global Drought Observatories

With this report, the reader finds an overview of the changes, upgrades and new features created in the European Drought Observatory (EDO) and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) and made in 2019. The year proved relatively quiet concerning drought events in Europe; the subcontinent was only affected in the Baltics, although fires broke out vigorously in the Balkans, Spain and Russia. Thanks to the recent juvenile concern with regard to the heating up of the climate, drought events and forest fires drew more public-attention. Our reaction upon this concern in the Global Drought Observatory is the development of a new group of data, which we call Drought Mitigation. With more people genuinely concerned in the effect of our alternation of the properties of the lower atmosphere, we take up the task to provide guidelines for repair and adaptation. Higher temperatures imply that air depletes more vapour from vegetation and soil, leading to more intense droughts or floods. Consient management of our fresh water resources and massive tree planting are measures that can have significant impact on the effects of a Drought, Forest Fires or also Flood events. Therefore, we started with including the results of the often-cited research result regarding reforestation potential of the Crowther Lab as a layer in the Global Drought Observatory. We completed our work with enriching data describing dams with data regarding the location, name and quantitative characteristics of dams as an additional layer. We worked on the integration of the GRACE Dataset, which gives us an actualized satellite born, insight in the depletion of groundwater resources. We created a new index, alerting drought impacts on protected wetlands. Droughts events in these areas might affect rare species living in these protected wetlands, thus creating a link to the biodiversity crisis. The drought alerting mechanism we developed thus far were human centred. With this new index and with the Crowther Lab reforestation inventory we hope to correct this one species view of the past, learning to share our territory with all species, also during hard times of a drought disaster. With these additions, we hope that EDO and GDO will give you a better overview of the impacts of drought events, not only for our economy but also for our shared ecosystems and their services to us. Finally note that we engage in a project to export EDO and GDO knowledge and software to African regional partners. Thus enabling them to set up drought observatories in Africa just as if we did for South- and Central America. Such a collaboration works both ways, we understand better the impacts of Drought events in their region and we learn from their practical skills with regard to make things work in a challenging environment, whilst we can give them working drought observatory software, practical manners to, almost, fully automate the filling and updating of the systems combined with our specific expertise on droughts build up in the last 12 years.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

The Changing Landscape for Stroke\ua0Prevention in AF: Findings From the GLORIA-AF Registry Phase 2

Background GLORIA-AF (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation) is a prospective, global registry program describing antithrombotic treatment patterns in patients with newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation at risk of stroke. Phase 2 began when dabigatran, the first non\u2013vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant (NOAC), became available. Objectives This study sought to describe phase 2 baseline data and compare these with the pre-NOAC era collected during phase 1. Methods During phase 2, 15,641 consenting patients were enrolled (November 2011 to December 2014); 15,092 were eligible. This pre-specified cross-sectional analysis describes eligible patients\u2019 baseline characteristics. Atrial fibrillation disease characteristics, medical outcomes, and concomitant diseases and medications were collected. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results Of the total patients, 45.5% were female; median age was 71 (interquartile range: 64, 78) years. Patients were from Europe (47.1%), North America (22.5%), Asia (20.3%), Latin America (6.0%), and the Middle East/Africa (4.0%). Most had high stroke risk (CHA2DS2-VASc [Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age  6575 years, Diabetes mellitus, previous Stroke, Vascular disease, Age 65 to 74 years, Sex category] score  652; 86.1%); 13.9% had moderate risk (CHA2DS2-VASc = 1). Overall, 79.9% received oral anticoagulants, of whom 47.6% received NOAC and 32.3% vitamin K antagonists (VKA); 12.1% received antiplatelet agents; 7.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. For comparison, the proportion of phase 1 patients (of N = 1,063 all eligible) prescribed VKA was 32.8%, acetylsalicylic acid 41.7%, and no therapy 20.2%. In Europe in phase 2, treatment with NOAC was more common than VKA (52.3% and 37.8%, respectively); 6.0% of patients received antiplatelet treatment; and 3.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. In North America, 52.1%, 26.2%, and 14.0% of patients received NOAC, VKA, and antiplatelet drugs, respectively; 7.5% received no antithrombotic treatment. NOAC use was less common in Asia (27.7%), where 27.5% of patients received VKA, 25.0% antiplatelet drugs, and 19.8% no antithrombotic treatment. Conclusions The baseline data from GLORIA-AF phase 2 demonstrate that in newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation patients, NOAC have been highly adopted into practice, becoming more frequently prescribed than VKA in Europe and North America. Worldwide, however, a large proportion of patients remain undertreated, particularly in Asia and North America. (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation [GLORIA-AF]; NCT01468701

Common variants in Alzheimer's disease and risk stratification by polygenic risk scores.

Funder: Funder: Fundación bancaria ‘La Caixa’ Number: LCF/PR/PR16/51110003 Funder: Grifols SA Number: LCF/PR/PR16/51110003 Funder: European Union/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Number: 115975 Funder: JPco-fuND FP-829-029 Number: 733051061Genetic discoveries of Alzheimer's disease are the drivers of our understanding, and together with polygenetic risk stratification can contribute towards planning of feasible and efficient preventive and curative clinical trials. We first perform a large genetic association study by merging all available case-control datasets and by-proxy study results (discovery n = 409,435 and validation size n = 58,190). Here, we add six variants associated with Alzheimer's disease risk (near APP, CHRNE, PRKD3/NDUFAF7, PLCG2 and two exonic variants in the SHARPIN gene). Assessment of the polygenic risk score and stratifying by APOE reveal a 4 to 5.5 years difference in median age at onset of Alzheimer's disease patients in APOE ɛ4 carriers. Because of this study, the underlying mechanisms of APP can be studied to refine the amyloid cascade and the polygenic risk score provides a tool to select individuals at high risk of Alzheimer's disease

A FOSS approach to Integrated Water Resource Management: the case study of Red-Thai Binh rivers system

The paper describes the development of a FOSS Geoportal targeted to manage information related to water resource management projects. It gives important insights on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) using FOSS, demonstrating that are a feasible and effective solution to data and metadata collection, storage, sharing and visualization in water resources management, using open international standards. A first application of the Geoportal on a real world case study is also presented

A FOSS based Geoportal for supporting Integrated and sustainable water Management of Red-Thai Binh Rivers System in changing climate (IMRR project)

The Red-Thai Binh Rivers basin is the second largest of Viet Nam. Despite the construction of several large-scale reservoirs (Hoa Binh, Thac Ba, Tuyen Quang and Son La), lack of coordination and inefficient operation of the reservoirs have resulted in frequent water shortages causing loss of agricultural production, interruptions to navigation, increased pollution and environmental degradation. Conflicts among water uses in the basin, including hydropower production, flood control and water supply, and negative impacts on long-term sustainability (e.g. hydrological alteration, river aggradation and salt intrusion) are expected to increase under the combined pressure of increasing water and energy demand, and climate change. The IMRR project aims at developing and promoting strategies for the sustainable management of the Red-Thai Binh Rivers System in Vietnam through coordinated decision-making and negotiation, supported by modelling and optimization tools and through capacity building of local authorities in the water sector. In order to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and environmental sustainability of water management in the Red-Thai Binh Rivers basin, in addition to the definition of advanced modelling and optimization tools, it is necessary to create a platform to support stakeholders dialogue, coordination and negotiations, as well as data collection, sharing and visualization. This ongoing research focuses on the creation of a web tool, GIS-based, leveraging on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that enables collection, sharing and visualization of IMMR project data at different aggregation levels; this includes visualization of the planning alternatives simulation and a GIS-based tool to receive notification from stakeholders/experts. The heterogeneous nature of these data requires the combination of different geospatial data services (Web Map Service WMS, Temporal Web Map Service WMS – T, Web Feature Service WFS, Web Feature Service transactional WFS - T, Sensor Observations Service SOS), servers (Geoserver, istSOS) and interface technologies (OpenLayers, Drupal) enabling interoperability of all complex resources data types. The webGIS allows to visualize, analyze and compare different planning alternatives for the management of the Red River water system in Vietnam, as a result of the Multi Criteria Decision Analysis methodology applied in the IMRR project. This research gives important insights on Spatial Data Infrastructures using FOSS, demonstrating that are a feasible and effective alternative to data and metadata collection, storage, sharing and visualization in complex water resources management contexts, using open international standards

Development of a health geomatics analysis framework to evaluate cardiac arrests in Lombardy: New information for decision-making

Cardiac arrest (CA) is an unpredictable event whose deleterious consequences can be minimized only by an immediate medical intervention in the first six minutes from the event, including cardiac defibrillation with automated external defibrillator (AED). Knowledge of AED distribution on a specific territory is functional to potentially provide immediate assistance while waiting for ambulance arrival. Our aim was to apply a health geomatic framework to map CAs occurred in Lombardy region in Italy along the year 2015, and known AED locations to retrospectively obtain new information that could be used to optimize AED placement over the considered territory. Results showed 10686 CAs and 6212 AED in all Lombardy region, with CA incidence in the range 0.7-1.27% and AED availability in the range 0.4-1.24% of inhabitants in the 15 healthcare districts in which Lombardy was divided. For the city of Milan, connected points reached within the same time (i.e., isochrones) were created starting from the position of each known AED and considering the distance traveled in a 6 min roundtrip at different walk speeds, showing 14% of potential territory coverage. A retrospective analysis of the 4005 CAs occurred in 2015 in the city of Milan showed that, despite an AED was within a 3-min range of a CA in 55% of the cases, only in less than 2% an AED was utilized. Health geomatics approaches provide new ways to look at existing information that could be used in decision-making processes to guide resources distribution on the Lombardy territory, while improving CA emergency care

The RISPOSTA procedure for the collection, storage and analysis of high quality, consistent and reliable damage data in the aftermath of floods

Despite the perceived abundance of information collected after a disaster, available data furnish a narrow picture of flood impacts, or they are difficult to compare so as to produce an integrated interpretation of flood events. This is due to the diversity of the purposes for which data are collected and the variety of stakeholders involved in data collection and management. The RISPOSTA procedure addresses the need for standardised ways to collect flood damage data and to create consistent and reliable flood databases that meet the objectives of risk mitigation. In this regard, the procedure satisfies several requirements of loss data: (1) the data should refer to the different exposed sectors so as to supply a comprehensive view of flood impacts; (2) they should be collected at the finest scale so that the proper scale of analysis can be chosen by subsequent data aggregation; (3) they should be linked to the physical event as well as to the features of the different exposed elements so as to supply information on both flood impacts and their explicative variables; and (4) they should be collected at different times according to the unfolding of the event in order to describe the entire range of possible damage

Collision Detection in Computer Graphics

Šajā darbā ir pētīta sistēma kustīgu objektu reālistiskai attēlošanai. Sistēmu var izmantot dažādiem mērķiem ar minimālām izmaiņām: no ātrām dinamiskām datorspēlēm līdz precīziem dinamikas aprēķiniem zinātniskai modelēšanai. Kvalitatīvas grafikas pamatā ir fizisks modelis, kas palīdz reālistiski animēt attēlu. Šajā darbā ir pētīta viena no metodēm, kuras būtība ir ķermeņu attēlošana cietu daudzskaldņu veidā. Fizikas modelēšana sadalās trijās problēmās: ķermeņu kustības trajektorijas aprēķināšana (kinemātika), kolīzijas (ķermeņu sadursmes) pārbaude un ķermeņu ātrumu izmaiņas pēc sadursmes. Uzrakstīta viena no iespējamām universālas programmas realizācijām, kurā izmanto aprakstīto fizikas modelēšanas metodi un paplašināmības principu.In this work is described system modeling for realistic rigid body dynamics rendering. System can be used in different purposes with minimal changes: from fast and flexible dynamics in computer games to precise dynamics calculation for scientific modeling. Physic model is base of high-quality computer graphics. This model animates image. In my work I describe one of the methods which consist of representation of objects in the form of rigid polyhedron. Modeling divides into three problems: object trajectory calculations (kinematics), collision detection and objects velocity calculations after collision has occurred. One of possible realization of universal program was created, which uses described physic model and expansibility principle