Utrecht Library

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Biodiversity footprint of companies - Summary report

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of their impact on biodiversity and natural capital. This may result from their implicit dependence on natural capital, from increasingly more critical consumers, or from the genuine concern of company managers and owners. Consequently, companies have an increasing need for tools to enable them to gain insight into their impact on biodiversity, and to measure and assess the effects of measures to limit this impact. The Natural Captains project of the Platform Biodiversity, Ecosystems & Economy (Platform BEE) is stimulating companies to translate thinking and working with natural capital into tangible actions. This means making visible the impact of their activities on biodiversity and natural capital in terms of their biodiversity footprint. One way to assess a company’s impact on biodiversity is to measure the biodiversity footprint of their current activities and possibly also to compare this footprint with that of alternative measures

Pulmonary function testing: tools and applications in young children with asthma

Many (pre-)school children with acute or chronic respiratory problems are seen every day by physicians, both in primary care and in hospitals. Although in many children these respiratory symptoms are self-limiting, it is important to recognise early in the course of the disease those children that are at risk to suffer from persistent respiratory diseases and to develop pulmonary function abnormalities and chronic airway remodelling. In most children diagnosis and treatment of respiratory disease are mainly based on medical history and physical examination. However, the evaluation of objective disease markers, e.g. pulmonary function could be helpful for the assessment of functional abnormalities. Especially in pre-school children respiratory function parameters are rarely available. Although recently several alternative methods have been developed, most have and can not be implemented for use in daily clinical practice and are currently only available in specialised centres. Many of these tests require difficult technical procedures, anaesthetic care or are even invasive. Clinical application of new or alternative pulmonary function tests in young children is only possible for techniques that are easily performed in children of all ages, do not require much time or sedation and show results quickly. They should be reproducible, cheap, able to distinguish healthy from diseased children, not invasive, applicable during spontaneous breathing, responsive to intervention and useful for follow up. Promising techniques that might fulfil (most of these) requirements are tidal breathing analysis, interrupter resistance measurement and impulse oscillometry. Adaptation of traditional techniques (MEFV) or standardisation of these newer techniques and availability of reference values might enable more widespread use of these techniques in daily practice. The studies described in this thesis addressed several aspects of pulmonary function testing in pre-school and school children

A Review on Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques Applied to Liquid Biopsy

For more than a decade, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques have been a mainstay in the toolset for the analysis of large amounts of weakly correlated or high-dimensional data. As new technologies for detecting and measuring biochemical markers from bodily fluid samples (e.g., microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip) revolutionise the industry of diagnostics and precision medicine, the heterogeneity and complexity of the acquired data present a growing challenge to their interpretation and usage. In this chapter, we attempt to review the state of ML and DL fields as applied to the analysis of liquid biopsy data and summarise the available corpus of techniques and methodologies

Позиционирование изображений фотошаблонов в системах автоматизированного оптического контроля

Разработана система автоматизированного оптического позиционирования фотошаблонов интегральных схем, которая имеет высокие показатели помехоустойчивости и точности

Costs and benefits of a more sustainable production of tropical timber

This study is part of the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) study of trade chains, and assessed the impact of harvesting tropical timber on ecosystem services and the costs and benefits of more sustainable production. The costs of implementation and the benefits from increased ecosystem services levels were assessed for two alternatives to conventional selective logging (CL), sustainable forest management (SFM) and forest plantation. The SFM alternative involves certified forest management implementing reduced impact logging techniques. The forest plantation alternative involves high-yield plantations that have a larger impact on ecosystem services than CL on the actual plantation area, but require only an equivalent of 11-42% of the CL area due to the higher yields per unit of area, and thus allows a larger area of primary forest to be conserved. The majority of Dutch imports of tropical timbers are from South America and South East Asia. We conducted separate analyses for South America and South East Asia to account for regional differences in terms of logging practices, timber yields and the extent and value of ecosystem service