High occupancy vehicle treatments, impacts and parameters. Volume I - procedures and conclusions. Final report.

Mode of access: Internet.Author corporate affiliation: New Jersey Department of Transportation, TrentonSubject code: CDCMSubject code: IJDHMSubject code: SDBLSubject code: SDBL

Use of environmental data for GIS-based risk assessment of biogas plants in Baden-Württemberg

This paper illustrates how environmental risks potentially emerging in conjunction with an observed growing number of biogas plants can properly be estimated, integrated and visualized in an overarching risk management application. On the one hand, due to safety flaws observed in the past, biogas plants have direct environmental risks as they can cause environmental pollution (e.g. groundwater contamination or emissions of methane). On the other hand, environmental hazards such as floodwater or storms are a threat especially to unsafe biogas plants and an enhancement factor of these risks. Moreover, the growing number of plants causes indirect risks for economy - e.g. dependency on dependable operation of or impact on smart grids - and society, e.g. transition to monocultures, over-fertilization or threatened species. This contribution describes how and which environmental data can support the assessment and visualization of these risks up to the calculation of corresponding risk indicators. The idea is to provide thematic layers for the iNTeg-Risk atlas offered by means of the Web Map Service (WMS) as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Such a biogas plant layer may comprise information about the geographic position, power and/or gas output, used substrates, security concepts, approvals and observation. It may be combined with further environmental layers describing environmental objects (e.g. nature protection areas), objects at risk (e.g. schools, plants) or traffic flows. Finally, by means of geospatial data analysis, such an integrated geospatial view allows risk managers to evaluate emerging risks caused by biogas plants. As a prototype implementation based on a few scenarios we provide an interface to the Environmental Information System of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg, from which the base data used for these evaluations will be drawn. As a next step, this application may be enhanced towards a planning instrument for environmental administrations as well as a communication and information means for the citizenship concerned