Preparing CORINE Land cover data for use

Corine Land cover data are distributed in 44 Shape files. In this report the author displays two methodologies to combine the 44 shape files in order to make 1 usable product. ArcINFO librarian and Oracle Spatial are being exploited.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Emerging Industrial Revolution: Symbiosis of Industry 4.0 and Circular Economy: The Role of Universities

ArticleGrowing consumerism and population worldwide raises concerns about society’s sustainability aspirations. This has led to calls for concerted efforts to shift from the linear economy to a circular economy (CE), which are gaining momentum globally. CE approaches lead to a zero-waste scenario of economic growth and sustainable development. These approaches are based on semi-scientific and empirical concepts with technologies enabling 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) and 6Rs (reuse, recycle, redesign, remanufacture, reduce, recover). Studies estimate that the transition to a CE would save the world in excess of a trillion dollars annually while creating new jobs, business opportunities and economic growth. The emerging industrial revolution will enhance the symbiotic pursuit of new technologies and CE to transform extant production systems and business models for sustainability. This article examines the trends, availability and readiness of fourth industrial revolution (4IR or industry 4.0) technologies (for example, Internet of Things [IoT], artificial intelligence [AI] and nanotechnology) to support and promote CE transitions within the higher education institutional context. Furthermore, it elucidates the role of universities as living laboratories for experimenting the utility of industry 4.0 technologies in driving the shift towards CE futures. The article concludes that universities should play a pivotal role in engendering CE transitions

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

Environment and ecosystem services

In this subchapter, we discuss the need for investing in long-term assessment of impact on ecosystem services. We also think that governments should keep supporting national accounting of ecosystem services and that they should use the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) for that purpose. Mapping and assessment of the assets can also be employed for ecosystem accounting. Ecosystem services impact as- sessment, even though it is very important and necessary, cannot hide the facts that disaster risk management should move towards an ecosystem-based approach and that ecosystem degradation must be reversed. It is also important to highlight that impact on ecosystem services triggers a cascading effect that could be reflected in direct and indirect losses. These elements are discussed in detail, and we provide examples of and bibliographical references on how the ecosystem-based approach stands as a promising approach that can impact all elements of the disaster risk equation: mitigating hazards, reducing exposure, reducing vulnerabilities and increasing the resilience of exposed communities

De geprotocolleerde Interapy-behandeling van depressie via het internet; resultaten van een gerandomiseerde trial

Psychologische behandelingen via internet bieden een nieuwe mogelijkheid voor de geestelijke gezondheidszorg. In samenwerking met de Stichting Mentrum ggz Amsterdam heeft Interapy een behandeling voor depressie via internet opgezet. De behandeling bestaat uit cognitief-gedragstherapeutische interventies, zoals psycho-educatie, schrijfopdrachten, registratie, activatie, het uitdagen van negatieve automatische gedachten en terugvalpreventie. Dit artikel beschrijft de procedure, de behandeling en de resultaten van een vergelijkende studie onder cliënten die matig tot ernstig depressief waren. De cliënten die direct actief werden behandeld (N = 32) verbeterden significant meer dan de cliënten in de psycho-educatieconditie (N = 14). Deze tweede groep kreeg de actieve behandeling ongeveer twaalf weken later. De effecten waren groot. In de actief behandelde groep liet 75 procent van de cliënten klinisch relevante verbetering zien, in de psycho-educatieconditie was dat percentage 36. Uit de follow-up na zes weken bleek dat de verbeteringen standhielden

Recommendations for National Risk Assessment for Disaster Risk Management in EU

Decision No 1313/2013/EU on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) calls Participating States to develop risk assessments periodically and make the summary of their National Risk Assessment (NRA) available to the European Commission as a way to prevent disaster risk in Europe. In order to facilitate countries on this task, the European Commission developed the Guidelines on risk assessment and mapping. In spite of these, the summaries received have revealed several challenges related to the process and the content of the assessments. The current report aims to provide scientific support to the UCPM participant countries in their development of NRA, explaining why and how a risk assessment could be carried out, how the results of this could be used for Disaster Risk Management planning and in general, how science can help civil protection authorities and staff from ministries and agencies engaged in NRA activities. The report is the result of the collaborative effort of the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre team and nine Joint Research Centre expert groups which provided their insight on tools and methods for specific risk assessment related to certain hazards and assets: drought, earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks, biological disasters, critical infrastructures, chemical accidents, nuclear accidents and Natech accidents. The current document would be improved by a next version that would include scientific guidance on other risks and the collaboration of potential users.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Stroke genetics informs drug discovery and risk prediction across ancestries

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of stroke — the second leading cause of death worldwide — were conducted predominantly in populations of European ancestry1,2. Here, in cross-ancestry GWAS meta-analyses of 110,182 patients who have had a stroke (five ancestries, 33% non-European) and 1,503,898 control individuals, we identify association signals for stroke and its subtypes at 89 (61 new) independent loci: 60 in primary inverse-variance-weighted analyses and 29 in secondary meta-regression and multitrait analyses. On the basis of internal cross-ancestry validation and an independent follow-up in 89,084 additional cases of stroke (30% non-European) and 1,013,843 control individuals, 87% of the primary stroke risk loci and 60% of the secondary stroke risk loci were replicated (P < 0.05). Effect sizes were highly correlated across ancestries. Cross-ancestry fine-mapping, in silico mutagenesis analysis3, and transcriptome-wide and proteome-wide association analyses revealed putative causal genes (such as SH3PXD2A and FURIN) and variants (such as at GRK5 and NOS3). Using a three-pronged approach4, we provide genetic evidence for putative drug effects, highlighting F11, KLKB1, PROC, GP1BA, LAMC2 and VCAM1 as possible targets, with drugs already under investigation for stroke for F11 and PROC. A polygenic score integrating cross-ancestry and ancestry-specific stroke GWASs with vascular-risk factor GWASs (integrative polygenic scores) strongly predicted ischaemic stroke in populations of European, East Asian and African ancestry5. Stroke genetic risk scores were predictive of ischaemic stroke independent of clinical risk factors in 52,600 clinical-trial participants with cardiometabolic disease. Our results provide insights to inform biology, reveal potential drug targets and derive genetic risk prediction tools across ancestries

CCM2 Hydrographical code as example for a world wide coastal coding system

The Limit of Oceans and Seas is a standard to define the names and limitations of the waters of the Earth using light houses and other visible or measurable features. The limits were defined at the beginning of the 20th century and finalized in the fifties. These shared delineations and names are of great help for sailors and other people working on the oceans in other to describe events unambiguously whilst using different languages and names for topographic features. With the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Europe, a similar need was felt for the definition, delineation, naming and coding of hydrographic features such as rivers and lakes (Vogt e.a. 2002). It proved that many hydrographic features are defined differently depending on the country, and that, also for legal purposes, a predictable definition is desired. To enable automated data-exchange, in for example Spatial Data Infrastructures, such definitions and unique codifications are a technical requirement. With the creation of CCM (Catchment Characterisation and Modelling) we took the opportunity to define a coding system for the features that were generated with CCM (Vogt e.a. 2007). It is a coding system that is applied to the European continental coastline, islands, watersheds, lakes and riverbranches. The coding system developed was based on the advice of the Water Frame Directive Committee. A system inspired on the so-called Pfafstetter coding was exploited (Pfafstetter 1989). We will present our experience in this paper and give insight in the effort to be expected to make a coding system for oceans, seas, coasts, islands and of the world. Furthermore we will present some of the benefits of a comprehensive coding system as implemented for Europe through CCM. Our scope is to present to IHO representatives a framework for realising a world-wide coastal coding system.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Optimization of the Processing of Time series of different Satellite Imagery

With the increase in availability of space born data, analysing large amounts of high resolution data of significant time series evolved to a common practice. From a computational perspective the analysis consists, in many cases, of comparing the value of stacks of pixels at the same location at different moments in time. Thus the development of a certain band (reflection) can be measured and anomalies can detected. The rather simple computations involved in stacking pixels in spaceborn imagery are hindered by differences in georeferencing between the various images. Before pixels in stack of images can be compared the imagery has to be referenced to a common grid allowing to make valid cross analysis. We defined a world reference grid based on decimal degrees and natural divisions of decimal degrees. Using this Grid we were able to separate the computational intensive georeferencing from the actual analysing of huge amounts of imagery data. The reference grid is stored in a spatial relational database and location dependend identifiers are assigned to every grid cell. These identifiers, so-called C-SQUARES, allow for quick switching between various cell sizes (resolutions). Subsequently images are georeferenced and every pixel is resampled against the static reference. Once the most appropriate value for a specific image overlaid by one or more grid cells is determined the result value is stored in a timeseries referenced by the reference grid cell. Once this precise georeferencing is done, the timeseries can be analysed very quickly. Remaining computations involve mainly the comparison of numbers referring to the same grid cell. In this paper we will give insight in the creation of the reference grid and the savings in storage space and processing time achieved by applying this methodology using MERIS data over Europe and Africa. Specific Web mapping applications showing time series of 10 day composites for 10 years will be shown.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Feasibility of a Worldwide Coastal Reference and Coding System Based on the IHO Ocean and Seas Definition

Coastlines form the geometrical basis of common Geographic Information Systems (GIS). For example, country borders must match the coastline, rivers flow up to the coastline, and a variety of legislation applies up to a defined distance from the coastline. In this article, we propose a well-defined coastline in a structured GIS format that complies with the IHO (International Hydrographic Organization) Ocean and Sea definitions. Once this line structure has been defined and digitized with an agreed accuracy, it may be used as a building block, for example for matching river mouths and country borders to the coastline, but also for additional functions such as creating a hydrographic coding system. A coding mechanism has been developed, based on available mathematical formulae, which enables the rapid computation of similar codes based on any high quality geometric data. An application of the system is demonstrated, in order to assess how grouping and ordering data along a coastline may be explored. Analysis of the coding system also enabled an assessment of how coastline length can be compared with data originating from different sources and / or morphology.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen