Analyzing the Impact of Airborne Particulate Matter on Urban Contamination with the Help of Hybrid Neural Networks

In this study, particulate matter (PM), total suspended particulate (TSP), PM10, and PM2.5 fractions) concentrations were recorded in various cities from south of Romania to build the corresponding time series for various intervals. First, the time series of each pollutant were used as inputs in various configurations of feed-forward neural networks (FANN) to find the most suitable network architecture to the PM specificity. The outputs were evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean square error (RMSE), and Pearson correlation coefficient (r) between observed series and output series. Second, each time series was decomposed using Daubechies wavelets of third order into its corresponding components. Each decomposed component of a PM time series was used as input in the optimal feed-forward neural networks (FANN) architecture established in the first step. The output of each component was re-included to form the modeled series of the original pollutant time series

Water Quality and Anthropogenic Pressures in a Changing Environment: The Arges River Basin, Romania

The objective of this work was to present several benchmarks regarding the water quality at hydrological basin level under increasing anthropogenic pressures. The first part briefly describes the sources of water pollution, the hydromorphological pressures, and the main water quality parameters widely used for the assessment. The second part presents as an example the dynamics of several water quality parameters recorded between 2007 and 2014 downstream of Argeș River, Romania, near the confluence with the Danube River. Argeș River supplies water for several important Romanian cities including Bucharest, and from here comes the rationale of the work, which envisages characterizing water quality status to substantiate proper water management. The following parameters were statistically analyzed: water temperature, suspended solids, pH, dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand, ammonium, nitrates, nitrites, and dissolved heavy metals. The factor analysis results showed that the first factor contains temperature and dissolved oxygen, the second has the heavy metals, the third groups have the ammonium and pH, the fourth contains the TSS and nitrites, while the fifth is formed by BOD5 and nitrates. Water quality plays a significant role in promoting socioeconomic development and maintaining viable ecosystems. The protection of water quality requires improved monitoring and reliable watershed management plans

Plant Competition in Cropping Systems

In the coming years, farmers will face difficult challenges throughout the world in terms of climate change, water scarcity, and environmental issues caused by conventional agricultural technologies. Effective management of natural resources can be encouraged by orienting the common agricultural practices towards the functional biodiversity concept in designing and implementing sustainable and eco-friendly cropping systems. In the framework of polycrop science, this book provides basic principles and several case studies of polycrop utilization in various regions of the world as a method of functional biodiversity amplification through species associations that maximize the productivity per unit of land area, suppress the growth and development of weeds, and reduce the amount of harmful pests and insects

Fine Particulate Matter in Urban Environments: A Trigger of Respiratory Symptoms in Sensitive Children

The overall objective of this research was to study children’s respiratory illness levels in Targoviste (Romania) in relationship to the outdoor concentrations of airborne particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter below 2.5 µm (PM2.5). We monitored and analysed the PM2.5 concentrations according to a complex experimental protocol. The health trial was conducted over three months (October–December 2015) and required the active cooperation of the children’s parents to monitor carefully the respiratory symptoms of the child, i.e., coughing, rhinorrhoea, wheezing, and fever, as well as their outdoor program. We selected the most sensitive children (n = 25; age: 2–10 years) with perturbed respiratory health, i.e., wheezing, asthma, and associated symptoms. The estimated average PM2.5 doses were 0.8–14.5 µg·day−1 for weekdays, and 0.4–6.6 µg·day−1 for the weekend. The frequency and duration of the symptoms decreased with increasing age. The 4- to 5-year old children recorded the longest duration of symptoms, except for rhinorrhoea, which suggested that this age interval is the most vulnerable to exogenous trigger agents (p < 0.01) compared to the other age groups. PM2.5 air pollution was found to have a direct positive correlation with the number of wheezing episodes (r = 0.87; p < 0.01) in November 2015. Monitoring of wheezing occurrences in the absence of fever can provide a reliable assessment of the air pollution effect on the exacerbation of asthma and respiratory disorders in sensitive children