Risks of Future Droughts and their Impacts on Scottish Private Water Supplies

In recent years, Scotland has been experiencing lower-than-average rainfall in the spring and summer seasons leading to water scarcity in many parts of the country, especially during the summer months. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these dry conditions even more in the future, presenting significant risks to water resources management. Businesses and households, especially those relying on Private Water Supplies (PWS) in rural areas, such as boreholes and springs, have already observed noticeable changes in the quantity and quality of water during the dry periods. Around 3.5% of the Scottish population relies on PWS which includes households, industries, agriculture, and the tourism industry. This study aims to project future drier periods from 2041-2080 across Scotland on a 1-km grid, using the Standardised Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index and the observed meteorological data from 1981-2020 as the baseline. Results suggest low to extreme drought conditions in all 1-km cells , with increases in dry conditions likely to be highest in the eastern parts of Scotland, showing a distinct spatial variability in drought characteristics across Scotland. In future work, past and future drought occurrences will be linked with the water quality characteristics of PWS to understand the likely impact of future droughts on Scotland’s water security. The water quality dataset has been made available from the Drinking Water Quality Regulator for Scotland for the period 2006-2020 for nearly 6000 PWS locations. These PWS have been monitored twice a year on an average for their water quality. They span across 25 administrative areas in Scotland and represent roughly 27% of the total PWS in Scotland. Water quality variables such as faecal coliforms, E.coli, iron, turbidity, lead, pH, colour, nitrate and phosphate will be included in the analysis to facilitate planning for effective, resilient water resources management and ensure access to clean water to maintain health and livelihoods

A European eel (Anguilla anguilla) case study using structured elicitation to estimate instream infrastructure passability for freshwater fishes

Conservation efforts are hampered by limited understanding about how different types of instream infrastructure impact migration patterns and fish survival. We used a rapid, fully online IDEA protocol to elicit expert judgments for the passability of seven different in-stream infrastructures to elver European eels (Anguilla anguilla) in Great Britain. Nine experts provided judgments via our online survey, followed by a second elicitation via email for reflection and adjustment of initial estimates. We found that on average, bridges were judged the most passable (95% passability), followed by fords, nonperched culverts, weirs, sluices, dams, and perched culverts (7%). Results showed a high degree of agreement about how passable bridges and perched culverts are for elver eels, but less certainty about other infrastructure. Thirty-four distinct factors were identified that experts believed influence infrastructure passability for elver eels, including: the structure itself, hydraulics, elver characteristics, obstructions (e.g., debris accumulation), and vegetation (e.g., to aid climbing). We discuss how our rapid, online-only variation on the IDEA protocol compares with the more traditional protocol, and how the expert estimates generated in this study can be used in future scenario building and connectivity modeling, with a view to improving conservation to support species persistence

Review on Secure Auditing, Preserving and Integrity of Data Using TPA on Cloud Storage

User should use the data storage without any loss as it is stored locally. Auditing process is important process to ensure integrity, user are not that skilful to maintain integrity of data and they are not aware about risk and security action. Hence so to perform user can depend on TPA (third party authentication), which will check integrity and privacy on cloud data which is stored locally.TPA audit the integrity and provides appropriate result to user. Results contain modified, deleted and uploaded information of files. User has to make sure that privacy is preserved from TPA with minimal consumption of cloud resources while auditing process. In this paper we propose a system that will provide integrity to locally stored data without downloading files avoiding additional resources and vulnerability. We further extend our result to enable the TPA to perform audits for multiple users simultaneously and efficiently. Extensive security and performance analysis show the proposed schemes are provably secure and highly efficient

Addressing road-river infrastructure gaps using a model-based approach

The world's rivers are covered over and fragmented by road infrastructure. Road-river infrastructure result in many socio-environmental questions and documenting where different types occur is challenged by their sheer numbers. Equally, the United Nations has committed the next decade to ecosystem restoration, and decision makers across government, non-government, and private sectors require information about where different types of road-river infrastructure occur to guide management decisions that promote both transport and river system resilience. Field-based efforts alone cannot address data and information needs at relevant scales, such as across river basins, nations, or regions to guide road-river infrastructure remediation. As a first step toward overcoming these data needs in Great Britain, we constructed a georeferenced database of road-river infrastructure, validated a subset of locations, and used a Boosted Regression Tree model-based approach with environmental data to predict which infrastructure are bridges and culverts. We mapped 110,406 possible road-river infrastructure locations and were able to either validate or predict which of 110,194 locations were bridges (n=60,385) or culverts (n=49,809). Upstream drainage area had the greatest contribution to determining infrastructure type: when <10 km2 our model correctly predicted culverts 73% of the time but only 60% of the time for bridges. Road type and stream gradient also influenced model results. Our model-based approach is readily applied to other locations and contexts and can be used to inform decisions about management of smaller infrastructure that are frequently overlooked worldwide

On some subclasses of bi-univalent functions associated with pseudo-starlike functions

In this paper, we have established the Taylor–Maclaurin coefficients |a2| and |a3| of the two new subclasses of bi-univalent functions using pseudo-starlike functions in the open unit disk U={z:|z|<1}