Inventory of Existing Studies Applying Life Cycle Thinking to Biowaste Management

European waste policy aims at reducing the negative environmental impact associated with waste generation and management and to contribute to an overall reduction of the environmental impact of the use of resources. The Commission Communication on the Thematic Strategy on the Prevention and Recycling of Waste (COM (2005) 666) promotes life cycle thinking (LCT) in waste policies at European level and contains proposals to encourage and assist Member States in implementing this approach. This includes specific provisions in the accompanying proposal for a new Waste Framework Directive, as well as the preparation of guidance documents, in particular to the management of biodegradable waste that is diverted from landfill. In this context, the European Commission¿s Joint Research Centre is conducting a project aimed at the development of European life cycle thinking guidelines for the management of waste. The present report is the first outcome of the project, focusing on biodegradable waste and presenting the results of an analysis of existing studies on the application of the life cycle approach to biowaste management and treatment options. In this report the main conclusions of the analysis are presented as a first step for the definition of the life cycle guidance document for biodegradable waste management. The analysis showed that for the management of biodegradable waste that is diverted from landfills, there is no single environmentally best option. The environmental assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the various biowaste management options is complex because they occur in different phases of the biowaste lifecycle, during collection, treatment and recycling, while contributing to different environmental effects, ranging from greenhouse effects, material depletion, acidification and toxicity for humans and ecosystems. The analysis equally highlights that the environmental balance of the various options available for the management of this waste depends on a number of local/regional factors, inter alia collection systems, waste composition and quality, climatic conditions, the potential of use of various waste derived products such as electricity, heat, methane-rich gas or compost. In particular, the positive environmental effects of recycling and energy recovery are related to the avoided products (e.g. electricity, fertilizers etc). These positive effects can exceed the environmental burdens of the waste collection and treatment, while further benefits can exist from waste prevention. Therefore the availability of options for recycling and energy recovery seems to be one of the most important factors that influences the total environmental performance of biowaste management and should be an important guiding principle for the development of European guidelines for the management of biowaste.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

Seasonal Predictability of Daily Rainfall Characteristics in Central Northern Chile for Dry-Land Management

The seasonal predictability of daily winter rainfall characteristics relevant to dry-land management was investigated in the Coquimbo region of central northern Chile, with focus on the seasonal rainfall total, daily rainfall frequency, and mean daily rainfall intensity on wet days at the station scale. Three approaches of increasing complexity were tested. First, an index of the simultaneous El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was regressed onto May–August (MJJA) observed precipitation; this explained 32% of station-averaged rainfall-amount variability, but performed poorly in a forecasting setting. The second approach used retrospective seasonal forecasts made with three general circulation models (GCMs) to produce downscaled seasonal rainfall statistics by means of canonical correlation analysis (CCA). In the third approach, a nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model (nHMM) driven by the GCM’s seasonal forecasts was used to model stochastic daily rainfall sequences. While the CCA is used as a downscaling method for the seasonal rainfall characteristics themselves, the nHMM has the ability to simulate a large ensemble of daily rainfall sequences at each station from which the rainfall statistics were calculated. Similar cross-validated skill estimates were obtained using both the CCA and nHMM, with the highest correlations with observations found for seasonal rainfall amount and rainfall frequency (up to 0.9 at individual stations). These findings were interpreted using analyses of observed rainfall spatial coherence, and by means of synoptic rainfall states derived from the HMM. The downscaled hindcasts were then tailored to meteorological drought prediction, using the standardized precipitation index (SPI) based on seasonal values, the frequency of substantial rainfall days (>15 mm; FREQ15) and the daily accumulated precipitation deficit. Deterministic hindcasts of SPI showed high hit rates, with high ranked probability skill score for probabilistic hindcasts of FREQ15 obtained via the nHMM

21st Century hydrological modeling for optimizing ancient water harvesting techniques

In order to increase dryland productivity, water harvesting techniques (WHT) have received renewed attention, leading to their massive implementation in marginal drylands. However, versatile tools to evaluate their efficiency under a wide range of conditions are often lacking. For two case studies in the arid and semi-arid central-northern zone of Chile, a fully coupled 3D surface-subsurface hydrological model based on the Richards’ and the Saint Venant equations was used to evaluate and improve existing water harvesting techniques using infiltration trenches (locally called ‘zanjas’). The model was parameterized with detailed runoff and soil-water content data collected during simulated rainfall from a 6 x 2 m experimental plot including a catchment area and infiltration trench at the arid site. Using seven responsive parameters identified by a global sensitivity analysis, surface and subsurface flow processes were calibrated simultaneously. The calibrated model accurately reproduced observed soil moisture contents (R2 0.92) and runoff amounts (R2 0.97), and represented the overflowing infiltration trench, which is a clear improvement over existing frameworks. A comparative analysis with a natural slope demonstrated that the trench was efficient in capturing runoff under high rainfall intensities, such as the one simulated, resulting in a significant decrease (46%) of runoff. However, when extended to natural rainfall seasons, runoff water harvesting was insufficient in dry, normal and wet years, while only under very wet conditions 55% of the potential runoff was effectively harvested and stored in the soil profile. As such, this test case shows the importance of correct water harvesting design to become an effective tool in dryland management, taking both soil physical and climatic constraints into account. The model was further tested on a much larger scale of two ca. 3 ha large watersheds at the semi-arid site, one with infiltration trenches and one without. Good agreement was observed between measured and simulated runoff at the watershed outlet

QQ-SNV: single nucleotide variant detection at low frequency by comparing the quality quantiles

Background: Next generation sequencing enables studying heterogeneous populations of viral infections. When the sequencing is done at high coverage depth ("deep sequencing"), low frequency variants can be detected. Here we present QQ-SNV (http://sourceforge.net/projects/qqsnv), a logistic regression classifier model developed for the Illumina sequencing platforms that uses the quantiles of the quality scores, to distinguish true single nucleotide variants from sequencing errors based on the estimated SNV probability. To train the model, we created a dataset of an in silico mixture of five HIV-1 plasmids. Testing of our method in comparison to the existing methods LoFreq, ShoRAH, and V-Phaser 2 was performed on two HIV and four HCV plasmid mixture datasets and one influenza H1N1 clinical dataset. Results: For default application of QQ-SNV, variants were called using a SNV probability cutoff of 0.5 (QQ-SNVD). To improve the sensitivity we used a SNV probability cutoff of 0.0001 (QQ-SNVHS). To also increase specificity, SNVs called were overruled when their frequency was below the 80th percentile calculated on the distribution of error frequencies (QQ-SNVHS-P80). When comparing QQ-SNV versus the other methods on the plasmid mixture test sets, QQ-SNVD performed similarly to the existing approaches. QQ-SNVHS was more sensitive on all test sets but with more false positives. QQ-SNVHS-P80 was found to be the most accurate method over all test sets by balancing sensitivity and specificity. When applied to a paired-end HCV sequencing study, with lowest spiked-in true frequency of 0.5 %, QQ-SNVHS-P80 revealed a sensitivity of 100 % (vs. 40-60 % for the existing methods) and a specificity of 100 % (vs. 98.0-99.7 % for the existing methods). In addition, QQ-SNV required the least overall computation time to process the test sets. Finally, when testing on a clinical sample, four putative true variants with frequency below 0.5 % were consistently detected by QQ-SNVHS-P80 from different generations of Illumina sequencers. Conclusions: We developed and successfully evaluated a novel method, called QQ-SNV, for highly efficient single nucleotide variant calling on Illumina deep sequencing virology data

M & L Jaargang 32/1

Koen De Groote De stadswording van Aalst. Of hoe een Merovingische nederzetting uitgroeide tot een laatmiddeleeuwse stad. [The urban formation of Aalst, or how a Merovingian settlement became a late medieval town.]Sinds het begin van de jaren 80 van vorige eeuw wordt er in Aalst archeologisch onderzoek verricht. De aanvankelijk kleine interventies en waarnemingen worden later grootschaligere en geplande onderzoeken. Al deze opgravingen groot en klein blijken belangrijke puzzelstukken te zijn in de reconstructie van het Aalsterse verleden. Archeoloog Koen De Groote toont ons hoe stedelijke archeologie in voortdurende dialoog dient te staan met cartografische, historische en bouwhistorische gegevens en hoe een dergelijke interdisciplinaire aanpak uiteindelijk toelaat een beeld te schetsen van het ontstaan en de vroegste ontwikkeling van Aalst.Joris Snaet en Tom Verbist De grote aula van de Leuvense Universiteit. [The Great Hall of the Leuven University.]Generaties Leuvense studenten hebben in de vertrouwde Grote Aula van het huidige Maria-Theresiacollege colleges gevolgd, wellicht zonder te beseffen dat ze zich bevonden in één van de opmerkelijkste historische gebouwen van de Leuvense universiteit. Als getuige van de Hollandse Periode (1815-1830) was de Alma Mater toen immers voor korte tijd een rijksinstelling. Het bewaren van de klassieke vormentaal en het authentiek karakter, met aandacht voor de hedendaagse functionele eisen, was het leitmotiv van de zorgvuldig voorbereide restauratiecampagne. Joris Snaet kadert de geplande ingreep stevig in het archivalisch bronnenmateriaal en Tom Verbist beschrijft de praktische uitwerking van deze weloverwogen ingreep.Summar