150 research outputs found
Catchment-Scale Analysis Reveals High Cost-Effectiveness of Wetland Buffer Zones as a Remedy to Non-Point Nutrient Pollution in North-Eastern Poland
Large-scale re-establishment of wetland buffer zones (WBZ) along rivers is regarded as an effective measure in order to reduce non-point source nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) pollution in agricultural catchments. We estimated efficiency and costs of a hypothetical establishment of WBZs along all watercourses in an agricultural landscape of the lower Narew River catchment (north-eastern Poland, 16,444 km2, amounting to 5% of Poland) by upscaling results obtained in five sub-catchments (1087 km2). Two scenarios were analysed, with either rewetting selected wetland polygons that collect water from larger areas (polygonal WBZs) or reshaping and rewetting banks of rivers (linear WBZs), both considered in all ecologically suitable locations along rivers. Cost calculation included engineering works necessary in order to establish WBZs, costs of land purchase where relevant, and compensation costs of income forgone to farmers (needed only for polygonal WBZs). Polygonal WBZs were estimated in order to remove 11%–30% N and 14%–42% P load from the catchment, whereas linear WBZs were even higher with 33%–82% N and 41%–87% P. Upscaled costs of WBZ establishment for the study area were found to be 8.9 M EUR plus 26.4 M EUR per year (polygonal WBZ scenario) or 170.8 M EUR (linear WBZ scenario). The latter value compares to costs of building about 20 km of an express road. Implementation of buffer zones on a larger scale is thus a question of setting policy priorities rather than financial impossibility
An Intelligent Safety System for Human-Centered Semi-Autonomous Vehicles
Nowadays, automobile manufacturers make efforts to develop ways to make cars
fully safe. Monitoring driver's actions by computer vision techniques to detect
driving mistakes in real-time and then planning for autonomous driving to avoid
vehicle collisions is one of the most important issues that has been
investigated in the machine vision and Intelligent Transportation Systems
(ITS). The main goal of this study is to prevent accidents caused by fatigue,
drowsiness, and driver distraction. To avoid these incidents, this paper
proposes an integrated safety system that continuously monitors the driver's
attention and vehicle surroundings, and finally decides whether the actual
steering control status is safe or not. For this purpose, we equipped an
ordinary car called FARAZ with a vision system consisting of four mounted
cameras along with a universal car tool for communicating with surrounding
factory-installed sensors and other car systems, and sending commands to
actuators. The proposed system leverages a scene understanding pipeline using
deep convolutional encoder-decoder networks and a driver state detection
pipeline. We have been identifying and assessing domestic capabilities for the
development of technologies specifically of the ordinary vehicles in order to
manufacture smart cars and eke providing an intelligent system to increase
safety and to assist the driver in various conditions/situations.Comment: 15 pages and 5 figures, Submitted to the international conference on
Contemporary issues in Data Science (CiDaS 2019), Learn more about this
project at https://iasbs.ac.ir/~ansari/fara
Phytosulfokine stimulates cell divisions in sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) mesophyll protoplast cultures
The aim of this work was to improve plating efficiency of sugar beet mesophyll protoplast cultures. Preliminary experiments showed that cultures of good quality, viable protoplasts were obtained in rich media based on the Kao and Michayluk formulation and with the calcium alginate as an embedding matrix. Nevertheless, in these cultures cell divisions were either not observed or very seldom confirming earlier reported recalcitrance of sugar beet protoplasts. The recalcitrant status of these cultures was reversed upon application of exogenous phytosulfokine (PSK)—a peptidyl plant growth factor. The highest effectiveness of PSK was observed at 100 nM concentration. Plating efficiencies obtained in the presence of PSK reached approximately 20% of the total cultured cells. The stimulatory effect of phytosulfokine was observed for all tested breeding stocks of sugar beet. Our data indicate that PSK is a powerful agent able to overcome recalcitrance of plant protoplast cultures
- …