Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a systematic process designed to identify and predict the potential impacts of human activity on the biophysical and human environment. It also functions as an environmental management tool to identify measures to avoid, mitigate or compensate for those effects. EIA is intended to be an iterative process to follow-up to projects postimplementation to determine actual environmental outcomes, interpret and communicate information about those outcomes and investigate opportunities for improved project environmental performance. Originating from the United States’ National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, EIA is now amongst the most successful and widely practiced environmental management tools in the world. Key Concepts: EIA is an aid to decision making through which concerns about the potential environmental consequences of proposed projects are assessed before those projects become a reality. Screening in EIA ensures that assessments are done when needed and not done when not needed. Scope is essential to good EIA and the goal is to focus on a select set of environmental components that are deemed important from scientific, public or regulatory perspectives and are likely to be adversely affected by the project. The underlying intent of EIA is to allow project proponents, managers and decision makers to enhance the benefits of proposed development projects and to mitigate potentially adverse impacts to the point of acceptability. EIA must be applied early in the development planning processes if it is to be influential in project design and decision making. Information gained in EIA follow-up studies, after the project is implemented, provides feedback to improve predictions and mitigation and management programmes, and an opportunity to learn for subsequent project proposals. Keywords: environmental impact assessment; baseline studies; impact prediction; mitigation and management of impacts; cumulative environmental effects; follow-up studie

Abstract

Transport offers many economic and social benefits but also brings a wide range of direct and indirect environmental impacts. Large amounts of finite resources in the form of fuels and materials are needed for the construction of vehicles and transport infrastructure. Transport activities account for over 30% of all energy use by final consumers and is widely predicted to be the largest contributor to the growth of carbon dioxide emissions in the twenty-first century. Road transport is also a major source of other noxious emissions, notably carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates as well as a number of other detrimental environmental effects, such as those related to the severance of communities and ecosystems and noise. This chapter reviews the nature of the environmental problems created by transport activities, their relationship with the discipline of transport geography, and some of the approaches developed to address transport’s environmental consequences. It first defines the meaning of environmental issues pertaining to transport and explains why environmental issues are of growing interest to transport geographers. The main social and natural environmental impacts of transport are then explored, together with various approaches used to ameliorate these impacts. Finally, the challenges involved in achieving more sustainable transport systems are discussed.

Abstract

Natural disasters like floods are a worldwide phenomenon and a serious threat to mankind. Flood simulations are applications of disaster control, which are used for the development of appropriate flood protection. Adequate simulations require not only the geometry but also the roughness of the Earth’s surface, as well as the roughness of the objects hereon. Usually, the floodplain roughness is based on land use/land cover maps derived from orthophotos. This study analyses the applicability of roughness map derivation approaches for flood simulations based on different datasets: orthophotos, LiDAR data, official land use data, OpenStreetMap data and CORINE Land Cover data. Object-based image analysis is applied to orthophotos and LiDAR raster data in order to generate land cover maps, which enable a roughness parameterization. The vertical vegetation structure within the LiDAR point cloud is used to derive an additional floodplain roughness map. Further roughness maps are derived from official land use data, OpenStreetMap and CORINE Land Cover datasets. Six different flood simulations are applied based on one elevation data but with the different roughness maps. The results of the hydrodynamic–numerical models include information on flow velocity and water depth from which the additional attribute flood intensity is calculated of. The results based on roughness maps derived from LiDAR data and OpenStreetMap data are comparable, whereas the results of the other datasets differ significantly. Document type: Article

Abstract

Cirrus clouds have a large influence on the Earth's climate and anthropogenic activities such as aviation can alter their properties. Besides the formation of contrails, indirect effects on naturally occurring cirrus like increased heterogeneous freezing due to exhaust soot particles are discussed in the literature. However, hardly any observational study exists. In this work we present cirrus optical properties measured by an airborne lidar over Europe during the Midlatitude Cirrus experiment (ML-CIRRUS). One half of the cloud cases showed elevated depolarization ratios with a mode difference of 10 percentage points indicating differences in the clouds microphysical properties. Their origin can be traced back to highly frequented air traffic regions, and they show lower in-cloud ice supersaturations. Our analysis reveals no influence of embedded contrails and temperature. These results could be explained by an indirect aerosol effect where heterogeneous freezing is caused by aviation exhaust particles.

Abstract

"jats:p"Relationships between the activities of bus carriers and rail passenger traffic (and the railway offer) are examined in this article. The study was carried out in peripheral areas located at the Polish and Czech borderlands in Lower Silesia province. High quality rail transport generally increases the demand for transport services. Therefore, the proper development of transport offer plays a key role in the functioning of public transport systems, the backbone of which is rail transport. The study also shows that under conditions of transport market deregulation, bus carriers have developed a competitive network which is not complementary to rail transport. As a consequence, the deregulation of the transport market has increased the risk of transport exclusion. Document type: Article

Abstract

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is widely regarded as the primary positioning solution for intelligent transport system (ITS) applications. However, its performance could degrade, due to signal outages and faulty-signal contamination, including multipath and non-line-of-sight reception. Considering the limitation of the performance and computation loads in mass-produced automotive products, this research investigates the methods for enhancing GNSS-based solutions without significantly increasing the cost for vehicular navigation system. In this study, the measurement technique of the odometer in modern vehicle designs is selected to integrate the GNSS information, without using an inertial navigation system. Three techniques are implemented to improve positioning accuracy; (a) Time-differenced carrier phase (TDCP) based filter: A state-augmented extended Kalman filter is designed to incorporate TDCP measurements for maximizing the effectiveness of phase-smoothing; (b) odometer-aided constraints: The aiding measurement from odometer utilizing forward speed with the lateral constraint enhances the state estimation; the information based on vehicular motion, comprising the zero-velocity constraint, fault detection and exclusion, and dead reckoning, maintains the stability of the positioning solution; (c) robust regression: A weighted-least-square based robust regression as a measurement-quality assessment is applied to adjust the weightings of the measurements adaptively. Experimental results in a GNSS-challenging environment indicate that, based on the single-point-positioning mode with an automotive-grade receiver, the combination of the proposed methods presented a root-mean-square error of 2.51 m, 3.63 m, 1.63 m, and 1.95 m for the horizontal, vertical, forward, and lateral directions, with improvements of 35.1%, 49.6%, 45.3%, and 21.1%, respectively. The statistical analysis exhibits 97.3% state estimation result in the horizontal direction for the percentage of epochs that had errors of less than 5 m, presenting that after the intervention of proposed methods, the positioning performance can fulfill the requirements for road level applications. Document type: Article

Abstract

Earthquake loss estimation systems in the US, for example HAZUS (Hazard in US), have been established based on sufficient damage records for the purpose of prevention and efficient response to earthquake hazards; however, in Korea, insufficient data sets of earthquakes and damage records are currently available. In this study, the earthquake damages to pipelines in Korea using the pipeline repair rate (RR) recommended in HAZUS was reevaluated with the degree of confidence when RR is used without modification for the damage estimation of pipelines in Korea. The numerical analyses using a commercial finite element model, ABAQUS, were carried out to compare stresses and strains mobilized in both brittle and ductile pipelines constructed by the design criteria and construction specifications of both Korea and the US. These pipelines were embedded in dense sand overlying three different in situ soils (clay, sand, and gravel) subjected to earthquake excitations with peak ground accelerations (PGAs) of 0.2 to 1.2 g and 1994 Northridge and 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake loadings. The numerical results show that differences in the stress and strain rates are less than 10%. This implies that RR in HAZUS can be used for earthquake damage estimation of pipelines with a 90% confidence level in Korea. Document type: Article

Abstract

The land use structure is a key component to understand the complexity of urban systems because it provides a snapshot of urban dynamics and how people use space. This paper integrates socially sensed activity data with a remotely sensed land cover product in order to infer urban land use and its changes over time. We conducted a case study in the Washington D.C.&ndash Baltimore metropolitan area to identify the pattern of land use change from undeveloped to developed land, including residential and non-residential uses for a period covering 1986&ndash 2008. The proposed approach modeled physical and behavioral features of land parcels from a satellite-based impervious surface cover change product and georeferenced Tweets, respectively. A model assessment with random forests classifiers showed that the proposed classification workflow could classify residential and non-residential land uses at an accuracy of 81%, 4% better than modeling the same land uses from physical features alone. Using the timestamps of the impervious surface cover change product, the study also reconstructed the timeline of the identified land uses. The results indicated that the proposed approach was capable of mapping detailed land use and change in an urban region, and represents a new and viable way forward for urban land use surveying that could be especially useful for surveying and tracking changes in cities where traditional approaches and mapping products (i.e., from remote sensing products) may have a limited capacity to capture change. Document type: Article

Abstract

"jats:p"When surveying the motivation side of travel and tourism, we can state that tourists consider in their travel decisions, certain landscape preferences – to a certain extent. It also seems to be evident, however, that the objective evaluation of a landscape is a hard task for researchers for numerous reasons. In recent decades, several attempts have been made to create such methods but it seems that, in Hungary at least, this topic is rather neglected. The aim of this study is to provide an evaluation method for the landscape preferences of passengers travelling on Hungarian railway lines, demonstrating how the landscape around the railways could become an attraction during the travel. We survey what types of landscape appearance would be needed in order to generate travel decisions for tourists and also how the travel experience itself could become a tourism product. Document type: Article