Journal of Environmental Systems and Sustainability - Articles

Iyer, A., Dąbrowski, T., Ahmadi, M., Rossi, G., Mukherjee, R., Costa, R., Kim, W., Hansen, M., Santos, S., Hansen, G., Amoah, N.

While several studies have found positive associations between exposure to oil spill cleanup-related chemicals and hypertension, no study has examined these associations longitudinally. This study examined associations of oil spill-related benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and n-hexane (BTEX-H) exposures, individually and as both the aggregate sum (total) of BTEX-H and the BTEX-H mixture with incident hypertension among Gulf Long-term Follow-up (GuLF) Study participants.

Leontyev, A., Yamauchi, T.

Impulsive individuals exhibit abnormal reward processing (heightened preference for immediate rewards, i.e., impulsive choice, IC) and a penchant for maladaptive action (the inability to inhibit inappropriate actions, i.e., impulsive action, IA). Both impulsive choice and impulsive action are strongly influenced by emotions (emotional impulsivity); yet how emotions impact impulsive behavior remains unclear. The traditional theory suggests that emotions primarily exacerbate impulsive action and prompts impulsive choice. The alternative theory states that emotions disrupt attention (attentional impulsivity, AImp) and prompt impulsive choice. However, the empirical evidence supporting these theories is inconsistent—few correlations have been reported between self-report measures of emotional impulsivity and behavioral measures of impulsivity beyond clinical populations. In two studies, we probed the interplay among emotions, impulsive action (IA), attentional impulsivity (AImp), and impulsive choice (IC). We elicited positive and negative emotions using emotional pictures and examined the extent to which elicited emotions altered behavioral indices of impulsivity. Our findings suggest that, in a nonclinical population, emotions accentuate impulsive behavior by disrupting attentional control. In particular, Positive Urgency plays an important role in inhibitory control. Keywords: impulsivity, emotions, mouse-cursor tracking.

Nakamura, H.

Silva, S., Fernández, I., Beaumont, A.

One of our era's greatest scourges is air pollution, on account not only of its impact on climate change but also its impact on public and individual health due to increasing morbidity and mortality. There are many pollutants that are major factors in disease in humans. Among them, Particulate Matter (PM), particles of variable but very small diameter, penetrate the respiratory system via inhalation, causing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, reproductive and central nervous system dysfunctions, and cancer. Despite the fact that ozone in the stratosphere plays a protective role against ultraviolet irradiation, it is harmful when in high concentration at ground level, also affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular system. Furthermore, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), dioxins, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are all considered air pollutants that are harmful to humans. Carbon monoxide can even provoke direct poisoning when breathed in at high levels. Heavy metals such as lead, when absorbed into the human body, can lead to direct poisoning or chronic intoxication, depending on exposure. Diseases occurring from the aforementioned substances include principally respiratory problems such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), asthma, bronchiolitis, and also lung cancer, cardiovascular events, central nervous system dysfunctions, and cutaneous diseases. Last but not least, climate change resulting from environmental pollution affects the geographical distribution of many infectious diseases, as do natural disasters. The only way to tackle this problem is through public awareness coupled with a multidisciplinary approach by scientific experts; national and international organizations must address the emergence of this threat and propose sustainable solutions.

mortensen, h., Gromelski, M., Hench, V., Martens, M., Wittwehr, C., Kumar, S., Kumar, V., Audouze, K., Virvilis, V., Nymark, P., Angrish, M., Lynch, I.

The FAIR AOP Roadmap for 2025: Advancing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-Usability of Adverse Outcome Pathways Mortensen, H.M., Gromelski, M., Hench, G., Kumar, V., Martens, M., Kumar, S., Audouze, K., Lynch, I., Virvilis, V., Edwards, S.E., Magagna, B., Nymark, P., Wittwehr, C.

Iyer, P., Kim, S., Kim, A.

Nature-based solutions have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. Together, these results contribute to a more complete picture and open the way to further applications. Urban green infrastructure have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. These results clarify the role of the underlying mechanisms and suggest several directions for future work. Understanding peatland restoration is of central importance, yet existing approaches rely on restrictive assumptions. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. We discuss limitations of the present study and outline how the methods can be extended. Previous work on urban green infrastructure has produced conflicting results, partly because of differences in design and data. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. These results clarify the role of the underlying mechanisms and suggest several directions for future work. Soil organic carbon have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. These results clarify the role of the underlying mechanisms and suggest several directions for future work. Previous work on soil organic carbon has produced conflicting results, partly because of differences in design and data. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. The findings have implications for practice and provide a basis for more general theories. Understanding agricultural nitrogen runoff is of central importance, yet existing approaches rely on restrictive assumptions. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. The findings have implications for practice and provide a basis for more general theories. Soil organic carbon have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. These results clarify the role of the underlying mechanisms and suggest several directions for future work. Understanding peatland restoration is of central importance, yet existing approaches rely on restrictive assumptions. We find that restoration effects emerged only after the first decade, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. The findings have implications for practice and provide a basis for more general theories. Understanding nature-based solutions is of central importance, yet existing approaches rely on restrictive assumptions. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We discuss limitations of the present study and outline how the methods can be extended. Despite considerable progress in recent years, several fundamental questions about soil organic carbon remain open. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. These results clarify the role of the underlying mechanisms and suggest several directions for future work. Despite considerable progress in recent years, several fundamental questions about agricultural nitrogen runoff remain open. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. We discuss limitations of the present study and outline how the methods can be extended. Pollinator communities have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find that restoration effects emerged only after the first decade. We find that land use explained more variance than climate. The analysis uses a combination of rigorous arguments and extensive numerical or empirical checks. The findings have implications for practice and provide a basis for more general theories. Agricultural nitrogen runoff have attracted growing attention because of their relevance to both theory and practice. We find a consistent decline over the 20-year record, and we show that the result is stable under a range of perturbations of the assumptions. In contrast to earlier studies, our approach accounts for heterogeneity and avoids the usual simplifying assumptions. We find substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and flood regulation. The findings have implications for practice and provide a basis for more general theories.

Fontaine, A., Lindqvist, I., Takahashi, H.

Pesticides are indispensable in agricultural production. They have been used by farmers to control weeds and insects, and their remarkable increases in agricultural products have been reported. The increase in the world’s population in the 20th century could not have been possible without a parallel increase in food production. About one-third of agricultural products are produced depending on the application of pesticides. Without the use of pesticides, there would be a 78% loss of fruit production, a 54% loss of vegetable production, and a 32% loss of cereal production. Therefore, pesticides play a critical role in reducing diseases and increasing crop yields worldwide. Thus, it is essential to discuss the agricultural development process; the historical perspective, types and specific uses of pesticides; and pesticide behavior, its contamination, and adverse effects on the natural environment. The review study indicates that agricultural development has a long history in many places around the world. The history of pesticide use can be divided into three periods of time. Pesticides are classified by different classification terms such as chemical classes, functional groups, modes of action, and toxicity. Pesticides are used to kill pests and control weeds using chemical ingredients; hence, they can also be toxic to other organisms, including birds, fish, beneficial insects, and non-target plants, as well as air, water, soil, and crops. Moreover, pesticide contamination moves away from the target plants, resulting in environmental pollution. Such chemical residues impact human health through environmental and food contamination. In addition, climate change-related factors also impact on pesticide application and result in increased pesticide usage and pesticide pollution. Therefore, this review will provide the scientific information necessary for pesticide application and management in the future.

Rasmussen, T., Poulsen, J., Ribergaard, M., Sasanka, R., Craig, A., Hunke, E., Rethmeier, S.

This study focuses on the performance of the elastic–viscous–plastic (EVP) dynamical solver within the sea ice model, CICE v6.5.1. The study has been conducted in two steps. First, the standard EVP solver was extracted from CICE for experiments with refactored versions, which are used for performance testing. Second, one refactored version was integrated and tested in the full CICE model to demonstrate that the new algorithms do not significantly impact the physical results. The study reveals two dominant bottlenecks, namely (1) the number of Message Parsing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) synchronization points required for halo exchanges during each time step combined with the irregular domain of active sea ice points and (2) the lack of single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) code generation. The standard EVP solver has been refactored based on two generic patterns. The first pattern exposes how general finite differences on masked multi-dimensional arrays can be expressed in order to produce significantly better code generation by changing the memory access pattern from random access to direct access. The second pattern takes an alternative approach to handle static grid properties. The measured single-core performance improvement is more than a factor of 5 compared to the standard implementation. The refactored implementation of strong scales on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors series node until the available bandwidth of the node is used. For the Intel® Xeon® CPU Max series, there is sufficient bandwidth to allow the strong scaling to continue for all the cores on the node, resulting in a single-node improvement factor of 35 over the standard implementation. This study also demonstrates improved performance on GPU processors.

Tilloy, A., Paprotny, D., Grimaldi, S., Gomes, G., Bianchi, A., Lange, S., Beck, H., Mazzetti, C., Feyen, L.

Since 1950, anthropogenic activities have altered the climate, land cover, soil properties, channel morphologies, and water management in the river basins of Europe. This has resulted in significant changes in hydrological conditions. The availability of consistent estimates of river flow at the global and continental levels is a necessity for assessing changes in the hydrological cycle. To overcome limitations posed by observations (incomplete records, inhomogeneous spatial coverage), we simulate river discharge for Europe for the period 1951–2020 using a state-of-the-art hydrological modelling approach. We use the new European set-up of the OS LISFLOOD model, running at 1 arcmin (≈1.8 km) with 6-hourly time steps. The hydrological model is forced by climate reanalysis data (ERA5-Land) that are bias-corrected and downscaled to the model resolution with gridded weather observations. The model also incorporates 72 surface field maps representing catchment morphology, vegetation, soil properties, land use, water demand, lakes, and reservoirs. Inputs related to human activities are evolving through time to emulate societal changes. The resulting Hydrological European ReAnalysis (HERA) provides 6-hourly river discharge for 282 521 river pixels with an upstream area >100 km2. We assess its skill using 2448 river gauging stations distributed across Europe. Overall, HERA delivers satisfying results (median KGE′=0.55), despite a general underestimation of observed mean discharges (mean bias=-13.1 %), and demonstrates a capacity to reproduce statistics of observed extreme flows. The performance of HERA increases through time and with catchment size, and it varies in space depending on reservoir influence and model calibration. The fine spatial and temporal resolution results in an enhanced performance compared to previous hydrological reanalysis based on OS LISFLOOD for small- to medium-scale catchments (100–10 000 km2). HERA is the first publicly available long-term, high-resolution hydrological reanalysis for Europe. Despite its limitations, HERA enables the analysis of hydrological dynamics related to extremes, human influences, and climate change at a continental scale while maintaining local relevance. It also creates the opportunity to study these dynamics in ungauged catchments across Europe. The HERA hydrological reanalysis and its climate and dynamic socio-economic inputs are available via the JRC data catalogue: https://doi.org/10.2905/a605a675-9444-4017-8b34-d66be5b18c95 (Tilloy et al., 2024).

Vanderheyden, M., Chaignon, B., Car, C., Pilot, M., el Berbri, I., Marshall‐Pescini, S., Range, F., Berghänel, A.

Infanticide by females occurs in many mammalian species but is rarely observed directly, making its social and ecological determinants difficult to identify. Here, we report the first direct observation of within‐pack infanticide by a female free‐ranging domestic dog. To assess whether this case can be better explained by resource competition or nutritional gain, we examined the social context in which it occurred. In our long‐term study population, we identified 26 cases characterised by a similar pattern of overlapping pregnancies within social groups. By comparing dominance rank and birth order across cases, we found that subordinate females time their births after or in synchrony with the alpha female, which may be a strategy to reduce infanticide risk. By giving birth later, the subordinate potentially allows the alpha a competitive advantage, thereby reducing the incentive for infanticide. Furthermore, subordinate free‐ranging dogs may use communal denning as a protective measure, as it hinders the identification of individual litters. In our study, the infanticide followed a period of rank instability. Social rank instability could elevate infanticide risk, since the absence of dominance signals might complicate the subordinate's assessment of the potential threat to its offspring, or because infanticide is used to consolidate dominance. On the other hand, we did not find support for the hypothesis that insufficient nutrition motivated the infanticide, based on an evaluation of the body condition scores within the pack and on the observation that not all killed pups were eaten. Taken together, our preliminary findings suggest that resource competition rather than nutritional gain may better explain infanticide by female free‐ranging dogs.