1,720,955 research outputs found
Evaluations of the Environmental Effects of Controlled Tile Drainage on Watershed and River Using the Improved SWAT and the QUAL2Kw Under Current and Future Climate Regimes
No full textIn agriculture-dominated areas, water pollution resulting from nutrients migrating from farms to water bodies is a major concern. The migration is further exacerbated by traditional tile drain known as Uncontrolled Tile Drainage (UCTD), which removes excess water from areas to keep the water table low enough for crops to grow. UCTD, commonly used in Ontario, Canada, is believed to contribute to water quality issues, whereas Controlled Tile Drainage (CTD) is an alternative technique in which a structure controls the outlets of the drains so that water only leaves a field when the water table level exceeds a desired threshold. Considered as a Best Management Practice (BMP), CTD has been documented as an efficient practice preventing nutrients from migrating out of agricultural fields. This thesis aims to improve our understanding of the environmental benefits of replacing UCTD with CTD. Three significant contributions were achieved.
The first contribution of the thesis is the improvements of the algorithm for calculating nitrates in tile flows in the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. Researchers have simulated CTD by dynamically changing tile depth to mimic the operation of outlet structure gates, but it has been demonstrated that doing so results in inaccuracies, and so the algorithm in the model has been improved subsequently. The current author proposed and tested a new algorithm for calculating nitrates in tile flows that better represents the dynamics of water and nutrients in soil layers for the SWAT model. A model for the South Nation watershed, located in Ontario, Canada, was then developed and successfully calibrated using the improved SWAT model.
The second contribution was the extension of the SWAT model to simulate riverine hydraulic and water quality processes by coupling it with the QUAL2Kw model. In this thesis, a procedure is developed to couple the SWAT model and the QUAL2Kw model to enable continuous simulations of 13 water quality parameters in the South Nation River system. The coupled model was calibrated and verified at various observed locations along the river during the five seasons of growth from 2006 to 2010. The simulation results suggested that CTD also improved the water quality of the river by lowering biologically available N levels of NO2--N, and NO3--N, thereby impeding phytoplankton growth in the river.
The third contribution is the verification of the benefits of replacing UCTD with CTD in the future climates. The confirmation was done using the SWAT model alone, and then the coupled SWAT/QUAL2K models, using a matrix of climate change experiments performed with several Global Climate Models and Regional Climate Models. The results suggest that nutrient loading from the watershed will increase in the 2021–2050 period compared to the 1985–2006 period. Thus, pollution from agricultural fields will worsen with the current UCTD approach, while the results also show that CTD would perform effectively and stably in future climate scenarios and could counterbalance the effects of climate change on water quality.
To the author’s knowledge, this study is the first attempt to date to assess the environmental effects of CTD on a watershed and river by coupling the SWAT and QUAL2Kw models. The findings expand the current scope of knowledge on the environmental effects of CTD on watersheds and rivers under current and future climate change regimes. Long periods of continuous simulation and a matrix of climate change scenarios also make this study stand out from other studies. It laid a foundation for future investigations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Evaluation of the Impact of Controlled Tile Drainage on Surface Water Quality in the South Nation River Watershed
No full textIn Ontario, many agriculture-dominated watersheds like The South Nation River watershed are experiencing ecosystem deterioration mainly resulting from agricultural activities. A promising best management practice, controlled tile drainage (CTD), maintains water and nutrients through controllable facilities and releases them in an intermittent manner, when available storage in the drains is exceeded. This thesis is to evaluate how much water quality improvement can be expected if CTD adopted at watershed scale on the basis of experimental data from the WEBs project. A watershed model AnnAGNPS was applied, calibrated and validated on the watershed. Simulation results indicate that CTD can significantly improve surface water quality by reducing nitrogen losses from agricultural areas. This research creatively uses the AnnAGNPS model to simulate CTD, and it also provides a reliable link the model to observations from experimental CTD fields. So far, there is no related research found from the literature
Evaluation of the Impact of Controlled Tile Drainage on Surface Water Quality in the South Nation River Watershed
No full textIn Ontario, many agriculture-dominated watersheds like The South Nation River watershed are experiencing ecosystem deterioration mainly resulting from agricultural activities. A promising best management practice, controlled tile drainage (CTD), maintains water and nutrients through controllable facilities and releases them in an intermittent manner, when available storage in the drains is exceeded. This thesis is to evaluate how much water quality improvement can be expected if CTD adopted at watershed scale on the basis of experimental data from the WEBs project. A watershed model AnnAGNPS was applied, calibrated and validated on the watershed. Simulation results indicate that CTD can significantly improve surface water quality by reducing nitrogen losses from agricultural areas. This research creatively uses the AnnAGNPS model to simulate CTD, and it also provides a reliable link the model to observations from experimental CTD fields. So far, there is no related research found from the literature
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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