Open research Europe最新文献

Background: Every few years, juvenile Kemp's ridley turtles ( Lepidochelys kempii) are stranded on the Dutch coasts. The main population distribution of this critically endangered species primarily inhabits the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of the United States. This study focuses on five reports from the Netherlands between 2007 and 2022, where juvenile turtles were reported to strand alive during the winter, albeit in a hypothermic state. At ambient ocean temperatures between 10°C and 13°C, Kemp's ridley turtles begin to show an inability to actively swim and remain afloat on the ocean's surface, a condition termed 'cold stunning'. Understanding their transport in cold-stunned state can help improve the rehabilitation process of stranded turtles.

Methods: Cold-stunned turtles are back-tracked as passive, virtual particles from their stranding location using Lagrangian flow modelling. This study investigates when and where these juvenile turtles cross the threshold temperatures between 10° C and 14° C before stranding by tracking the temperature along the trajectories.

Results: As expected, the simulations show the transport of the cold-stunned turtles via the English Channel. More surprisingly, the analysis suggests they likely experience cold-stunning in the southern North Sea region and encounter temperatures below 10°C for only a few days to up to three weeks, and below 12°C for up to a month before stranding.

Conclusions: The estimate of cold-stunned drift duration of the turtles provides additional knowledge about their health status at the time of stranding. Adherence to rehabilitation protocols for Kemp's ridley and post-release monitoring are recommended to improve their long-term survival.

People with injuries to the peripheral nervous system suffer from paralysis of the facial muscles, fingers and hands or toes and feet, often for the rest of their lives, due to its poor functional regeneration. Therefore, to improve patients' quality of life, there is an urgent need for conduits that effectively support the healing of large defects in nerve pathways through specific guidance of nerve cells. This paper describes two specific methods for achieving directed growth of Schwann cells, a type of glial cells that can support the regeneration of the nerve pathway by guiding the neuronal axons in the direction of their alignment. One method uses aligned polyamide-6 (PA-6) nanofibers produced via electrospinning on a very fast rotating structured collector, which enables easy nanofiber detachment, without additional effort. The other method implies the exposure of a poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) foil to a KrF* laser beam, that renders a nanorippled surface topography. Schwann cell growth on these substrates was inspected after one week of cultivation by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). For both methods we show that Schwann cells grow in a certain direction, predetermined by nanofiber and nanoripple orientation. In contrast, cells cultivated on randomly oriented nanofibers or unstructured surfaces, show an omnidirectional growth behavior. These two methods can be used to produce nerve conduits for the treatment of injuries to the peripheral nervous system.

Background: Earth Observation (EO) datasets have become vital for decision support applications, particularly from open satellite portals that provide extensive historical datasets. These datasets can be integrated with in-situ data to power artificial intelligence mechanisms for accurate forecasting and trend analysis. However, researchers and data scientists face challenges in finding appropriate EO datasets due to inconsistent metadata structures and varied keyword descriptions. This misalignment hinders the discoverability and usability of EO data.

Methods: To address this challenge, the EIFFEL ontology (EIFF-O) is proposed. EIFF-O introduces taxonomies and ontologies to provide (i) global classification of EO data and (ii) linkage between different datasets through common concepts. The taxonomies specified by the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) have been formalized and implemented in EIFF-O. Additionally, EIFF-O incorporates:1.An Essential Climate Variable (ECV) ontology, defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), is embedded and tailored for Climate Change (CC) applications.2.The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) ontology is included to facilitate linking datasets to specific targets.3.The ontology extends schema.org vocabularies and promotes the use of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) formats for semantic web integration.

Results: EIFF-O provides a unified framework that enhances the discoverability, usability, and application of EO datasets. The implementation of EIFF-O allows data providers and users to bridge the gap between varied metadata descriptions and structured classification, thereby facilitating better linkage and integration of EO datasets.

Conclusions: The EIFFEL ontology represents a significant advancement in the organization and application of EO datasets. By embedding ECV and SDG ontologies and leveraging semantic web technologies, EIFF-O not only streamlines the data discovery process but also supports diverse applications, particularly in Climate Change monitoring and Sustainable Development Goals achievement. The open-source nature of the ontology and its associated tools promotes rapid adoption among developers.

Background: Energy communities and local electricity markets (e.g., as peer-to-peer trading) are on the rise due to increasingly decentralized electricity generation and favorable adjustment of the legal framework in many European countries.

Methods: This work applies a bi-level optimization model for dynamic participation in peer-to-peer electricity trading to determine the optimal parameters of new participants who want to join an energy community, based on the preferences of the members of the original community (e.g., environmental, economic, or mixed preference). The upper-level problem chooses optimal parameters by minimizing an objective function that includes the prosumers' cost-saving and emission-saving preferences, while the lower level problem maximizes community welfare by optimally allocating locally generated photovoltaic (PV) electricity between members according to their willingness-to-pay. The bi-level problem is solved by transforming the lower level problem by its corresponding Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions.

Results: The results demonstrate that environment-oriented prosumers opt for a new prosumer with high PV capacities installed and low electricity demand, whereas profit-oriented prosumers prefer a new member with high demand but no PV system capacity, presenting a new source of income. Sensitivity analyses indicate that new prosumers' willingness-to-pay has an important influence when the community must decide between two new members.

Conclusions: The added value of this work is that the proposed method can be seen as a basis for a selection process between a large number of potential new community members. Most important future work will include optimization of energy communities over the horizon several years.

The COST EU-PoTaRCh Action establishes a network focused on the past, present, and future significance, production, and use of major forest by-products in Europe and beyond. The Action centers around forest by-products-primarily potash, tar, resin, and charcoal (PoTaRCh), along with plant extracts-which have been produced and utilized for over 100,000 years due to their unique chemical, biological, and therapeutic properties. The primary goal of the Action is to demonstrate the importance of these products for the socio-economic development of European countries and beyond, as well as their impact on biodiversity and the natural environment. The Action's objectives are organized into five Working Groups (WGs), each aligned with specific areas of interest: heritage, chemical characterization, archaeology, environmental history, and future perspectives of PoTaRCh materials. A key aspect of the Action is its support for stakeholders outside the scientific community who possess knowledge of PoTaRCh products through their use in industries such as production, education, and the promotion of forests' natural and cultural heritage. In doing so, the Action brings together stakeholders with diverse activity profiles, including museums, state forests, the forestry industry, associations dedicated to preserving traditions, and the tourism sector. The EU-PoTaRCh Action adheres to the three key principles of COST's inclusiveness policy: participation of inclusiveness target countries, gender balance, and the involvement of young researchers, including in leadership positions.

Background: Plastic contamination is one of the concerns of our age. With more than 150 million tons of plastic floating in the oceans, and a further 8 million tons arriving to the water each year, in recent times the scientific community has been studying the effects these plastics have on sea life both in the field and with experimental approaches. Laboratory based studies have been using both natural sea water and artificial sea water for testing various aspects of plastic contamination, including the study of chemicals leached from the plastic particles to the water. We set out to test this equivalence, looking at the leaching of heavy metals form plastic particles.

Methods: We obtained leachates of polyvinyl chloride plastic pre-production nurdles both in natural and artificial sea water and determined the elements in excess from untreated water by Inductively coupled plasma - optical emission spectrometry. We then used these different leachates to assess developmental success in the tunicate Ciona intestinalis by treating fertilised eggs through their development to hatched larvae.

Results: Here we report that chemical analysis of polyvinyl chloride plastic pre-production pellet leachates shows a different composition in natural and artificial sea water. We find that the zinc leaching from the plastic particles is up to five times higher in natural seawater than in artificial seawater, and this can have an effect in the toxicological studies derived. Indeed, we observe different effects in the development of C. intestinalis when using leachates in natural or artificial sea water. We also observe that not all artificial sea waters are suitable for studying the development of the tunicate C. intestinalis.

Conclusions: Our results show that, at least in this case, both types of water are not equivalent to produce plastic leachaetes and suggest that precaution should be taken when conclusions are derived from results obtained in artificial sea water.

European railway borders are facing a particular exposure to security threats and need a delicate balance between securitization and free movement, especially amid globalisation, the current geopolitical landscape and increased migrant flows. For example, the war in Ukraine illustrated the challenges experienced at the Eastern EU borders by the refugee migration surge in early 2022. This exploratory focuses on the European border security control process from the rail border perspective. It encompasses a descriptive synthesis of the lessons learned from the UIC Refugee Task Force as well as insights from the ongoing EU-funded Horizon Europe project ODYSSEUS (Unobtrusive Technologies for Secure and Seamless Border Crossing for Travel Facilitation). Project ODYSSEUS aims to support the security and integrity of the European space, reduce illegal movements of people and goods across EU borders, facilitate travelling for citizens all while protecting fundamental rights of travellers. The project will test a combination of multi-behavioural and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant biometric user identity verification tools, allowing, when possible, citizens to cross EU border without any interruption or queue. Further, novel luggage and baggage checks will allow citizens' vehicles and cargos to be remotely checked at land borders to speed up the border check processes in a secure and reliable manner. The project will run three pilot tests at road, rail and water borders. In this paper, we analyse the implementation of project's technologies in the rail border crossing pilot test and discuss the implications for the actors involved in the process of railway border crossing (e.g., border authorities, railway operators and railway travellers).

Background: Upgrading the level of smartness in buildings can significantly contribute to improve our quality and sustainability of living, through increased energy efficiency, optimised resource management, and improved air quality and comfort. However, the fragmented nature of the sector makes it challenging to identify what is technically, socially and economically achieved today in Europe in terms of building smartness, and what should be developed and financially supported tomorrow to accelerate the roll-out of smart and energy efficient buildings.

Methods: This paper introduces the collaborative process developed to involve a large community of experts in detecting and formalising research and innovation gaps related to smart buildings. This process is composed of four successive steps: 1) a communication phase to invite volunteer experts to join the proposed task forces; 2) The organisation and facilitation of online brainstorming workshops to identify research & innovation (R&I) gaps; 3) the collective drafting of a white paper synthesising the brainstorming outcomes; and 4) an open consultation to collect additional external feedback before finalising the white paper.

Results: The collaborative process developed was tested over 18 months and implemented on 12 different topics relying on 27 brainstorming workshops. Building on the collective knowledge of 135 participants, it enabled identification a significant series of R&I gaps related to smart buildings.

Conclusions: The collective sessions as well as the open consultation phases showed overall some clear convergence on the gaps identified. It can therefore be concluded the outcome of the collaborative process reached a consensus among the targeted innovation community. The feedback collected on the process, shows that the frequency, duration and attendance of the brainstorming workshops proposed were very relevant, while the selection of online participatory tools could still be improved. This process could be replicated in other frameworks where research and innovation gaps are sought for.

Agroecology largely focusses on terrestrial agroecosystems, but it can also be applied to fish farming. Indeed, ponds are typically used for fish production in Europe, but are also important reservoirs of biodiversity. Numerous studies demonstrate that both fish production and biodiversity are strongly determined by human management. One key practice in extensive fish farming, although more rare in Europe, is to dry out ponds. They are left dry for a complete year after several years of fish production. However, the extent to which this practice affects the functioning of the ecosystem, its biodiversity and fish production remain unclear. We investigated data from 85 fish ponds in the Dombes region, France, sampled between 2007 and 2014. We related variation in key abiotic characteristics to the time since last dry out. The dataset included organic matter content in pond sediments and concentrations of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus in the water column, and biotic components such as macrophytes cover and richness, phytoplankton concentration and richness, macroinvertebrates density, and fish yield. Our results show that drying out facilitates the mineralization of organic matter in sediments and results in higher concentrations of inorganic nitrogen in the water column. Macrophytes cover is highest during the first year after drying out, and gradually declines after at the expense of increasing phytoplankton concentration. The diversity of both is highest in the first year after drying out and declines rapidly, especially for macrophytes. Fish yield is at its maximum in the second year. Drying out fish ponds appears to be an important agroecological practice in extensive fish farming with an application every three to four years. By nutrient recycling, this practice has a positive impact on the balance between primary producers and indirectly on the whole food web during two years. It optimizes fish production and allows biodiversity conservation.

Citizen science projects optimise the democratisation of the production of scientific knowledge. In these initiatives, research processes do not rely solely on scientists' but on citizens' engagement likewise with benefits on both sides. As previous work shows, the democratisation perspective of citizen science projects might be viewed critically as some groups of citizens tend to be overrepresented in these initiatives while other are left out. This paper explores the claim of democratisation and the citizens' benefits based on four citizen science projects in the fields of astrophysics and particle physics on the citizen science platform Zooniverse. Besides a general engagement strategy, the citizen science projects addressed two groups specifically, the elderly and people with visual impairments. The claim for democratisation is reflected in the analysis of citizens' demographic variables as an indicator for accessibility of the research projects. We used a pre-post design with questionnaires on science attitudes, motivations, skills, self-efficacy, and knowledge to assess what citizen scientists gained from participating in the project. The demographic analysis of the data reveals that participants were quite heterogeneous and that people who feel that they belong to a group that is discriminated against are particularly motivated to participate in citizen science projects. In terms of benefits, the results indicate knowledge and scientific skills gains, but no changes on other evaluative dimensions. Their attitude towards science was, in general, already rather positive when joining the projects, thus not leaving much room for change. These results confirm the importance of and call for a diversified citizen science engagement strategy and show that even in citizen science projects where the citizens' task is limited to classifying data lead to scientific knowledge and skills gains.