The use of information and interactive processes in growth management

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia do Ambiente, especialidade em Sistemas Sociais

Environmental data management in the Sado Estuary

Estuaries are perhaps the most threatened environments in the coastal fringe; the coincidence of high natural value and attractiveness for human use has led to conflicts between conservation and development. These conflicts occur in the Sado Estuary since its location is near the industrialised zone of Peninsula of Setúbal and at the same time, a great part of the Estuary is classified as a Natural Reserve due to its high biodiversity. These facts led us to the need of implementing a model of environmental management and quality assessment, based on methodologies that enable the assessment of the Sado Estuary quality and evaluation of the human pressures in the estuary. These methodologies are based on indicators that can better depict the state of the environment and not necessarily all that could be measured or analysed. Sediments have always been considered as an important temporary source of some compounds or a sink for other type of materials or an interface where a great diversity of biogeochemical transformations occur. For all this they are of great importance in the formulation of coastal management system. Many authors have been using sediments to monitor aquatic contamination, showing great advantages when compared to the sampling of the traditional water column. The main objective of this thesis was to develop an estuary environmental management framework applied to Sado Estuary using the DPSIR Model (EMMSado), including data collection, data processing and data analysis. The support infrastructure of EMMSado were a set of spatially contiguous and homogeneous regions of sediment structure (management units). The environmental quality of the estuary was assessed through the sediment quality assessment and integrated in a preliminary stage with the human pressure for development. Besides the earlier explained advantages, studying the quality of the estuary mainly based on the indicators and indexes of the sediment compartment also turns this methodology easier, faster and human and financial resource saving. These are essential factors to an efficient environmental management of coastal areas. Data management, visualization, processing and analysis was obtained through the combined use of indicators and indices, sampling optimization techniques, Geographical Information Systems, remote sensing, statistics for spatial data, Global Positioning Systems and best expert judgments. As a global conclusion, from the nineteen management units delineated and analyzed three showed no ecological risk (18.5 % of the study area). The areas of more concern (5.6 % of the study area) are located in the North Channel and are under strong human pressure mainly due to industrial activities. These areas have also low hydrodynamics and are, thus associated with high levels of deposition. In particular the areas near Lisnave and Eurominas industries can also accumulate the contamination coming from Águas de Moura Channel, since particles coming from that channel can settle down in that area due to residual flow. In these areas the contaminants of concern, from those analyzed, are the heavy metals and metalloids (Cd, Cu, Zn and As exceeded the PEL guidelines) and the pesticides BHC isomers, heptachlor, isodrin, DDT and metabolits, endosulfan and endrin. In the remain management units (76 % of the study area) there is a moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects and in some of these areas no stress agents could be identified. This emphasizes the need for further research, since unmeasured chemicals may be causing or contributing to these adverse effects. Special attention must be taken to the units with moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects, located inside the natural reserve. Non-point source pollution coming from agriculture and aquaculture activities also seem to contribute with important pollution load into the estuary entering from Águas de Moura Channel. This pressure is expressed in a moderate impact potential for ecological risk existent in the areas near the entrance of this Channel. Pressures may also came from Alcácer Channel although they were not quantified in this study. The management framework presented here, including all the methodological tools may be applied and tested in other estuarine ecosystems, which will also allow a comparison between estuarine ecosystems in other parts of the globe.

Fisheries Safety Management

Fisheries is one of the most dangerous professions in the world. Fatal accidents and injuries in the fisheries are characterized as well as particular circumstances that may cause or aggravate the risk of accidents. Aspects of safety management of fishing vessels are covered in this paper: areas of concern when doing a risk assessment in fishing vessels, fundamental elements on a safety management system for the fisheries and the need for international and national level instruments as well as legal and compulsory measures

Management Structure and Work Team Processes; Responsibilities and Responsiveness

This paper explores the management structure of the team-based organization. First it provides a theoretical model of structures and processes of work teams. The structure determines the team’s responsibilities in terms of authority and expertise about specific regulation tasks. The responsiveness of teams to these responsibilities are the processes of teamwork, in terms of three dimensions, indicating to what extent teams indeed use the space provided to them. The research question that this paper addresses is to what extent the position of responsibilities in the team-based organization affect team responsiveness. This is done by two hypotheses. First, the effect of the so-called proximity of regulation tasks is tested. It is expected that the responsibility for tasks positioned higher in the organization (i.e. further from the team) generally has a negative effect on team responsiveness, whereas tasks positioned lower in the organization (i.e. closer to the team) will have a positive effect on the way in which teams respond. Second, the relationship between the number of tasks for which the team is responsible with team responsiveness is tested. Theory suggests that teams being responsible for a larger number of tasks perform better, i.e. show higher responsiveness. These hypotheses are tested by a study of 109 production teams in the automotive industry. The results show that, as the theory predicts, increasing numbers of responsibilities have positive effects on team responsiveness. However, the delegation of expertise to teams seems to be the most important predictor of responsiveness. Also, not all regulation tasks show to have effects on team responsiveness. Most tasks do not show to have any significant effect at all. A number of tasks affects team responsiveness positively, when their responsibility is positioned lower in the organization, but also a number of tasks affects team responsiveness positively when located higher in the organization, i.e. further from the teams in the production. The results indicate that more attention can be paid to the distribution of responsibilities, in particular expertise, to teams. Indeed delegating more expertise improve team responsiveness, however some tasks might be located better at higher organizational levels, indicating that there are limitations to what responsibilities teams can handle.

Concept of Customer Relationship Management as an example of innovation in banking sector

Banks that has introduced CRM system, had to make some difficult changes in their organization in order to become more customer oriented. Beside the pure CRM banks try to adopt other innovative tools related with the core CRM. Some of these solutions are constructed in such a way so that ensured could be also access to the information beside to bank’s organization.

Noise management at work

Every single day millions of European workers are exposed to noise at work. One in five of European’s workers have to raise his voice to be heard for at least half of the time that there are at work and 7% suffer from work-related hearing impairment. In Europe noise-induced hearing loss is the most common reported occupational disease. This paper deals with issues related with noise management at work, especially regarding the compliance with the new noise European Directive, (2003/10/EC).

Information technology service management: an experimental approach towards IT service prediction

Dissertation presented to obtain a Masters degree in Computer Science

Risk management of new product development process

Dissertation submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa for the achievement of Integrated Master´s degree in Industrial Management Engineering

Wetland Habitat Studies using various Classification Techniques on Multi-Spectral Landsat Imagery: Case study: Tram chim National Park, Dong Thap Vietnam

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Web GIS to support irrigation management: a prototype for SAGRA network, Alentejo Portugal

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Estimation of vegetation carbon stock in Portugal using land use/ land cover data

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

The contribution of multitemporal information from multispectral satellite images for automatic land cover classification at the national scale

Thesis submitted to the Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management – Geographic Information Systems

Integrated ecological-economic modelling and assessment aproach for coastal ecosystem management

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, New University of Lisbon, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Sciences

Enterprise information portals: potential for evaluating research for knowledge management and human capital assets using social network analysis

Paper presented at the ECKM 2010 – 11th European Conference on Knowledge Management, 2-3 September, 2010, Famalicão, Portugal. URL: http://www.academic-conferences.org/eckm/eckm2010/eckm10-home.htm