Analysis of the needs of the East Coast cluster regional natural resource management bodies in relation to planning for climate change adaptation

The Climate Change Adaptation for Natural Resource Management (NRM) in East Coast Australia Project aims to foster and support an effective “community of practice” for climate change adaptation within the East Coast Cluster NRM regions that will increase the capacity for adaptation to climate change through enhancements in knowledge and skills and through the establishment of long‐term collaborations. It is being delivered by six consortium research partners: * The University of Queensland (project lead) * Griffith University * University of the Sunshine Coast * CSIRO * New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage * Queensland Department of Science, IT, Innovation and the Arts (Queensland Herbarium). The project relates to the East Coast Cluster, comprising the six coastal NRM regions and regional bodies between Rockhampton and Sydney: * Fitzroy Basin Association (FBA) * Burnett‐Mary Regional Group (BMRG) * SEQ Catchments (SEQC) * Northern Rivers Catchment Management Authority (CMA) (NRCMA) * Hunter‐Central Rivers CMA (HCRCMA) * Hawkesbury Nepean CMA (HNCMA). The aims of this report are to summarise the needs of the regional bodies in relation to NRM planning for climate change adaptation, and provide a basis for developing the detailed work plan for the research consortium. Two primary methods were used to identify the needs of the regional bodies: (1) document analysis of the existing NRM/ Catchment Action Plans (CAPs) and applications by the regional bodies for funding under Stream 1 of the Regional NRM Planning for Climate Change Fund, and; (2) a needs analysis workshop, held in May 2013 involving representatives from the research consortium partners and the regional bodies. The East Coast Cluster includes five of the ten largest significant urban areas in Australia, world heritage listed natural environments, significant agriculture, mining and extensive grazing. The three NSW CMAs have recently completed strategic level CAPs, with implementation plans to be finalised in 2014/2015. SEQC and FBA are beginning a review of their existing NRM Plans, to be completed in 2014 and 2015 respectively; while BMRG is aiming to produce a NRM and Climate Variability Action Strategy. The regional bodies will receive funding from the Australian Government through the Regional NRM Planning for Climate Change Fund (NRM Fund) to improve regional planning for climate change and help guide the location of carbon and biodiversity activities, including wildlife corridors. The bulk of the funding will be available for activities in 2013/2014, with smaller amounts available in subsequent years. Most regional bodies aim to have a large proportion of the planning work complete by the end of 2014. In addition, NSW CMAs are undergoing major structural change and will be incorporated into semi‐autonomous statutory Local Land Services bodies from 2014. Boundaries will align with local government boundaries and there will be significant change in staff and structures. The regional bodies in the cluster have a varying degree of climate knowledge. All plans recognise climate change as a key driver of change, but there are few specific actions or targets addressing climate change. Regional bodies also have varying capacity to analyse large volumes of spatial or modelling data. Due to the complex nature of natural resource management, all regional bodies work with key stakeholders (e.g. local government, industry groups, and community groups) to deliver NRM outcomes. Regional bodies therefore require project outputs that can be used directly in stakeholder engagement activities, and are likely to require some form of capacity building associated with each of the outputs to maximise uptake. Some of the immediate needs of the regional bodies are a summary of information or tools that are able to be used immediately; and a summary of the key outputs and milestone dates for the project, to facilitate alignment of planning activities with research outputs. A project framework is useful to show the linkages between research elements and the relevance of the research to the adaptive management cycle for NRM planning in which the regional bodies are engaged. A draft framework is proposed to stimulate and promote discussion on research elements and linkages; this will be refined during and following the development of the detailed project work plan. The regional bodies strongly emphasised the need to incorporate a shift to a systems based resilience approach to NRM planning, and that approach is included in the framework. The regional bodies identified that information on climate projections would be most useful at regional and subregional scale, to feed into scenario planning and impact analysis. Outputs should be ‘engagement ready’ and there is a need for capacity building to enable regional bodies to understand and use the projections in stakeholder engagement. There was interest in understanding the impacts of climate change projections on ecosystems (e.g. ecosystem shift), and the consequent impacts on the production of ecosystem services. It was emphasised that any modelling should be able to be used by the regional bodies with their stakeholders to allow for community input (i.e. no black box models). The online regrowth benefits tool was of great interest to the regional bodies, as spatial mapping of carbon farming opportunities would be relevant to their funding requirements. The NSW CMAs identified an interest in development of the tool for NSW vegetation types. Needs relating to socio‐economic information included understanding the socio‐economic determinants of carbon farming uptake and managing community expectations. A need was also identified to understand the vulnerability of industry groups as well as community to climate change impacts, and in particular understanding how changes in the flow of ecosystem services would interact with the vulnerability of these groups to impact on the linked ecologicalsocio‐economic system. Responses to disasters (particularly flooding and storm surge) and recovery responses were also identified as being of interest. An ecosystem services framework was highlighted as a useful approach to synthesising biophysical and socioeconomic information in the context of a systems based, resilience approach to NRM planning. A need was identified to develop processes to move towards such an approach to NRM planning from the current asset management approach. Examples of best practice in incorporating climate science into planning, using scenarios for stakeholder engagement in planning and processes for institutionalising learning were also identified as cross‐cutting needs. The over‐arching theme identified was the need for capacity building for the NRM bodies to best use the information available at any point in time. To this end a planners working group has been established to support the building of a network of informed and articulate NRM agents with knowledge of current climate science and capacity to use current tools to engage stakeholders in NRM planning for climate change adaptation. The planners working group would form the core group of the community of practice, with the broader group of stakeholders participating when activities aligned with their interests. In this way, it is anticipated that the Project will contribute to building capacity within the wider community to effectively plan for climate change adaptation.

The impact of orbital errors on the estimation of satellite clock errors and PPP

Precise satellite orbit and clocks are essential for providing high accuracy real-time PPP (Precise Point Positioning) service. However, by treating the predicted orbits as fixed, the orbital errors may be partially assimilated by the estimated satellite clock and hence impact the positioning solutions. This paper presents the impact analysis of errors in radial and tangential orbital components on the estimation of satellite clocks and PPP through theoretical study and experimental evaluation. The relationship between the compensation of the orbital errors by the satellite clocks and the satellite-station geometry is discussed in details. Based on the satellite clocks estimated with regional station networks of different sizes (∼100, ∼300, ∼500 and ∼700 km in radius), results indicated that the orbital errors compensated by the satellite clock estimates reduce as the size of the network increases. An interesting regional PPP mode based on the broadcast ephemeris and the corresponding estimated satellite clocks is proposed and evaluated through the numerical study. The impact of orbital errors in the broadcast ephemeris has shown to be negligible for PPP users in a regional network of a radius of ∼300 km, with positioning RMS of about 1.4, 1.4 and 3.7 cm for east, north and up component in the post-mission kinematic mode, comparable with 1.3, 1.3 and 3.6 cm using the precise orbits and the corresponding estimated clocks. Compared with the DGPS and RTK positioning, only the estimated satellite clocks are needed to be disseminated to PPP users for this approach. It can significantly alleviate the communication burdens and therefore can be beneficial to the real time applications.

Evaluation of the economic impact of tourism expenditures in Portugal

Dissertação de Mestrado, Economia do Turismo e Desenvolvimento Regional, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015

Squid impact analyser: uma ferramenta para análise de impacto de mudança em linhas de produto de software

Software Products Lines (SPL) is a software engineering approach to developing software system families that share common features and differ in other features according to the requested software systems. The adoption of the SPL approach can promote several benefits such as cost reduction, product quality, productivity, and time to market. On the other hand, the SPL approach brings new challenges to the software evolution that must be considered. Recent research work has explored and proposed automated approaches based on code analysis and traceability techniques for change impact analysis in the context of SPL development. There are existing limitations concerning these approaches such as the customization of the analysis functionalities to address different strategies for change impact analysis, and the change impact analysis of fine-grained variability. This dissertation proposes a change impact analysis tool for SPL development, called Squid Impact Analyzer. The tool allows the implementation of change impact analysis based on information from variability modeling, mapping of variability to code assets, and existing dependency relationships between code assets. An assessment of the tool is conducted through an experiment that compare the change impact analysis results provided by the tool with real changes applied to several evolution releases from a SPL for media management in mobile devices

An Assessment Of The Economic Impact Of Climate Change On The Transportation Sector In Montserrat

.--I. Introduction.--II. Literature review regarding climate change impacts on international transportation.--III. Economy of the Caribbean subregion and Monserrat.--IV. The international transportaion system in the Caribbean and in Monserrat.--V. Vulnerabilities of international transport system in Monserrat to climate change.--VI. Modelling.-- VII. Economic impact analysis of climate chage on the international transport.-- VIII. Approaches to mitigation and adaptation in the air and sea transportation sectors.-- IX. Conclusions

Change-Impact driven Agile Architecting.

Software architecture is a key factor to scale up Agile Software Development ASD in large softwareintensive systems. Currently, software architectures are more often approached through mechanisms that enable to incrementally design and evolve software architectures aka. agile architecting. Agile architecting should be a light-weight decision-making process, which could be achieved by providing knowledge to assist agile architects in reasoning about changes. This paper presents the novel solution of using change-impact knowledge as the main driver for agile architecting. The solution consists of a Change Impact Analysis technique and a set of models to assist agile architects in the change -decision-making- process by retrieving the change-impact architectural knowledge resulting from adding or changing features iteration after iteration. To validate our approach, we have put our solution into practice by running a project of a metering management system in electric power networks in an i-smart software factory.

Evaluation, energy optimization, and spectrum analysis of an artificial noise technique to improve CWSN security

This paper presents the security evaluation, energy consumption optimization, and spectrum scarcity analysis of artificial noise techniques to increase physical-layer security in Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks (CWSNs). These techniques introduce noise into the spectrum in order to hide real information. Nevertheless, they directly affect two important parameters in Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks (CWSNs), energy consumption and spectrum utilization. Both are affected because the number of packets transmitted by the network and the active period of the nodes increase. Security evaluation demonstrates that these techniques are effective against eavesdropper attacks, but also optimization allows for the implementation of these approaches in low-resource networks such as Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks. In this work, the scenario is formally modeled and the optimization according to the simulation results and the impact analysis over the frequency spectrum are presented.

A computer program (VEHSIM) for vehicle fuel economy and performance simulation (automobiles and light trucks). Volume I: description and analysis. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Research and Development, Washington, D.C.

A computer program (HEVSIM) for heavy duty vehicle fuel economy and performance simulation. Volume I: description and analysis. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Research and Development, Washington, D.C.

Economic impact of highway snow and ice control. Final report.

Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C.

Economic impact of highway snow and ice control. ESIC - user's manual.

Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C.

Final wilderness environmental impact statement for the Grand Junction Resource Area /

"November 1989"--Cover.

Satisfaction of the automotive fleet fuel demand and its impact on the oil refining industry. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Research and Development, Washington, D.C.

Environmental assessment using remotely sensed data : application of remote sensing data to environmental impact studies for transmission line routes /

Mode of access: Internet.

Final environmental impact statement on the proposed Port Fourchon Development Plan Phase IV, Lafourche Parish, Louisiana /

Mode of access: Internet.