This century is the “century of the cities”, where rapid urbanization and greater global connection present unprecedented urban challenges and concentrates risk in urban areas making them increasingly vulnerable (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). The need arises for urban planning must be asked to fully incorporate an understanding of the sub-surface into the deliberation/decision-making process (Howard, 1997). The Urban Geo Footprint (UGF) is classification tool being developed by a sub-group of the Urban Geology Expert Group of EuroGeoSurvey (UGEG) and it is based on a multidisciplinary effort in which different skills and expertise come into play. The main objective of this project is to set up a classification method to identify the main geological and anthropic features that influence city's resilience related to its geological setting. A tool is being developed in order to clustering cities according to their geological and climatic features and to understand why target urban contexts have different issues (e.g. climate change, floods), and thus to assess the cities’ geo-resilience. The UGF will help cities to understand what ‘economic’ and ‘social well-being’ benefits (i.e. in terms of ‘geological resilience’) could derive from urban planning associated with subsoil knowledge. The salient features required for this tool are: - It must be user-friendly and easy to use by scientists and non-scientists - It must be available at European level (and maybe, once is tested in Europe, it could be extended worldwide). The following main 5 drivers are defined in the tool: Geology, Climate, Geohazards, Geomorphology, Subsoil anthropic pressure. The assessment method of UGF tool will consist in testing it with data of different EU pilot-cities. The work in progress is developing a complex worksheet (which can be defined as the «UGF framework») with several quantitative parameters related to the 5 drivers mentioned above. All these parameters are going to be indexed (using scores) and weighted based on two levels of investigation: “basic” and “advanced”. The final result for each city is a general UGF score that will be the combination of all the drivers specific scores. Each tested city will be classified also by the weight of each driver in the calculation. Other objectives of the project are: - Contributing to develop a method for the comparison of data from different cities and update all existing database. - Improving the European collaboration and, therefore, the exchange of ideas on good practices to increase cities’ resilience. - Improving citizens' awareness of both the resources and the threats associated with geology.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021
The FaCE-It project aims to examine the effects of sediment fining and hardening on benthic ecosystem functioning caused by anthropogenic impacts. Human activities, e.g. the construction of offshore windfarms, add artificial hard substrate to naturally soft sediments, altering the existing seabed habitats. The input of hard substrates leads to partial or entire replacement of the native benthic communities by fouling communities. The organisms comprising a fouling community act as active “biofilters” consuming organic compounds from the water column and releasing inorganic and organic materials, in the forms of faeces and pseudofaeces, to the surrounding environment – a procedure known as biodeposition. It is known that some fouling organisms, such as the amphipod Jassa herdmani and the hydroid Tubularia indivisa, build tube-like structures that absorb suspended particulate matter (SPM). These activities result in the alteration of the biogeochemical processes and could also lead to the SPM plumes that have been reported to occur in the Belgian offshore windfarms. The aim of the present study is to identify the alterations caused by fouling communities to the water characteristics and analyze the water gradient – flow of the water compounds according to the currents - around an offshore windfarm (C-Power) in the Belgian Part of the North Sea. The initial hypothesis is that organic and inorganic materials will flow according to the currents and will appear in different concentrations in front, within and behind the entire windfarm structure. For this purpose, a sampling campaign was organized in order to collect water samples from different areas of the windfarm and analyze them for a variety of water characteristics, such as chlorophyll a, suspended particulate matter, particulate organic carbon and nitrogen and dissolved organic carbon. The results of this study will present the concentrations of the water gradient occurring in the offshore windfarms due to the presence of the fouling community.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2017
