Search publications of the members of the Royal Belgian institute of natural Sciences
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Archeo-antropologisch assessment van de menselijke resten van de opgraving “Oudenaarde - Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe Hospitaal (2020-2021)
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The closed circuit rebreather (CCR): is it the safest device for deep scientific diving ?
- The closed circuit rebreather (CCR) is not a new diving technology. From the late 1990s CCR units were commercially available in Europe, and increasingly more divers, and among them scientific divers, have been trained to use them. Even if many benefits exist for using CCR for all diving depth ranges, it is in the deep diving zone ranging from 50 m to 100 m of sea water where the main advantages to using this equipment exist. Using rebreathers does carry additional risks, and these must be mitigated to ensure safe usage. A standard for CCR scientific diving has existed for many years in the USA, and the levels of expertise within the European scientific diving community are now sufficient for a European standard to be established. National legislation for occupational scientific diving in many cases excludes CCR diving, which can limit its use for scientific purposes. This paper suggests that, where possible, legislations should be allowed to evolve in order to include this type of equipment where and when its use has direct advantages for both the safety and the efficiency of scientific diving. This paper provides a brief description of the fundamentals of closed circuit rebreather diving and outlines the benefits that its use offers diving scientists. Special attention is given to safety issues with the assertion that the CCR concept is, if strictly applied, the safest available technique today for autonomous deep scientific diving purposes.
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Quantification and Characterisation of Belgian Offshore wind farm operational sound emission at low wind speeds
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Integrative species delimitation and phylogeny of the branchiate worm Branchiodrilus (Clitellata, Naididae)
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DNA barcoding and diversity of groundwater oligochaetes in the Ouémé basin, Benin, West Africa
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D5.1 - MANIFESTS DSS - Implementation reports
- This technical devliverable explains the implementation details of the decision support tools developped during the MANIFESTS project "MANaging risks and Impacts From Evaporating and gaseous Substances To population Safety". These tools includes: - The MANIFESTS Common Operational Picture and its viewer (COP tool) - The MANIFESTS models web application
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D2.1 - Literature review on past accident
- Maritime transport of Hazardous and Noxious Substances (HNS) has increased for 20 years, involving the risk of major pollution accidents with potentially more hazardous than oil. Chemicals may involve long-term environmental effects and the risks for public safety can be more severe for chemical releases (European Maritime Safety Agency [EMSA], 2007). Approximately 2,000 chemicals are transported by sea and only a few hundred chemicals are transported in bulk, but it represents the main volume of the chemical trade (Purnell, 2009). Alongside the expansion of chemicals transported at sea, incidents involving chemical tankers increased accordingly. Still, information on past and more recent incidents is not easily available. Furthermore, in the case of marine accident involving HNS, spill response is difficult due to the chemicals spilled, particularly when gas or volatile substances are released. The vapour cloud created can be toxic, flammable or explosive and there is a necessity to protect the crew, the population nearby as well as the environment and the stakeholders involved in marine pollution response. As an example, Figure 1 shows a picture of the explosion which occurred in September 2019 in the Ulsan harbour, South Korea. This explosion is the consequence of a styrene monomer leak on the chemical tanker Stolt Groenland that led to a massive explosion with fireball and mushroom cloud. The present report is a literature review on past accidents that have induced the formation of a toxic, flammable or explosive gas cloud. The information gathered will allow better identification of 1) the categories of chemicals most involved; 2) the main risks generated by the gas cloud dispersion in the air and 3) the consequences of a chemical slick on fire at the water surface as well as the hazard due to a vapour cloud explosion. This work is part of WP2: Enhancing knowledge and data on gases and evaporators of the MANIFESTS program (Managing risks and impacts from evaporating and gaseous substances to population safety) that studies risks associated to accidental chemical spills in the marine environment. The aim of this WP is to contribute to a better prediction of the consequences of vapour clouds due to marine accidents. This would facilitate the intervention of marine pollution organisms and would also help to protect population nearby, as we would know precisely where the dangerous area is.
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D4.1 Explosive risk and fire module
- Responding to maritime accidents can be extremely challenging when involving HNS that behave as evaporators. Due to their potential to form toxic or combustible clouds, evidence-based decisions are needed to protect the crew, responders, the coastal population and the environment. However, when an emergency is declared, key information is not always available for all the needs of responders. A case in point is the lack of knowledge and data to assess the risks that responders or rescue teams could take when intervening, or those that could impact coastal communities when allowing a shipping casualty to dock at a place of refuge. The MANIFESTS project aims to address these uncertainties and improve response and training capacities through the development of an operational decision-support system (DSS) for volatile HNS spills. Besides management and communication, the project includes four other work packages: WP2 on collecting new data on evaporators, WP3 on table top exercises and field training, WP4 on improving modelling tools and WP5 on the development of the DSS. Key expected outcomes include: · Operational guidance; · Desktop and field exercises; · In situ training; · Experimental data on gas cloud fate; · A brand-new fire and explosion modelling module; · Improved HNS database with new experimental data on evaporation/dissolution kinetics. This report presents the results obtained in the framework of the task 4.1 aiming at developing tools that would help responders to asses risks in case of explosion and of fire of volatile HNS. The fire module computes the energy flux as a function of the distance to the fire source. It is useful to assess the safety distance at which e.g. a boat can approach a fire while keeping the crew safe. The energy flux can cause burning to people, and start new fire. The burning rate is also estimated. The explosion module computes the overpressure of the shockwave caused by the combustion of a chemical. This overpressure can be very dangerous for people and structure, causing wounds from minor injury to death and destruction of building. The model could be used to predict what could happen in case of the explosion of a stored explosive for instance. The two models are simplifications of the reality and do not take everything into account. Their results can be useful to have a rough idea of what could happen in open sea but should always be interpreted keeping the model hypotheses and limitations in mind. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, the source code of both modules is not made available to public
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Environmental impacts of offshore wind farms in the Belgian part of the North Sea: A continued move towards integration and quantification
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Project RAVen: Validating radar technologies to study near- and offshore bird migration
- The Belgian part of the North Sea is part of a very important seabird migration route through the Southern North Sea, which makes it an ideal area to study bird migration. Because of its shape, this part of the North Sea acts as a migration bottleneck, concentrating birds during migration. This study aims at cross-validating bird detection by meteorological and bird radars, mainly focusing on offshore and coastal migration, and suggesting refinements to the bird detection algorithms of both weather and dedicated bird radars. The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI) uses three C-band weather radars for meteorological observations, one of which is located in Jabbeke, at only a few kilometers from the Belgian coast. The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) has installed a Merlin bird radar (DeTect Inc.) on an offshore platform at 25km from the coast, to study the impact of offshore wind farms. The Merlin radar system consists of two identical radar antennas, one scanning in the horizontal pane and one in the vertical. They are operating at a range of 7.4km and 1.85km respectively, thus providing high resolution data. The measurements of the bird radar and the weather radar in Jabbeke are overlapping, which offers a unique situation to cross-validate the data of both types of radar and to extrapolate the high resolution data of the bird radar to the wider spatial scale of the weather radar. RBINS and RMI are joining forces in a two year project called RAVen (RAdar registrations of bird migration Validation through an interdisciplinary approach). It runs until mid-September 2018 and is funded by the Belgian Science Policy. First results (from spring 2016) already show a good correlation between the number of birds detected by both radars.
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Comparing the results of four widely used automated bat identification software programs in the North Sea region
- Recently a few papers were published addressing the prudency needed when using automated identification software programs to analyse recordings of bat echolocation sounds. We want to contribute to that discussion by analysing a reference dataset of bat recordings with four widely used and commercially available software programs (BatIdent, BatExplorer, Kaleidoscope and Sonochiro). The reference data were all recorded in Western-Europe with a batcorder. For most of the recordings there was a visual confirmation of the recorded species. In a few other cases certainty was obtained because the specimens were captured and released or because the recordings were made in certain areas which were outside of the range of other species (e.g. at high altitude to separate Eptesicus serotinus and Eptesicus nilssonii). After running the different programs on the reference data, we compared the outputted results. Overall, identification of the recordings to species level in this test was best with Batident (81% correct identifications), followed by Kaleidoscope (71%), Sonochiro (63%) and BatExplorer (53%). We can conclude that each of the tested programs has its own strengths and weaknesses, but none of them should be used unsupervised. Outputted results need to be checked by a trained expert. In this way, our test affirms the conclusions of previous tests in Northern Europe and the USA.
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Archaeobotanical Studies from Hierakonpolis: Evidence for Food Processing During the Predynastic Period in Egypt
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Late Pleistocene coprolites from Qurta (Egypt) and the potential of interdisciplinary research involving micromorphology, plant macrofossil and biomarker analyses
- As part of a rock art dating project at Qurta (Upper Egypt), samples were collected from an organic deposit and from an accumulation of individual faecal pellets. Radiocarbon dating of these relatively well-preserved materials indicates an unexpectedly old age of ca. 45,000 BP or older. In order to identify the biogenic nature of these deposits and to reconstruct the palaeo-environment at the time of their formation, micromorphological, palaeobotanical, and biomarker analyses were carried out. All data indicate that the organic deposit and the pellets were produced by different species. The presence of a novel biomarker, which only occurs in animal urine (hippuric acid), contributed to the conclusion that the organic deposit most likely represents the remains of a rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) latrine, whereas the pellets stem from small bovids. Plant macroremains from the pellets indicate that the animals browsed in the more vegetated areas, presumably near the Nile, although the general environment was probably mainly arid and open. Combined with the dates, this suggests that the pellets date to MIS 3 or 4. Our results demonstrate the great potential of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Quaternary coprolite deposits, allowing for more adequate and more complete interpretation.
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Iron Age Cultural Interactions, Plant Subsistence and Land Use in Southeastern Europe Inferred from Archaeobotanical Evidence of Greece and Bulgaria
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Treeline and timberline dynamics on the northern and southern slopes of the Retezat Mountains (Romania) during the late glacial and the Holocene
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Pollen-derived biomes in the Eastern Mediterranean-Black Sea-Caspian-Corridor
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Foraging and Food production strategies during the Early Neolithic in the Balkans-Carpatian Area. The site Bukova Pusta in Romanian Banat
- This volume brings together leading specialists in archaeobotany, economic zooarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology to discuss practices of food production and consumption in their social dimensions from the Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age ...
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Plant food from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age hilltop site Kush Kaya, Eastern Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria: Insights on the cooking practices
- This volume brings together leading specialists in archaeobotany, economic zooarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology to discuss practices of food production and consumption in their social dimensions from the Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age ...
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Food supply and disposal of food remains at Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Ada Tepe: Bioarchaeological aspects of food production, processing and consumption
- This volume brings together leading specialists in archaeobotany, economic zooarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology to discuss practices of food production and consumption in their social dimensions from the Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age ...
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Neolithic woodland management and land-use in south-eastern Europe: The anthracological evidence from Northern Greece and Bulgaria
- Wood charcoal (anthracological) remains accumulated in archaeological deposits provide a valuable tool for reconstruction of past local vegetation and its use. They can offer evidence complementary to pollen analysis or be the main source on past vegetation change in areas where no pollen preservation is available. The current study assembles the anthracological evidence from 18 Neolithic sites situated in the zone spanning between the Lower Danube plain and the Aegean coast. This evidence is presented within the broader archaeological and paleoecological context of the region and in cal. years BC and/or BP. The data is interpreted in terms of land-use related to woodland management and exploitation of woodland resources during three chronological phases which could be distinguished within the Neolithic of south-eastern Europe: a) 6500-5800 cal. BC, b) 5800-5500 cal. BC, and c) 5500-4900 cal BC). The main vegetation type targeted by the Neolithic population were the thermophilous, mixed deciduous oak communities, which contained a rich and diverse undergrowth of light-demanding and fruit/nut bearing trees, shrubs and herbs. Those plant communities were the major source of fuel wood, forest pasture, fodder, gathered fruits, etc. The analyses indicate stability and sustainability of the firewood procurement and woodland management practices for the whole considered period and further suggest that the Neolithic land-use strategies favoured the rich and often fruit-bearing undergrowth of the oak forests and woodland.
