The development and growth of geospatial techniques offer many advantages and challenges to the study of biodiversity, especially in the present era of climate change.We are now at the beginning of the international decade for biodiversity and by the time we travel through the decade, there would be sea-changes in the measurement and monitoring approaches, database management options, and inter-linked studies on biodiversity. With the onset of geoinformatics techniques comprising remote sensing, global positioning system (GPS), integrative tools, such as GIS, is realized as a complimentary system to ground-based biodiversity studies. Recently, a nationwide biodiversity study at landscape level using geoinformatics modeling techniques for India has been completed. The study has assessed plant diversity using a three-tier approach, wherein six biodiversity attributes (i.e., spatial, phytosociological, social, physical, economical, and ecological) were linked together based on their relative importance to stratify biological richness of forest vegetation (non-agricultural) of India. It has enumerated 7,964 plant species from 20,000 nested quadrate sampling plots of 0.04 ha each, delineated and mapped 120 vegetation classes; and organized the geo-spatial database on bisindia web portal. Here, we have (i) proposed a method to incorporate the fauna component in-line up with the existing methodology and (ii) utilized the GPS-gathered positional information on the distribution of two species (i.e., Medicago sativa and Poa annua to simulate their distribution for the year 2020 (SRES A1-B scenario, IPCC) using Maxent model. The study conducted in a test site of western Himalayas estimated (i) 24% increase in the overall biologically rich areas on supplement of fauna data and (ii) distribution of both the species would tend to increase in favor of shorter cold season. The study highlights the importance of geoinformatics techniquebased biodiversity study for its amenability to incorporate any further change or modification, and utility of the geo-spatial biodiversity database for simulating various species
Treatment of micropollutants even after tertiary treatment and developing cost-effective, sustainable and energy-efficient technology for the same still remains an active area of research. The present study reports the feasibility and efficacy of hydrodynamic cavitation (HC)-based advanced oxidation process (AOP) for the degradation of norfloxacin. Experiments using HC were carried out in a sequential manner starting with the optimization of the cavitating device (orifice plate) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) followed by optimizing the operational parameters such as pH, inlet pressure and initial concentration. An experimental study revealed that under optimized conditions of pH – 2, inlet pressure – 6 bar and initial conc – 250 μg/L, NRF degradation of 22.26% was obtained using HC in an experimental run of 60 min. For further improvement of the HC process, experiments were carried out by integrating with H2O2, O3 and Fenton's reagent. Under the optimized conditions, integrating with H2O2, O3 and Fenton's reagent enhanced the extent of NRF degradation. The energetics of the process was further evaluated to understand the techno-economic viability. The study revealed that HC + H2O2 consumed less energy of 8.01 kWh/m3 at the economics of Rs. 82.53/m3. Thus, HC combined with oxidizing agents can be a novel technique in the genre of AOP for the degradation of micropollutants.
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