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Maintaining the ecosystem is one of the main concerns in this modern age. With the fear of ever-increasing global warming, the UK is one of the key players to participate actively in taking measures to slow down at least its phenomenal rate. As an ingredient to this process, the Springer vehicle has been designed and is being developed for environmental monitoring and pollutant tracking. This paper highlights the Springer hardware and software architecture including various navigational sensors, a speed controller, and an environmental monitoring unit. In addition, details regarding the modelling of the vessel are outlined which are based mainly on recent trials data. The formulation of a fault tolerant multi-sensor data fusion technique is also presented. Moreover, control strategy based on a linear quadratic Gaussian controller is developed and simulated on the Springer model.

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Effects of climate change on vegetation greenness have attracted considerable attention in the context of global change; however, the dependence of such climatic effects on elevation remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine the relationship between vegetation greenness change and climate change and, in particular, characterize how this relationship changes with elevation in the high mountains of southwest China by using the remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and observed temperature and precipitation data sets for the period of 1982–2013. The results show that vegetation exhibited a greening trend (slope: 0.0008 year−1, p < 0.01) under climate warming (slope: 0.04 °C year−1, p < 0.01) and drying (slope: −2.47 mm year−1, p > 0.05). The vegetation greening and climate warming trends were stronger in the higher elevation plateaus than in the lower elevation mountains. Statistical analysis showed that temperature was the main driving factor on vegetation greening, and the driving effect was elevation‐dependent. A substantially more significant correlation between climate warming and vegetation greening was found in the higher elevation plateaus, which reveals a higher temperature sensitivity of these plateaus. In addition, a significant correlation between inter‐annual standard deviations of NDVI and precipitation during 1982–2013 was tracked over the entire study area.

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Abstract:For the last three decades, a large scale integration of distributed generation (DG) is beginning to change the electrical distribution network from passive to active. Consequently, technical difficulties are created by significant impacts generated by DGs with voltage variation being the dominant effect. This paper presents a comprehensive review of voltage control techniques on electrical distribution networks connected with DG, recommendations are provided in terms of enhancing network voltage stability and maximising the DG utilisation.

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