Suchergebnisse

Understanding, predicting and controlling the dynamics of cholera and other waterborne diseases are crucial goals of public health policies. Appropriate quantitative models to forecast epidemic development and to evaluate possible intervention scenarios would be specially needed during epidemic outbreaks, when preparedness and efficient allocation of resources are key to emergency management. Moreover, these tools ought to be spatially explicit, because waterborne disease epidemics usually display spatially inhomogeneous patterns. Here we describe spatially explicit epidemiological models and methods for real-time forecast of waterborne disease epidemics and design of intervention strategies for epidemic prevention and control. Applications to two cholera epidemics in South Africa and Haiti are briefly illustrated.

River networks are critically important ecosystems. This interdisciplinary book provides an integrated ecohydrological framework blending laboratory, field, and theoretical evidence that changes our understanding of river networks as ecological corridors. It describes how the physical structure of the river environment impacts biodiversity, species invasions, population dynamics, and the spread of waterborne disease. State-of-the-art research on the ecological roles of the structure of river networks is summarized, including important studies on the spread and control of waterborne diseases, biodiversity loss due to water resource management, and invasions by non-native species. Practical implications of this research are illustrated with numerous examples throughout. This is an invaluable go-to reference for graduate students and researchers interested in river ecology and hydrology, and the links between the two. Describing new related research on spatially-explicit modeling of the spread of waterborne disease, this book will also be of great interest to epidemiologists and public health managers.

We introduce a new representation of coupled solute and water age dynamics at the catchment scale, which shows how the contributions of young runoff waters can be directly referenced to observed water quality patterns. The methodology stems from recent trends in hydrologic transport that acknowledge the dynamic nature of streamflow age and explores the use of water age fractions as an alternative to the mean age. The approach uses a travel time-based transport model to compute the fractions of streamflow that are younger than some thresholds (e.g., younger than a few weeks) and compares them to observed solute concentration patterns. The method is here validated with data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest during spring 2008, where we show that the presence of water younger than roughly 2 weeks, tracked using a hydrologic transport model and deuterium measurements, mimics the variation in dissolved silicon concentrations. Our approach suggests that an age-discharge relationship can be coupled to classic concentration-discharge relationship, to identify the links between transport timescales and solute concentration. Our results highlight that the younger streamflow components can be crucial for determining water quality variations and for characterizing the dominant hydrologic transport dynamics. ; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; NSF EARNational Science Foundation (NSF) [1014507]; NSF LTER DEB [1114804]; ENAC School; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne ; ENAC School, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; NSF EAR, Grant/Award Number: 1014507; NSF LTER DEB, Grant/Award Number: 1114804 ; Public domain authored by a U.S. government employee

Abstract
We demonstrate that when power scaling occurs for an individual tree and in a forest, there is great resulting simplicity notwithstanding the underlying complexity characterizing the system over many size scales. Our scaling framework unifies seemingly distinct trends in a forest and provides a simple yet promising approach to quantitatively understand a bewilderingly complex many-body system with imperfectly known interactions. We show that the effective dimension, Dtree, of a tree is close to 3, whereas a mature forest has Dforest approaching 1. We discuss the energy equivalence rule and show that the metabolic rate–mass relationship is a power law with an exponent D/(D + 1) in both cases leading to a Kleiber's exponent of 3/4 for a tree and 1/2 for a forest. Our work has implications for understanding carbon sequestration and for climate science.

Mathematical models of cholera dynamics can not only help in identifying environmental drivers and processes that influence disease transmission, but may also represent valuable tools for the prediction of the epidemiological patterns in time and space as well as for the allocation of health care resources. Cholera outbreaks have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the 1970s. They have been ravaging the shore of Lake Kivu in the east of the country repeatedly during the last decades. Here we employ a spatially explicit, inhomogeneous Markov chain model to describe cholera incidence in eight health zones on the shore of the lake. Remotely sensed data sets of chlorophyll a concentration in the lake, precipitation and indices of global climate anomalies are used as environmental drivers in addition to baseline seasonality. The effect of human mobility is also modelled mechanistically. We test several models on a multiyear data set of reported cholera cases. The best fourteen models, accounting for different environmental drivers, and selected using the Akaike information criterion, are formally compared via proper cross validation. Among these, the one accounting for seasonality, El Niño Southern Oscillation, precipitation and human mobility outperforms the others in cross validation. Some drivers (such as human mobility and rainfall) are retained only by a few models, possibly indicating that the mechanisms through which they influence cholera dynamics in the area will have to be investigated further. Key Points Markov chain model of cholera dynamics in the Lake Kivu area (DRC) Global climate anomalies are the main drivers, together with rainfall The influence of mobility and remotely sensed chlorophyll a were also tested

This survey is part of the study series "Security". This series of studies is based on a representative survey of security policy opinion-forming in Switzerland carried out in 1983. This survey was conducted at the Institute of Sociology Unitobler University of Bern by K. Haltiner and was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (NRP No. 11 "Security Policy", Project 4.419.0.81.11). Since 1991, opinion-forming in security policy has been collected annually since January/February and published under the title "Security". At the same time, the survey was expanded to include questions on foreign policy and the general feeling of security. The project is now being led by the Military Sociology Lectureship of the Military Academy at ETH Zurich and the Center for Security Studies of ETH Zurich.
The aim of these surveys is to identify trends and tendencies with regard to the general perception of security and threats, confidence in institutions and authorities, the degree of cooperation in foreign and security policy, neutrality in general and different views of neutrality, attitudes towards military defence and the interest in security policy. In addition to a core of questions that are asked at all times or at irregular intervals, they are also asked annually on current security policy issues.
In 2019, the focus will be on relations between the USA and Switzerland as well as the general global political situation, attitudes towards equal opportunities in the Swiss army.
In addition to the trend analysis, the series of studies also focuses on the question of the extent to which attitudes towards the three issues (general security, foreign policy and defence policy) are related to living conditions and political orientation.

Die Jahresstudie "Sicherheit", die von der Militärakademie an der ETH Zürich und dem CSS jeweils gemeinsam publiziert wird, dient der Ermittlung langfristiger Trends in der aussen-, sicherheits- und verteidigungspolitischen Meinungsbildung in der Schweiz. Sie basiert auf im Jahresrhythmus durchgeführten repräsentativen Befragungen. Auch 2019 fühlen sich die SchweizerInnen im Allgemeinen wieder sehr sicher. Befragte beurteilen die Zukunft der Schweiz optimistisch. Dabei nennen sie vor allem die gute Wirtschaftslage und das politische System der Schweiz als Gründe für ihre optimistische Zukunftseinschätzung. Die zukünftige Entwicklung der weltpolitischen Lage wird allerdings signifikant pessimistischer als noch im Vorjahr eingeschätzt. Die Auswertung der Gründe zeigt, dass in erster Linie die Machtpolitik der USA, China und Russland als Gefahr für die Welt gesehen wird. ; The annual survey "Sicherheit", a joint publication by the Military Academy at ETH Zurich and the CSS, evaluates long-term trends and tendencies in public opinion on foreign, security and defense policy issues in Switzerland. It is based on representative surveys of the Swiss electorate conducted each year. The findings of the 2019 edition include that the Swiss generally feel very safe. Moreover, respondents are optimistic about Switzerland's future, citing the good economic situation and Switzerland's political system as reasons for their optimistic assessment of the future. By contrast, the future development of the global political situation is perceived significantly more pessimistically than in the previous year. The analysis of the reasons for this development indicate that, above all, the power politics of the USA, China and Russia are seen to be a threat to the world. ; ISSN:1424-5698