Search Results (8)

Watershed water bodies, as a key part of the Earth’s water cycle, were identified as an important destination for emerging pollutants. However, existing research primarily focused on single environmental zones, such as lakes or rivers, lacking a comprehensive understanding at the watershed scale. Scientific knowledge mapping and tools, such as Bibliometrics, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace, were employed to conduct a comprehensive analysis of literature on emerging pollutants in watershed water bodies from the WOSCC database. The results indicated that, from 2000 to 2024, research themes in this field gradually expanded from the identification and detection of pollutants to source analysis, environmental behavior, ecological effects, risk assessment, and social governance. Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed high-frequency terms such as “waste-water,” “persistent organic pollutants,” “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” and pollutants related to sediments. Burst keyword analysis showed that early keywords like “polychlorinated biphenyls” were gradually replaced by more recent terms like “particles.” Additionally, it was found that cooperation between China and the United States was close, and research was increasingly interdisciplinary. Finally, the main challenges in the current research were summarized, and future research directions were proposed, aiming to provide theoretical support and data foundation for scientific studies and policymaking concerning emerging pollutants in watershed water bodies. Full article

Transboundary water governance faces persistent challenges due to mismatches between natural hydrological boundaries and political administrative boundaries. This study examines the evolution and mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation in the Taihu Basin (1987–2024), addressing how cooperation forms, evolves, and sustains amid conflicting priorities. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed 106 policy documents, government reports, and stakeholder interviews to map governance stages, cooperation networks, and policy themes. Results reveal three phases in transboundary water governance in Taihu Basin: (1) a centralized hierarchy (1987–2007) dominated by vertical mandates; (2) a hybrid stage (2008–2018) with rising horizontal cooperation driven by crisis responses like the 2007 cyanobacteria outbreak; and (3) a networked stage (2019–2024) integrating diagonal mechanisms that bridged hierarchical gaps and scaled grassroots innovations. Key findings show diagonal relations reduced bureaucratic delays, enabling bottom-up practices like joint river chief systems to become regional policies. While grounded in the Taihu Basin context, this study provides a compelling case of institutional coupling that may inform governance in other transboundary basins, where vertical authority, horizontal reciprocity, and diagonal experimentation coexist dynamically. This study offers a model for balancing administrative fragmentation and ecological integrity, emphasizing adaptive networks over rigid hierarchies. These insights provide a feasible solution approach for addressing transboundary water resource governance challenges in similar institutional environments. Full article

In the dynamic field of robotics engineering, nanorobot technology has witnessed rapid advancements. Developing a technology roadmap is essential for quickly identifying the trends and key technological aspects of nanorobotics from an array of multi-source data. Traditional research methods, such as Delphi surveys, bibliometrics, patent analysis, and patent paper citation analyses, often fail to capture the rich semantic information available. Moreover, these approaches generally provide a unidimensional perspective, which restricts their capacity to depict the complex nature of technological evolution. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel framework that utilizes the ALBERT method combined with multi-source data for critical theme extraction. It integrates varied data sources, including academic papers and patents, to explore the interrelation within the nanorobot technology roadmap. The methodology begins with text feature extraction, clustering algorithms, and theme mining to identify dominant technological themes. Subsequently, it applies semantic similarity measures to connect multiple themes, employing a “multi-layer ThemeRiver map” for a visual representation of these inter-layer connections. The paper concludes with a comprehensive analysis from both the technological research and industrial application perspectives, underscoring the principal developmental themes and insights of nanorobot technology, and projecting its future directions. Full article

In recent decades, the creation and availability of Voluntary Geographic Information (VGI) have changed the paradigm associated with the production of Geospatial Information (GI), since, due to its free access, citizens can view, analyse, process, and validate this type of data. One of the most popular examples of VGI is the collaborative OpenStreetMap (OSM) project which covers a wide range of themes or characteristics associated with the real world. One of these themes is the feature “waterway” that represents watercourses. The quality of OSM data characteristics is a topic that has been published by many authors in recent years, particularly on the analysis of the completeness indicator. However, few references are found in the literature about studies that analyse the completeness of OSM watercourses or even watercourses obtained by other sources. All this motivated the authors to develop a study that aims to analyse the completeness of these specific lines that have so much relevance to hydrologists. The study presents an analysis of the variation over time in completeness/coverage of the OSM “waterway” feature in the period between 2014 and 2023 in a mountainous region included in the Mondego River basin, located in the Inland of Portugal. The methodology applied is supported by classical methods of measuring the completeness of lines that may be found in the literature. The total length of the watercourses was calculated and compared in percentage terms with the total length of the reference watercourses for dates under analysis. The watercourses of the military official hydrography of the 1/25,000 scale were used as a reference. The relation of the OSM completeness with some indicators related to terrain surface (altitude, slope, and location/proximity settlements) was also analysed. The choice of these indicators was motivated by the fact that the study area has strong mountain characteristics and is crossed by the main Portuguese river. The analysis was performed using the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Digital Elevation Model (SRTM DEM) data and satellite image of Geographic Information System software. The results show that the completeness of this OSM feature (waterway) has a slight increase, considering the amplitude of the studied period (nine years) and the fact that, nowadays, digital mobile devices enable easy access to satellite images, allowing the digitalization of geographic entities or objects of the real world remotely. Regarding the indicator altitude, slope, and location/proximity of the settlements, we believe that there is no influence of these indicators on the evolution of the completeness of the OSM waterways in the study area. Full article

The conservation of natural resources is indispensable for supporting sustainable development. Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystem (WEFE) nexus management is widely acknowledged as the utmost priority of our time. Considering the specificities of the different nexus sectors, conflicting views of sustainability may arise from different stakeholders. This paper presents and analyses an effective stakeholders’ participation strategy aiming at identifying WEFE challenges in the Pinios River Basin (PRB), the most agriculturally productive and natural resource-stressed basin of Greece. The presented methodology was developed in the context of a Learning and Action Alliance (LAA) scheme adopted by the H2020 REXUS project, intended to support resilient nexus system management with the engagement of stakeholders. The proposed comprehensive methodology comprises multiple phases, including “framing”, “mapping”, “involvement”, “co-production”, and “sharing” phases. The involvement phase is the most interactive one, including the organisation and outputs of efficient crowdsourcing theme sessions organised in the framework of the first REXUS PRB stakeholders’ workshop. This paper illustrates and analyses stakeholders’ perceptions regarding nexus status in the PRB and reveals the most critical challenges in the pilot basin, along with their interdependencies and correlations. The determination of nexus challenges insights by stakeholders could significantly contribute to redefining policies so that they align with sustainable development aims. This methodology is proposed to form the baseline strategy in stakeholders’ engagement for future nexus management studies. Full article

Conducting research on the spatial cognition of tourists in historical towns helps to balance cultural heritage protection and tourism development. However, the current tourist cognition research is not comprehensive enough in terms of data sources, time dimension, and spatial objects. This research takes Fengjing Ancient Town in Shanghai as an example, and through multi-source data analysis explores how tourists’ perception and cognition of the attractions changes, discusses the impacts of characteristic of spatial system and elements on perception, and then establishes a spatial cognition analysis framework involving time dimension, cognitive depth, and spatial type. On-site aerial photos, Sina Weibo check-in data, tourist memory maps, and photos from tourism websites were used to classify tourists’ spatial cognition through content analysis, theme classification, and GIS spatial analysis. This research finds that tourists have formed three cognitive levels in the travel process, from “initial spatial consciousness” to “place memory” then to “imagery perception”. Meanwhile, space is the most important object of tourists’ cognition, and it is also the carrier of other intangible cultures. In terms of spatial cognition and ancient town tourism, this research finds the tourists’ spatial cognition of Fengjing Ancient Town is related to the main river and main tourist routes that represent the image characteristics of the ancient town. This research shows that clear boundaries of tourism space, richer folk activities, and more sequential tourism routes could help tourists form a more systematic spatial cognition. Based on the findings, this research also establishes an analysis and application framework of tourists’ multilevel spatial cognition to provide optimization suggestions for development of tourism. Full article

Geoscientists have extensively used machine learning for geological mapping and exploring the mineral prospect of a province. However, the interpretation of results becomes challenging due to the complexity of machine learning models. This study uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) and Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) to estimate potential locations for gold mineralisation in Rengali Province, a tectonised mosaic of volcano-sedimentary sequences juxtaposed at the interface of the Archaean cratonic segment in the north and the Proterozoic granulite provinces of the Eastern Ghats Belt in Eastern India. The objective is to integrate multi-thematic data involving geological, geophysical, mineralogical and geochemical surveys on a 1:50 K scale with the aim of prognosticating gold mineralisation. The available data utilised during the integration include aero-geophysical (aeromagnetic and aerospectrometric), geochemical (national geochemical mapping), ground geophysical (gravity), satellite gravity, remote sensing (multispectral) and National Geomorphology and Lineament Project structural lineament maps obtained from the Geological Survey of India Database. The CNN model has an overall accuracy of 90%. The SHAP values demonstrate that the major contributing factors are, in sequential order, antimony, clay, lead, arsenic content and a magnetic anomaly in CNN modelling. Geochemical pathfinders, including geophysical factors, have high importance, followed by the shear zones in mineralisation mapping. According to the results, the central parts of the study area, including the river valley, have higher gold prospects than the surrounding areas. Gold mineralisation is possibly associated with intermediate metavolcanics along the shear zone, which is later intruded by quartz veins in the northern part of the Rengali Province. This work intends to model known occurrences with respect to multiple themes so that the results can be replicated in surrounding areas. Full article

In recent years, nanogenerator technology has developed rapidly with the rise of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other fields. Therefore, the quick identification of the evolutionary path of nanogenerator technology from a large amount of data attracts much attention. It is of great significance in grasping technical trends and analyzing technical areas of interest. However, there are some limitations in previous studies. On the one hand, previous research on technological evolution has generally utilized bibliometrics, patent analysis, and citations between patents and papers, ignoring the rich semantic information contained therein; on the other hand, its evolution analysis perspective is single, and it is difficult to obtain accurate results. Therefore, this paper proposes a new framework based on the methods of Sentence-BERT and phrase mining, using multi-source data, such as papers and patents, to unveil the evolutionary path of nanogenerator technology. Firstly, using text vectorization, clustering algorithms, and the phrase mining method, current technical themes of significant interest to researchers can be obtained. Next, this paper correlates the multi-source fusion themes through semantic similarity calculation and demonstrates the multi-dimensional technology evolutionary path by using the “theme river map”. Finally, this paper presents an evolution analysis from the perspective of frontier research and technology research, so as to discover the development focus of nanogenerators and predict the future application prospects of nanogenerator technology. Full article