Search Results (1,829)

This study analyses the presence of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the educational legislation and curricular materials of Spain and the United Kingdom, comparing their regulatory frameworks and evaluating the frequency of SDGs in textbook activities. A total of 555 activities from two secondary education geography textbooks were analysed using a non-experimental, descriptive-correlational, and cross-sectional design. The results show statistically significant differences between the countries regarding the incorporation of SDGs, with a higher prevalence in the Spanish textbook (66.0%) compared to the British one (41.9%), χ²(1) = 30.34, p < 0.001, φ = 0.234. An analysis of the co-occurrence structure among goals—conducted using the Jaccard coefficient and tested against a null model with fixed marginals and 1000 permutations—identifies three significant associations, corresponding to a social equity cluster, an environmental cluster, and a production-related cluster. The main finding reveals an inverse relationship: Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10) and Climate Action (SDG 13) coincide in only 4 activities, whereas 24.90 would be expected by chance (p = 0.002), and this pattern is replicated independently in both textbooks. The study concludes that the SDGs are incorporated in a fragmented manner, with a systematic dissociation between the social and environmental axes that transcends the two curricular contexts analysed. Full article

The increasing tourism pressure on the UNESCO World Heritage Altai Mountains calls for efficient environmental monitoring tools. This study presents a Google Earth Engine framework that couples the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) with land use/land cover (LULC) mapping to assess ecological changes in the Lake Manzherok area between 2020 and 2025. RSEI was derived from Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery by combining four indicators (NDVI, MNDWI, NDBSI, LST) through principal component analysis. LULC classification was carried out using Random Forest trained exclusively on Sentinel-2 spectral bands. The results confirm that RSEI effectively captures ecological gradients in complex mountainous terrain, with the first principal component explaining 57–62% of the total variance. While 92% of the study area remained stable, 5.9% showed a decline in ecological status, spatially coinciding with a near doubling of built-up and bare surfaces from 9.89 km² to 18.17 km². The largest negative RSEI changes were associated with transitions from forestland (ΔRSEI = −0.29) and grassland (ΔRSEI = −0.20) to built-up/bare land, whereas reverse transitions displayed positive ΔRSEI values. These spatial patterns are consistent with the visible development related to tourism. However, because the built-up/bare land class also includes naturally bare surfaces, and because interannual climate variability may affect the RSEI components, it is important to interpret the ΔRSEI values as relative changes rather than absolute measurements of tourism impact. The proposed framework provides a reproducible and transferable tool for monitoring ecological quality in data-scarce mountain regions, delivering spatially explicit evidence that can support conservation and land-use planning. Full article

Repeated mining of shallow-buried close-distance coal seams can disturb the fractured strata remaining in the goaf of the upper coal seam. Under gully terrain, mining disturbance is coupled with surface-relief effects, which may reactivate the overburden structure and induce dynamic strata-pressure behavior. In particular, when the working face advances across gullies, the change in surface slope alters the spatial distribution of roof load, while lower-seam extraction further disturbs the fractured rock mass formed by upper-seam mining, increasing the risk of severe strata-pressure behavior and support-crushing accidents. Taking the cross-ditch mining of the 2⁻² and 3⁻¹ coal seams in Anshan Coal Mine as the research object, this study integrates field geological investigation, theoretical calculation, physical similarity simulation, and field engineering verification to analyze overburden structural evolution, key-stratum breaking characteristics, and support-load variation under gully terrain. The results show that gully landforms generate obvious nonuniform loading above the working face. During upslope advance, the roof load gradually increases from the goaf side to the solid-coal side, causing tensile stress concentration at the fixed end of the key stratum and accelerating rock-stratum failure. A cantilever rock-beam mechanical model subjected to parabolic nonuniform loading was established, and the maximum breaking interval of the key stratum was calculated as 24.09 m. With increasing gully slope angle, the load gradient intensifies, the rock-beam breaking interval decreases, and the risk of overburden instability increases. Physical similarity simulation indicates that, when the 2⁻² coal seam working face passes through the 45° steep-slope section, the fractured overburden is more likely to form a stepped rock-beam structure, accompanied by slope rotation, stepped surface subsidence, and a sharp increase in support pressure. Under the 30° gentle-slope condition, The lateral confinement effect is stronger, roof movement is more gradual, and support-pressure fluctuation is reduced. During subsequent extraction of the lower 3⁻¹ coal seam, repeated mining disturbance reactivates the overlying goaf structure, and the upper stepped rock beam and lower hinged rock beam couple to form a double composite structure. When the fracture lines of the upper and lower key strata are staggered, the instability load of the upper structure is mainly buffered by caved gangue and interburden strata. The calculated support resistance in the asynchronous breaking stage is 8248.04 kN, which agrees well with the field-measured value of 8273 kN. When the fracture lines tend to coincide and synchronous breaking occurs, the unstable load of the upper key block is transferred downward and superimposed on the structural load of the lower key block, increasing the required support resistance to 15,165.55 kN, far exceeding the rated working resistance of the ZY9200/15/29 hydraulic support. Sensitivity analysis indicates that gully slope angle is the dominant factor affecting support resistance. As the slope angle increases from 30° to 60°, the support resistance increases from 13,228.65 kN to 18,278.43 kN, and the normalized support-resistance index increases from 0.872 to 1.205. Therefore, synchronous breaking of double key strata is the main mechanical cause of sudden support-load increase and support-crushing risk during cross-ditch mining of shallow-buried close-distance coal seams. The results can provide a basis for hydraulic support selection, roof weakening, weighting-interval control, and dynamic strata-pressure prevention under similar conditions. Full article

The massive integration of variable renewable energy sources (vRES) in Central Europe is fundamentally transforming electricity price formation and straining transmission grids. However, existing academic metrics, such as the RES Capture Price, offer only a static view of investor revenues and fail to capture dynamic market rigidity and systemic risks during periods of high instantaneous vRES penetration. This study addresses this literature gap by introducing two novel and transparent methodological parameters: Market Exposure to Green Overproduction (MEGO) and the Price Divergence Coefficient (PDC). Formulated as conditional non-parametric indicators, the MEGO index quantifies the conditional probability of price collapse and the loss of market elasticity during hours when vRES penetration exceeds critical thresholds (α = 0.50 to 0.80) of systemic load. Conversely, the PDC index measures the frequency of substantial price non-convergence across neighbouring bidding zones (CZ, PL, FR) relative to the German reference market (DE). Based on an extensive dataset spanning from 2015 to mid-2026—capturing the transition to 15 min market time units— the empirical results reveal a distinct change in market behaviour. While the frequency of price collapse during high-vRES periods was lower in earlier years and temporarily reduced during the 2022 energy crisis, the post-crisis period (2024–2026) exhibits substantially higher MEGO values, with periods in which wind and solar generation exceeded 80% of instantaneous system load being associated with prices at or below 0 EUR/MWh in up to 60% of the evaluated intervals. Concurrently, the PDC analysis reveals persistent spatial price non-convergence, particularly in France and Poland. These patterns coincided with major changes in European electricity-market conditions, including the implementation of Core Flow-Based Market Coupling, variations in nuclear availability and evolving cross-border network conditions; however, the PDC indicator alone does not permit causal attribution to any individual factor. The proposed MEGO and PDC parameters provide policymakers, transmission system operators (TSOs), and investors with an intuitive diagnostic framework for dimensioning grid flexibility, energy storage, and cross-border infrastructure in the decarbonization era. Full article

This paper studies how hidden, stochastic continuation of informed participation shapes price discovery in a two-period Kyle-type market. Hidden participation separates two analytical questions that coincide in the standard Gaussian-linear model. Conditional on a specified linear continuation order, we first derive the exact Bayesian posterior mean and variance of a mixture comprising an informed-trading regime and a noise-only regime; this is a conditional-inference result, not a full nonlinear equilibrium. We then derive an equilibrium under a constrained best-linear-pricing protocol in which market makers use the minimum-mean-square-error affine projection and the insider optimizes pointwise against linear prices. The exact Bayesian posterior responds nonlinearly because order flow reveals both residual value and the likelihood of informed participation, while moderate flows can preserve substantial regime uncertainty. In the projection benchmark, a lower continuation probability accelerates first-period information revelation, shifts insider rents toward the initial round, and creates opposing early- and late-learning effects. A dimensionless analysis characterizes how inference varies with continuation probability and the informed-to-noise variance ratio and establishes scale invariance for the benchmark’s normalized comparative statics. The paper thus isolates a participation margin in price discovery and states precisely which results concern exact inference and which concern a constrained equilibrium. Full article

While climate change is a significant pressure point for pollinators and honeybees, its long-term relationship with managed honeybee colonies and honey production remains unclear and context sensitive. This study, using FAOSTAT data from 1961 to 2024, examined the relationships between land surface temperature anomalies and the number of registered beehives, the constant-price honey production value, and the normalized honey production value per colony, both globally and specifically for 18 Mediterranean countries. To differentiate between long-term structural trends and short-term temperature relationships, correlation, regression, bootstrap confidence interval, temperature series sensitivity analysis, cross-correlation function, and normalized index analyses were used together. The study results show strong long-term co-movement between temperature anomalies and recorded beekeeping indicators at the global and Mediterranean scale in the level series; however, first-differenced (year-to-year) analyses show this association weakens substantially and, for Mediterranean honey production value, reverses sign, indicating that the level-series correlations are driven largely by common long-term trends. The relationship between temperature anomalies and beekeeping indicators shows a context-dependent structure among Mediterranean countries. The findings show that the increase in colony size does not always coincide with the increase in the constant-price honey production value per colony; in some cases, these two indicators can move in different directions. This indicates the need for an analytical decomposition of the dynamics of quantitative growth and economic production value per colony in the beekeeping sector. Full article

Boundary-layer atmospheric stability, wind-shear variability, and thermodynamic forcing are all important factors for the initiation, intensification, and transport of dust storms. But there is limited knowledge of the quantitative evaluation of bulk-layer atmospheric stability and the relation between wind-driven dust dynamics and atmospheric stability in arid and semi-arid regions. In this research, a hybrid AI–meteorology framework, HyMet-Fusion, is presented that combines visual information derived from satellite observations with physics-based indicators of atmospheric stability to evaluate atmospheric stability during dust storm events over Iraq. The proposed framework is based on the use of deep features extracted from the satellite imagery through a frozen EfficientNetB0 backbone, combined with indicators derived from the ERA5 pressure level data for the atmosphere, such as the Bulk Richardson Number (Bulk Ri), the Wind Shear (WS) and the Dry Air Index (DAI). The two branches were merged using a late fusion (0.75 physics/0.25 image) and each hour was classified into three atmospheric stability conditions: Relatively Stable, Moderately Unstable and Unstable. The overall hourly accuracy using a Leave-One-Event-Out (LOEO) cross-validation scheme, where each dust event was used for independent testing and no dust event was used for training, was 72.4%, with 81.2% accuracy for the dominant stability state and 92.2% correct assessment of the unstable condition time for the severe dust events. Inaccuracies were mainly (66%) in the conservative direction (more instability). Unstable atmospheric conditions were also found to be associated with all severe dust storms and coincided with higher wind shear, lower Bulk Ri values and higher thermodynamic variability. Moderate and light dust events were primarily associated with transitional and relatively stable atmospheric conditions, and differed between the various regions, primarily in Kirkuk and Nasiriyah. Correlation analysis showed that wind shear had the highest correlation with atmospheric instability (r = 0.92), followed by DAI (r = 0.90) and Bulk Ri (r = −0.75). In addition, the wind shear also increased significantly from light to severe dust events at all stations investigated, showing that wind shear is a critical factor for turbulent mixing, vertical momentum exchange and dust uplift processes. The results suggest wind shear is the leading dynamics mechanism for bulk-layer instability in Iraqi dust storms. The findings highlight the complementary benefit of using physics-based atmospheric indicators embedded with deep learning satellite image analysis. The HyMet-Fusion system can be used as a transferable method for observing wind-driven instability of the atmosphere and related dust hazards, which could be employed in boundary-layer meteorology, air-quality forecasting, aviation safety and environmental risk assessment in arid and semi-arid areas. Full article

Thermomagnetic-fraction geochemistry has shown promise beneath transported cover, but area-scale applications rarely combine explicit element-association analysis, statistical robustness tests and transparent target prioritization. We evaluate this workflow in the largely covered Jing’erquan Ni-Cu metallogenic area using 985 soil samples collected over approximately 140 km² at an average spacing of about 300 m (7.0 samples km⁻²). After removal of pre-existing strongly magnetic grains, 100 g aliquots were heated under oxygen-limited conditions at 650 °C for 45 min, and the newly generated magnetic fraction was separated at an instrument-current setting of 1 A. Twelve indicators were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis (PCA), spatial clustering and a three-term composite score. Four rotated factors explain 75.1% of the variance; Cr and Ni load at 0.95 on F2, while TFe₂O₃, Zn, Co and Cu covary on F1. Pearson–Spearman matrix agreement (r = 0.990), winsorized-versus-original Pearson agreement (r = 0.999), and PCA factor-congruence coefficients (>0.998) show that the principal associations are not controlled by the largest Cu, Ni or Cr values. Alternative composite weights retain all eight named follow-up targets, although internal ranking changes when Cu is emphasized. Among them, JQ-1–JQ-4 are assigned high follow-up priority by the expert-informed score. The coincidence of JQ-1 with the known Jing’erquan Ni-Cu mining area provides an internal plausibility check for the workflow, whereas JQ-2–JQ-8 remain unverified follow-up targets. These results show that the thermomagnetic-fraction dataset delineates multielement surface geochemical anomalies in covered terrain and can serve as a complementary screening tool for subsequent Ni-Cu exploration. Full article

Background/Objectives: Osteoarthritis (OA) is partly driven by an imbalance between bone-resorbing osteoclasts (OCs) and bone-forming osteoblasts (OBs). Collagen hydrolysates (CHs) are widely used for OA symptom management, with potential benefits attributed to bioactive peptides (BAPs) released during digestion. However, their direct effects on bone cells remain unclear. Methods: Two bovine-sourced CHs, CH-GL and CH-OPT, were digested in vitro and tested on primary murine OC and OB cultures. Osteoclastogenesis was evaluated mainly under standard RANKL conditions (50 ng/mL), with exploratory analysis under high RANKL conditions (100 ng/mL). OC cultures were exposed to CH digesta at 0.01, 0.05, 0.1, or 0.5 mg/mL, while OB cultures were exposed to 0.01 or 0.1 mg/mL. Results: Under standard RANKL conditions, CH-GL significantly reduced OC area by over 50% across all tested concentrations, while OC number was not significantly altered. This coincided with decreased expression of selected osteoclastogenic markers, including Nfatc1, Ctsk, Dc-stamp, and Oscar. In OB cultures, CH-GL increased Runx2, Osterix, and Alp expression at 0.1 mg/mL and reduced Mmp9 expression at both tested doses. It also modestly increased mineralization-related signal intensity and collagen-associated matrix area. For CH-OPT, selected reductions in Dc-stamp and Oscar expression were observed, while OC number, OC area, and most OB-related outcomes were not significantly altered. Conclusions: CH digesta modulated selected OC- and OB-related outcomes in primary murine cells. These preliminary in vitro findings support further investigation of CH-derived bioactives in models that more closely reproduce OA-associated joint pathology. Full article

Accurate crop mapping is essential for food security and water resource management in semi-arid North Africa. This study evaluated four machine learning algorithms for crop classification using Sentinel-2 NDVI time series in the Al Haouz region, Morocco with a time series of 12 dates (December 2023–May 2024) using 105,869 ground reference samples. Support Vector Machine (SVM) achieved the highest performance (macro F1-score = 0.80, Overall Accuracy = 81%), followed by XGBoost (0.79), Random Forest (0.79), and Decision Tree (0.71). Class-wise analysis revealed excellent discrimination for apricots (F1 = 0.99) due to distinctive spring phenology, while citrus showed the lowest accuracy (F1 = 0.61) due to confusion with olives. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) analysis quantified phenological similarity between crops, revealing that classification confusion correlates with profile similarity. Temporal sensitivity analysis revealed that reducing acquisitions from 12 to 8 dates results in only 2.4% performance loss, offering significant operational advantages for resource-limited contexts. February–March acquisitions proved most discriminative, coinciding with peak vegetative differentiation. These findings provide practical recommendations for operational crop monitoring in semi-arid African regions facing water scarcity and food security challenges. Full article

This study examines the relationships between gross value added (GVA), employment, timber harvest, and labour productivity in the Czech forestry sector from 2009 to 2024. Annual data obtained from the Czech Statistical Office, Eurostat, UNECE, and Reports on the State of Forests and Forestry in the Czech Republic were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, and simple linear regression. The results revealed a statistically significant negative relationship between GVA and timber harvest volume (r = −0.820; p < 0.001), showing that the increase in timber harvesting during the bark beetle outbreak coincided with declining economic performance due to market oversupply and falling timber prices. In contrast, the relationship between GVA and employment was negative but statistically insignificant (r = −0.406; p > 0.05). Labour productivity increased by 44.5% during the analysed period; however, no statistically significant long-term linear trend was identified. The findings suggest that Czech forestry is undergoing technological transformation associated with increasing capital intensity and rising labour productivity, while remaining vulnerable to large-scale disturbance events and market instability. The study contributes to the forest economics literature by showing that disturbance-driven increases in harvesting intensity may reduce economic performance under conditions of timber market oversupply. Full article

Carbonate jade has emerged as a recently recognized commercial variety in the Chinese gemstone market. Systematic gemological and mineralogical investigations on carbonate jade, however, remain very scarce. Three Xinjiang calcite-dominated jade samples were investigated by using Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) absorption spectroscopy, microbeam X-ray fluorescence (Micro-XRF) spectrometry, trace element analysis, in situ U-Pb dating, and C-O isotope analysis. The orange-red color originates from staining by hematite and magnetite inclusions, while the green color is produced by d-d electronic transitions of lattice-bound Fe³⁺ and Mn²⁺. The provenance comparison reveals systematic differences in trace element compositions between the Xinjiang carbonate jade and Pakistani Lvwen stone: the Xinjiang samples are characterized by extremely low Cu and Sr contents, whereas the Pakistani Lvwen stone has high Cu, Mn and Sr contents, and low Fe content. The U-Pb age obtained for the Xinjiang carbonate jade sample coincides with a Late Cretaceous rapid cooling event. Enriched light rare earth element (LREE) and C-O isotope (δ¹³C_V-PDB = −1.19–2.21‰, δ¹⁸O_V-SMOW = 15.00–20.01‰) signatures indicate that the carbonate-precipitating fluids were derived from marine carbonate wall rocks. These findings provide new mineralogical and geochemical constraints on the coloration mechanism, provenance, and fluid evolution of carbonate jade from Xinjiang. Full article

A field inventory in the Rio Chapecó drainage, southern Brazil, about 11,120 km², revealed an unexpected diversity of endemic small fossorial catfishes, genus Cambeva, comprising 2 species recently described and 11 undescribed. They were found in different habitats, including sediment types and altitudes, and exhibited great morphological diversity, suggesting them to be a species flock. The objectives of this study were to analyse criteria (monophyly, endemicity, species richness, ecomorphological diversity) used to recognise species flocks and to describe the new species, which were diagnosed using external morphology and osteological characters. The phylogenetic analyses using COI, CYTB and RAG2 (2305 bp) for 64 species of Cambeva and 4 outgroups did not support that species assemblage as a single monophyletic group but supported a clade with 3 species, the C. alphabelardense clade, and a clade with 10 species, the C. betabelardense clade. The latter clade was recognised as a putative species flock based on those criteria. A time-calibrated analysis indicated the origin and diversification of both clades during the Miocene, a timeframe coinciding with the emergence and persistence of the Paranean Sea, which may have isolated adjacent river drainages, favouring the high species diversification of Cambeva, besides diversification of the Crenicichla missioneira complex from the same region. Full article

Cold-climate dwellings can face coincident electricity and domestic hot-water shortfalls in winter, when solar availability is at its lowest. This study evaluates an integrated residential system for Aomori, Japan, combining photovoltaics, evacuated-tube solar water heating, and battery storage with electrolysis, compressed-hydrogen storage, and a PEM fuel cell operated in combined-heat-and-power mode. Building on a screening-level annual-balance analysis, a coupled annual TRNSYS simulation with a 0.125 h time step resolved battery dispatch, electrolyzer part-load operation, hydrogen compression and finite storage, seasonal fuel-cell operation, and heat recovery. The results show that the principal value of seasonal hydrogen lies in improving winter supply adequacy, dispatchability, and heat recovery rather than annual conversion efficiency. Fuel-cell heat recovery increased the number of days satisfying the hot-water screening indicator—a daily mean tank temperature of at least 43 °C—from 221 to 332. A reserve-aware criterion identified a 225 W electrolyzer operating-power cap as the positive-reserve case; 205 W was near-cyclic with a negligible margin, whereas the original 475 W cap was substantially oversized. The hydrogen pathway remained markedly less efficient than direct photovoltaic and solar-thermal use, and the estimated storage hardware’s lower bound substantially exceeded the break-even capital ceiling supported by the annual operating value. Seasonal hydrogen can therefore strengthen winter energy adequacy and heat recovery but is not yet cost-effective at the single-dwelling scale under the investigated conditions. Full article

Many natural and engineered systems evolve under constraints that restrict the set of admissible states. Classical frameworks study invariant sets, viability regions, survival probabilities, and exit-time events, while the explicit treatment of threshold-defined admissible subsets induced by sampled finite-horizon persistence is not usually isolated as a primary state-space object. This paper formulates a finite-horizon framework for Persistence Under Declared Constraints (PSUC). For a fixed constraint set, sampling step, persistence horizon, and tolerance level, the associated survival domain is the set of initial conditions whose sampled trajectories remain inside the declared constraint set with probability of at least $1-\alpha$. Under explicit regularity assumptions, survival domains are closed superlevel sets of the persistence field and form a nested filtration as the persistence horizon increases. This filtration admits a canonical intrinsic representation through a maximal admissible sampled-horizon field whose sampled superlevel sets recover it exactly. The same field also induces a canonical admissibility preorder; after quotienting by horizon-indistinguishability, this yields a partial order and its associated Alexandrov topology, in which the sampled survival filtration is represented as an upper-set filtration. The Alexandrov construction itself is classical; the contribution lies in the canonical order induced by the sampled admissibility-depth field and in the resulting canonical order-theoretic representation of the filtration. A secondary scalar ordering is also obtained for any lower-bounded auxiliary scalar function. Under an additional continuity assumption, the framework further yields boundary localization at the threshold level and an inheritance relation for connected components along the filtration. Finally, the paper shows that sampled survival domains need not coincide with continuous-time survival sets, thereby clarifying the intrinsically protocol-dependent nature of the object studied. The contribution is therefore a restricted but explicit analysis of threshold-defined admissible-state filtrations induced by sampled finite-horizon persistence, together with a canonical order-theoretic representation of the same filtration, formulated in a way that remains compatible with existing work on viability, stochastic survival, and exit-time analysis. Full article