Unlabelled: The identification of the source in groundwater pollution is the only way to drastically deal with resulting environmental problems. This can only be achieved by an appropriate monitoring network, the optimization of which is prerequisite for the solution of the inverse modeling problem, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
March 2022
The growing popularity of inexpensive IoT (Internet of Things) sensor networks makes their uncertainty an important aspect of their adoption. The uncertainty determines their fitness for purpose, their perceived quality and the usefulness of information they provide. Nevertheless, neither the theory nor the industrial practice of uncertainty offer a coherent answer on how to address uncertainty of networks of this type and their components.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The effectiveness of allergen immunotherapy (AIT) in seasonal and perennial allergic rhinitis (AR) depends on the definition of pollen exposure intensity or time period. We recently evaluated pollen and symptom data from Germany to examine the new definitions of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) on pollen season and peak pollen period start and end. Now, we aim to confirm the feasibility of these definitions to properly mirror symptom loads for grass and birch pollen-induced allergic rhinitis in other European geographical areas such as Austria, Finland and France, and therefore their suitability for AIT and clinical practice support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: It is recommended to position pollen monitoring stations on rooftop level to assure a large catchment area and to gain data that are representative for a regional scale. Herein, an investigation of the representativeness of pollen concentrations was performed for 20 pollen types in the pollen seasons 2015-2016 in Vienna for rooftop and ground level and was compared with weather data and for the first time with symptom data.
Methods: The complete data set was analyzed with various statistical methods including Spearmen correlation, ANOVA, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and logistic regression calculation: Odds ratio and Yule's Q values.
Forecasting ragweed pollen concentration is a useful tool for sensitive people in order to prepare in time for high pollen episodes. The aim of the study is to use methods of Computational Intelligence (CI) (Multi-Layer Perceptron, M5P, REPTree, DecisionStump and MLPRegressor) for predicting daily values of Ambrosia pollen concentrations and alarm levels for 1-7 days ahead for Szeged (Hungary) and Lyon (France), respectively. Ten-year daily mean ragweed pollen data (within 1997-2006) are considered for both cities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article reviews interactions and health impacts of physical, chemical, and biological weather. Interactions and synergistic effects between the three types of weather call for integrated assessment, forecasting, and communication of air quality. Today's air quality legislation falls short of addressing air quality degradation by biological weather, despite increasing evidence for the feasibility of both mitigation and adaptation policy options.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper we propose a methodology consisting of specific computational intelligence methods, i.e. principal component analysis and artificial neural networks, in order to inter-compare air quality and meteorological data, and to forecast the concentration levels for environmental parameters of interest (air pollutants).
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