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This Special Issue delves into the realm of geographic information systems (GIS) and their pivotal role in fostering green development. Featuring a collection of rigorous research articles authored by esteemed experts in the field, this compilation offers insights into the applications of GIS within the domain of sustainable development. These contributions underscore GIS as an indispensable tool in sustainable development endeavors. We hope that these contributions shed light on the ability of GIS to inform decision-making processes, facilitate renewable energy planning, and contribute to disaster management strategies. The scientific rigor and advancements showcased in this Special Issue can provide a comprehensive understanding of how GIS is steering progress in green development. Related Books Application of Remote Sensing and GIS for Promoting Sustainable Geoenvironment Environmental & Earth Sciences Geographic Information Systems and Cartography for a Sustainable World Compute

Technologies to harvest marine renewable energies (MREs) are at a pre-commercial stage, and significant R&D progress is still required in order to improve their competitiveness. Therefore, hybridization presents a significant potential, as it fosters synergies among the different harvesting technologies and resources. In the scope of this Special Issue, hybridization is understood in three different manners: (i) combination of technologies to harvest different MREs (e.g., wave energy converters combined with wind turbines); (ii) combination of different working principles to harvest the same resource (e.g., oscillating water column with an overtopping device to harvest wave energy); or (iii) integration of harvesting technologies in multifunctional platforms and structures (e.g., integration of wave energy converters in breakwaters). This Special Issue presents cutting-edge research on the development and testing of hybrid technologies for harvesting MREs and intends to inform intere

Coastal ecosystems are dynamic, complex, and often fragile transition environments between land and oceans. They are exclusive habitats for a broad range of living organisms, functioning as havens for biodiversity and providing several important ecological services that link terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. Humans living in coastal zones have been strongly dependent on these ecosystems as a source of food, physical protection against storms and advancing sea, and a range of human activities that generate economic income. Notwithstanding, the intensification of human activities in coastal areas of the recent decades, as well as the global climatic changes and coastal erosion processes of the present, have had detrimental impacts on these environments. Maintaining the structural and functional integrity of these environments and recovering an ecological balance or mitigating disturbances in systems under the influence of such stressors are complex tasks, only possible t

This book presents the latest solutions in fuel cell (FC) and renewable energy implementation in mobile and stationary applications. The implementation of advanced energy management and optimization strategies are detailed for fuel cell and renewable microgrids, and for the multi-FC stack architecture of FC/electric vehicles to enhance the reliability of these systems and to reduce the costs related to energy production and maintenance. Cyber-security methods based on blockchain technology to increase the resilience of FC renewable hybrid microgrids are also presented. Therefore, this book is for all readers interested in these challenging directions of research. Related Books Advanced Modeling, Control, and Optimization Methods in Power Hybrid Systems - 2021 Engineering Efficiency and Sustainability of the Distributed Renewable Hybrid Power Systems Based on the Energy Internet, Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Engineering Optimal Control of Hybrid Systems and Renewable Ene

This book explores sustainable urban development, addressing the challenges and opportunities encountered in the 21st century. It addresses topics such as resilience, blockchain architecture, and green roofs, offering insights into urban challenges and opportunities. The research provides innovative strategies and best practices for sustainable, equitable, and resilient urban communities. The collection emphasizes stakeholder integration, community engagement, and the importance of addressing specific challenges faced by vulnerable populations. As a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students, this publication aims to foster informed conversations about the future of urban planning and design, and inspire further research and dialogue on sustainable urban development, paving the way for more sustainable urban communities worldwide. Related Books Planning, Development and Management of Sustainable Cities Biology & Life Sciences ... State of the Art an

In many parts of the world, freshwater is a subject of frequent and intense large-scale disturbances. Pollution, water withdrawal, alteration of freshwater flows, road construction, aquifer mining, surface water diversion, desertification, wetland drainage, soil erosion in agriculture, deforestation, and dam building have led to some irreversible species losses and severe changes in community compositions of freshwater ecosystems. Pollution represents one of the most relevant impacts on freshwater environments, ranging from surface water bodies—such as springs, streams, rivers, lakes, and intermittent waterbodies—to groundwater and transitional habitats between surface waters and groundwaters. The origins and fates of pollutants are different and depend on various pollutants, including fertilizers with pesticides in agricultural areas, heavy metals, chlorinated organic compounds, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are predominantly derived from industrial and urban set

Major concerns regarding health and the environment are at the heart of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Sustainable Development Goals. Now more than ever, humanity is called upon to take action to protect the environment and public health. The environment in which we live is the most vital factor for our health and well-being. Human activities have significant impacts on the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and even outer space. Biological, chemical, and physical risk factors are part of our everyday lives, and scientific research continuously faces challenges to understand and mitigate these interactions to make life on Earth more sustainable. The sustainability of human societies and the biodiversity that supports them requires the responsible supervision of natural resources, including the development of technologies and regulations. Related Books Energy Efficiency, Environment and Health Public Health & Healthcare ... Energy

This Reprint brings together different perspectives on sustainable energy transitions, highlighting the importance of integrating social, technological, and spatial approaches. The papers explore key themes such as user behaviour in residential energy use, renewable energy communities, smart cities and buildings, energy modelling at the urban scale, and the role of critical raw materials in long-term planning. The contributions included in the volume support the identification of multiple strategies and research lines for the future of the topic, from bottom-up strategies to innovative storage systems and building retrofits. One of the main aspects emphasized is the need for systemic thinking and multi-scalar coordination across levels and techniques. It provides a critical perspective into how urban environments, infrastructures, and citizen engagement can interact to accelerate decarbonization and support more resilient and inclusive energy systems.

Nature is an inexhaustible source of biologically active substances, and interest in their research will always be relevant, regardless of whether new molecules will be discovered or new activities of already known compounds will be proven. For centuries, people have used the bounty of nature in the areas they inhabited, both for food and medicine. Today, the borders have taken on another dimension, and the accumulated knowledge about the benefits of natural products is becoming available to many more people around the world. From an ecological point of view, it is extremely important to recover waste from agriculture and the food sector, which is a potential source of biologically important molecules. Modern science allows studying the metabolism of compounds of natural origin at the cellular level, modifying natural molecules in order to obtain derivatives with better activity or lower toxicity, and conducting in-depth research on a wide range of pharmacological effects. Therefore, this Special Issue of Molecules presents the latest advances in the isolation, identification of new molecules from natural sources, biological effects of plant extracts and essential oils, and  utilization of waste products.

This Special Issue on Heritage Tourism and Sustainable City Dynamics explores the intersection of cultural heritage, tourism, and sustainability through twelve diverse articles. These contributions address themes such as post-COVID-19 resilience in the hotel sector, environmentally responsible behaviour in heritage tourism, and innovative frameworks for urban heritage management. Case studies span globally significant sites, including the Spanish Civil War anti-aircraft shelters, earthen architecture in the Iberian Peninsula, A Plan to Safeguard the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Guano’s Knotted Carpet Weaving Tradition in Ecuador, and Norwegian World Heritage Sites. Articles also examine green tourism's impact on community attachment in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, the economic role of Raymi Llaqta in Peru, and visitor satisfaction at Córdoba's Fiesta de los Patios. Global analyses investigate the comparative advantage of heritage tourism from 2011 to 2022 and new dimensions in religious tourism in Nessebar, Bulgaria. A notable focus is balancing preservation with tourism in Porto, Portugal, and leveraging sustainable practices. These studies highlight the role of heritage in fostering resilience, cultural identity, and sustainable urban development, offering actionable insights for managing challenges in a rapidly evolving tourism landscape. The twelve articles are authored by a group of thirty-five authors. These represent ten countries—Spain, Portugal, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Peru, Ecuador, Hungary, Egypt, and Indonesia—with cross-country collaboration on some articles.

Enhancing social and economic development while preserving nature is one of the major challenges for humankind in the current century. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment showed an alarming degradation of ecosystems and exacerbated poverty for many groups of people across the world due to unprecedented changes in ecosystems caused by human activities in the 20th century. Sustainable Rural Development is key to maintaining active local communities in rural and semi-natural areas, avoiding depopulation, and preserving high-ecological-value sites, including protected areas. Establishing protected areas is the most common strategy to preserve biodiversity around the world with the advantage of promoting the supply of ecosystem services. However, depending how it affects economic opportunities and the access to natural resources, it can either attract or repel human settlements. The convergence of development and conservation requires decision-making processes capable of aligning the need

Forests are extremely valuable ecosystems that are associated with a number of ecosystem services of significant importance for human wellbeing, with biodiversity being among the most highly desired of them. However, global forests currently face multifarious and often contradicting challenges. In Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the abandonment of land, which is associated with socioeconomic changes during the 20th century, provides an opportunity for degraded or even damaged forests to recover and reoccupy their pre-human areas. While this may result in a significant increase in forest cover and a decrease in forest fragmentation, it may also lead to an increased degree of landscape homogeneity with negative impacts on local biodiversity. If the extensive deforestation of the globally important tropical forests and land conversion of agriculture continues to occur, it will threaten the long-term sustainability of these biodiversity hotspots. This deforestation often occurs at large spatial scales without necessarily ensuring significant economic benefits, while the loss of habitats and biodiversity is undoubtedly huge.  All the above issues stress the need for sustainable forest management and for reconciling land management and socioeconomic development with the need for conserving the global biodiversity at all levels from genetic variants, including species, populations and ecosystems. In this Special Issue, we present a collection of state-of-the-art studies on various aspects of forest biodiversity conservation and protection.

Biomarkers of environmental toxicants are measures of exposures, some of which can serve to assess disease risk and inter-individual susceptibilities. Metabolites, protein and DNA adducts also serve to elucidate the mechanisms of the bioactivation and detoxication of reactive toxicant intermediates. Some environmental chemicals act as modulators of gene and protein activity, and induce the dysbiosis of the microbiome, which impacts the metabolome and overall health. In this Special Issue on “Biomarkers of Environmental Toxicants”, review articles and original research studies are featured, covering the latest bioanalytical, biochemical and mass spectrometry-based technologies, to monitor exposures through targeted and non-targeted methods, and mechanistic studies that examine the biological effects of environmental toxicants in cells and humans. Diverse topics, such as exposome, microbiome, DNA/protein adducts and t-RNA modifications, as well as important environment toxicants, includ

This book examines applied studies contributing to the issues of financial markets and sustainable economy in conditions of COVID-19 pandemic. All studies in this book applied complex models with quantitative data in the areas of finance, macro and sustainable economy, as well as business and management, to express the main issues of the financial–economic universe during the pandemic crisis. Some of the studies offer possible solutions in the sustainable post-COVID era. This book is also of particular interest in relation to the green economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Related Books The Impact of COVID-19 on Financial Markets and the Real Economy Business & Economics Life in the Time of a Pandemic Public Health & Healthcare ... The Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Energy Economics and Markets in Central and Eastern Europe Business & Economics Challenges of Post-COVID-19 for a Sustainable Development Society Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on

The administration of land tenure, value, and use has changed significantly over recent decades. Change has been driven by efforts to better balance rural and urban land use, improve recognition of previously informal land rights in certain geographical regions, and to acknowledge the social and cultural values relating to land. These changes have been underpinned by the new wave of technological innovations that have expanded the ways and means of performing land administration. Running parallel to these seemingly positive developments are the land-related societal problems including land tenure insecurity, food shortages, slum formation, and environmental degradation. This edited volume brings together articles spanning innovative approaches to securing land tenure, land valuation, and the planning of land use, with the aim of deepening the understanding of the nexus between societal challenges and land, and further enriching the knowledge on how current technological advances can

Over the past few decades, the risks associated with natural hazards have increased significantly due to changes in climate as well as land use/land cover (LULC), both of which are mainly driven by anthropic pressure on landscapes, such as urbanization, forest management practices, agricultural practices, and similar processes. Climate and LULC change contribute significantly to variations in the frequency, variability, and magnitude of natural hazards, including floods, landslides, erosion, and others.  Constant progress in remote sensing (RS) enables the rapid collection of high-quality and accurate information on landscape characteristics, particularly LULC. Geographic information systems (GIS), in turn, provide tools for processing, modeling, analyzing, and synthesizing spatial data. Together, RS and GIS play an essential role in natural hazards mapping, monitoring, and assessment. Therefore, the focus of this Special Issue was to gather and present current knowledge on the interactions between LULC and natural hazards and to examine the impacts of LULC changes and scenarios on the occurrence of natural hazards, as well as vice versa—the impacts of natural hazards on LULC and society—across various spatial scales, from local to global. Addressing these issues has the potential to support risk managers and decision-makers in adopting appropriate mitigation and adaptation actions, as well as resilient preparedness and response strategies.

At present, the prevention of groundwater pollution is of paramount importance as this resource is decreasing globally. To achieve this goal, the sources and mechanisms of pollution must be identified by scientists and engineers, taking advantage of the technology evolution. This alone, however, is not enough; knowledge about this issue needs to be disseminated. This is the purpose of this Special Issue, “Groundwater Pollution: Sources, Mechanisms, and Prevention”. This Reprint presents synchronous and innovative methods and techniques developed worldwide in the field of groundwater pollution. Eleven papers were published focusing on monitoring, remote sensing, simulation and optimization, human health risk assessment, climate change impact, and remediation. The contribution of the published manuscripts is not limited to their results but extends to proposals for further research and future improvements.

Many advanced control methods have been proposed in the past to improve the operation of buildings. This reprint collected publications dealing with advanced control solutions implemented in existing buildings to improve their performance. Moreover, it gathers promising methodologies to facilitate the adoption of advanced control solutions in the building control industry. It includes virtual sensing for indoor air pollutants, novel models to predict indoor air temperature as well as building heating and cooling loads; and model-based controls, predictive controls, and predictive maintenance algorithms to optimize setpoint tracking and the operation of building heating and cooling systems. Related Books New Directions on Model Predictive Control Engineering Building Energy Performance Modelling and Simulation Engineering Study on Building Energy Efficiency Related to Simulation Models Engineering Advanced Digital, Modeling and Control Applies into Various Processes Computer Science

Selected studies focussing on various aspects of the evaluation of marine larval settlement on both natural and artificial surfaces, including those on pro-fouling and anti-fouling systems, have been collected for advancing our understanding of larvae–surface interactions. Biofouling is a large problem worldwide since it often causes severe damage to submerged structures, but it also leads to the formation of a well-structured community on natural hard substrata characterised by ecological succession and can be considered an important source of biodiversity. Therefore, the influence of a substratum’s physico-chemical interactions on the settlement of various organisms of the macrofouling community represents an essential factor in choosing an appropriate artificial surface for application in a variety of coastal marine ecosystems. This reprint will certainly be greatly beneficial with respect to addressing the challenges of future innovative eco-engineering designs, yielding the best

Earthen sites are ancient sites that hold significant historical, cultural, and scientific value, with earth serving as the primary building material. As places of great importance for civilization, earthen sites not only account for a large proportion of cultural heritage resources but also contain extremely rich historical information. They form an important basis for studying the origin and development of civilization and have great historical, scientific, and artistic value. The protection of earthen sites has developed into a multidisciplinary field combining physics, chemistry, archaeology, geology, humanities, and art. Relevant research fields encompass protection concepts, value interpretation, disease mechanisms, protection technologies, preventive protection, and the digitization of cultural relics. As a result, numerous excellent scientific research results have been obtained. This Reprint primarily covers Spain, Malaysia, and China, as well as specific urban case studies from Zhuhai City, Lishui City, Quanzhou City, and Weiyuan City. These articles cover fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) technology, surface micro-chemical analysis, microbial diversity analysis, erosion resistance testing, lightweight crack detection and independent physical simulation, durability analysis, biocrust analysis, erosion resistance mechanisms, and composite biofilm ecological protection technology. This Reprint provides a reference for empirical analyses of conservation techniques for earthen sites across cities of different scales and types.

This Special Issue, “Green and Sustainable Solvents II: A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Giovanni Sindona on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday”, aims to collect and publish recent advances in this interdisciplinary area. Research articles as well as reviews dealing with innovative techniques, alternative solvents, byproduct valorization, and new routes for the use of green solvents in industrial applications are of interest. Manuscripts on how green solvents contribute to the development of natural products research are welcome. Molecules is very pleased to host this Special Issue, and invites scientists to submit their original contributions. Related Books Recent Advances in Green Solvents Chemistry & Materials Science Green Separation and Purification Technology Chemistry & Materials Science Ionic Liquids and Deep Eutectic Solvents: Greener Approaches for Sustainable Chemistry Chemistry & Materials Science Development of Alternative Green Sample Preparation Techniques Chemistr

This Special Issue contains an editorial and ten papers on a range of fundamental and applied topics within the area of spider ecology and behaviour with one paper on biological control, seven papers on fundamental topics within the broad areas of ecology and behaviour, and two papers focusing on novel methodologies for studying spider behaviour. Related Books The Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Behaviour of Mites Biology & Life Sciences Phylogenomic, Biogeographic, and Evolutionary Research Trends in Arachnology Biology & Life Sciences Shark Ecology Biology & Life Sciences Silkworm and Silk: Traditional and Innovative Applications Biology & Life Sciences Conservation and Ecology of Raptors Biology & Life Sciences The recommendations have been generated using an AI system. About: About MDPI Books Advisory Board Legal Information: MDPI Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions Terms of Use Accessibility Sales: Order and Delivery Indexing and Distribution Further Information: B

Water is very important for the existence of living things. Several studies have found that clean water laden with toxic chemical (heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, microplastics, pesticide residues, and perfluorooctanoic acid), radiological (radioactive elements such as uranium, cesium, and plutonium), and microbiological (bacteria, viruses, and protozoa) contaminants through unintentional and intentional means can be detrimental to living things when consumed. These contaminants could occur via anthropogenic or natural activities. Therefore, to prevent pollution and to limit the presence of conventional and emerging contaminants in various sources of water, it is imperative to devise water adaptive strategies to remediate water pollution in varied water sources, especially for climate-related pollution triggers, and to conduct routine water quality monitoring, assessment, and security evaluation to determine its useability (suitability) and associated health risks. This Special Issue

River discharge is a fundamental hydrologic quantity that summarizes how a watershed transforms the input of precipitation into output as channelized streamflow. Accurate discharge measurements are critical for a range of applications including water supply, navigation, recreation, management of in-stream habitat, and the prediction and monitoring of floods and droughts. However, the traditional stream gage networks that provide such data are sparse and declining. Remote sensing represents an appealing alternative for obtaining streamflow information. Potential advantages include greater efficiency, expanded coverage, increased measurement frequency, lower cost and reduced risk to field personnel. In addition, remote sensing provides opportunities to examine long river segments with continuous coverage and high spatial resolution. To realize these benefits, research must focus on the remote measurement of flow velocity, channel geometry and their product: river discharge. This Special