scholarly journals Maps of light pollution in odd places

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Jari Lyytimaki
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Societal Implications ◽  
Light Pollution ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The Public ◽  
Management Actions ◽  
Policy Awareness ◽  
Pollution Research ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Multiple Uses

Advances in remote sensing have proved to be highly valuable for the light pollution research and awareness raising. Maps based on night time satellite data can be used in communication campaigns aimed to improve the public and policy awareness about the extent and effects of light pollution and to justify appropriate management actions. However, visually appealing maps are also used in other communication settings. This article reviews different uses of light pollution maps and discusses the societal implications such uses. Based on examples of light pollution maps in different communication settings not directly related to light pollution debate the review proposes that the relatively wide popularity of light pollution maps may strengthen the impressions of artificially illuminated night environment as the normal baseline for human experience. This contributes to the loss of experience of the natural darkness possibly leading to generational amnesia complicating the management of light pollution. Multiple uses of light pollution maps and other visualizations should be taken into account when campaigns and policies aimed to support sustainable lighting are planned and implemented.

scholarly journals Implementation and Simulation of Real Load Shifting Scenarios Based on a Flexibility Price Market Strategy–The Italian Residential Sector as a Case Study

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 3080
Author(s):  
Francesco Mancini ◽  
Jacopo Cimaglia ◽  
Gianluigi Lo Lo Basso ◽  
Sabrina Romano
Keyword(s):  
Production Systems ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Load Shifting ◽  
Market Strategy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Management Actions ◽  
Flexible Loads ◽  
Typical Day ◽  
Power And Energy

This work aims to evaluate the Flexibility Potential that a residential household can effectively provide to the public grid for participating in a Demand Response activity. In detail, by using 14 dwellings electrical data collection, an algorithm to simulate the Load Shifting activity over the daytime is implemented. That algorithm is applied to different scenarios having considered the addition of several technical constraints on the end users’ devices. In such a way, more realistic demand-side management actions are implemented in order to assess the Flexibility Potential deriving from the loads shifting. Basically, by performing simulations it is possible to investigate how the household appliances real operating conditions can reduce the theoretical Flexibility Potential extent. Starting from a Flexibility Price-Market-based Strategy, this work simulates the shifting over the day and night-time of some flexible loads, i.e., the shiftable and the storable ones. Specifically, all instants where load curtailments and enhancements occur over the typical day, the flexibility strategy effectiveness in terms of percentage, the power and energy that are potentially flexible, are evaluated. All the simulations are performed only for residential consumers to evaluate the actual dwellings Flexibility Potential in the absence of any electrical storage and production systems. The outcomes of these simulations show an average Theoretical Flexibility reduction, which is calculated as the fraction of appliances’ cycles shifting over the total ones, equal to 53%, instead of 66%; in a single dwelling, a maximum variation equal to 29% has been registered. In the end, the monthly average shifted energy per dwellings decreases from 27 to 18 kWh, entailing 32.5% off.

scholarly journals Quantifying the Impact of Light Pollution on Sea Turtle Nesting Using Ground-Based Imagery

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1785
Author(s):  
James Vandersteen ◽  
Salit Kark ◽  
Karina Sorrell ◽  
Noam Levin
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Cloud Cover ◽  
Sea Turtle ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Variation ◽  
Light Pollution ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Remote Sensing Techniques ◽  
The Impact

Remote sensing of anthropogenic light has substantial potential to quantify light pollution levels and understand its impact on a wide range of taxa. Currently, the use of space-borne night-time sensors for measuring the actual light pollution that animals experience is limited. This is because most night-time satellite imagery and space-borne sensors measure the light that is emitted or reflected upwards, rather than horizontally, which is often the light that is primarily perceived by animals. Therefore, there is an important need for developing and testing ground-based remote sensing techniques and methods. In this study, we aimed to address this gap by examining the potential of ground photography to quantify the actual light pollution perceived by animals, using sea turtles as a case study. We conducted detailed ground measurements of night-time brightness around the coast of Heron Island, a coral cay in the southern Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and an important sea turtle rookery, using a calibrated DSLR Canon camera with an 8 mm fish-eye lens. The resulting hemispheric photographs were processed using the newly developed Sky Quality Camera (SQC) software to extract brightness metrics. Furthermore, we quantified the factors determining the spatial and temporal variation in night-time brightness as a function of environmental factors (e.g., moon light, cloud cover, and land cover) and anthropogenic features (e.g., artificial light sources and built-up areas). We found that over 80% of the variation in night-time brightness was explained by the percentage of the moon illuminated, moon altitude, as well as cloud cover. Anthropogenic and geographic factors (e.g., artificial lighting and the percentage of visible sky) were especially important in explaining the remaining variation in measured brightness under moonless conditions. Night-time brightness variables, land cover, and rock presence together explained over 60% of the variation in sea turtle nest locations along the coastline of Heron Island, with more nests found in areas of lower light pollution. The methods we developed enabled us to overcome the limitations of commonly used ground/space borne remote sensing techniques, which are not well suited for measuring the light pollution to which animals are exposed. The findings of this study demonstrate the applicability of ground-based remote sensing techniques in accurately and efficiently measuring night-time brightness to enhance our understanding of ecological light pollution.

scholarly journals Light Pollution: Changing the Situation to Everyone's Advantage

2001 ◽  
Vol 196 ◽  
pp. 33-38
Author(s):  
David L. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Light Pollution ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Universe

There is no question of the need for outdoor lighting to improve the effectiveness of our night-time environment. However, too much of the lighting installed to try to meet this need actually compromises the purpose, and it too often adversely affects the night-time environment, including our view of the stars and of the Universe above us. This urban sky glow severe impacts on all of astronomy, amateur and professional, as well as those of the public who enjoy and profit by the beauty offered by a prime dark sky. In the present paper, I review the issues involved and suggest guidelines to minimize these negative aspects of poor night-time lighting. With good outdoor lighting we all win.

scholarly journals RECOGNITION OF URBAN FUNCTIONAL REGIONS AT STREET SCALE BASED ON LJ1-01 NIGHT-TIME LIGHT REMOTE SENSING AND MOBILE BIG DATA

2019 ◽  
Vol IV-4/W9 ◽  
pp. 119-124
Author(s):  
Q. Zhou ◽  
Y. Zhang ◽  
D. Gao ◽  
B. Sun
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Remote Sensing Data ◽  
Pollution Monitoring ◽  
Light Pollution ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Sensing Data ◽  
Functional Regions ◽  
Mobile Big Data

Abstract. Night-time light (NTL) remote sensing data has been widely used in the analysis of human activities at night for a large extent, such as light pollution monitoring and recognition of urban functional regions. In most previous studies, the spatial resolutions of NTL remote sensing data are rather low (e.g., 500 m or coarser). Besides, remote sensing classification of land use rather than land cover types is often a hard task. Due to the reasons, it is difficult to meet the demand of urban refined management. In this study, mobile big data and Luojia1-01 (LJ1-01) NTL remote sensing satellite data with higher spatial resolution are adopted for extracting urban functional regions at the street-level scale. Taking Shenzhen city as a case, mobile big data (i.e., the volume of mobile devices) with the accuracy of approximate 150 m (i.e., 7-bit GeoHash encoding format) is integrated with NTL remote sensing data. After a hot spot analysis, the correlation between the two types of data are analysed. The typical supervised classification algorithms including KNN, SVM and random forest are used to distinguish urban functional regions, which are represented by five types, namely residential, business and commercial, industrial, transportation and other areas. The results show the effectiveness in extracting land use types in cities by combination of Luojia1-01 night-time light remote sensing and mobile big data. This study provides a basis for monitoring night light pollution of residential area, urban planning and the construction of smart cities.

scholarly journals Night-Time Light Remote Sensing Mapping: Construction and Analysis of Ethnic Minority Development Index

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2129
Author(s):  
Fei Zhao ◽  
Lu Song ◽  
Zhiyan Peng ◽  
Jianqin Yang ◽  
Guize Luan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Population Data ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Entire Study ◽  
Development Index ◽  
Remote Sensing Mapping ◽  
Entire Study Area

Using toponym data, population data, and night-time light data, we visualized the development index of the Yi, Wa, Zhuang, Naxi, Hani, and Dai ethnic groups on ArcGIS as well as the distribution of 25 ethnic minorities in the study area. First, we extracted the toponym data of 25 ethnic minorities in the study area, combined with night-time light data and the population proportion data of each ethnic group, then we obtained the development index of each ethnic group in the study area. We compared the development indexes of the Yi, Wa, Zhuang, Naxi, Hani, and Dai ethnic groups with higher development indexes. The results show that the Yi nationality’s development index was the highest, reaching 28.86 (with two decimal places), and the Dai nationality’s development index was the lowest (15.22). The areas with the highest minority development index were concentrated in the core area of the minority development, and the size varied with the minority’s distance. According to the distribution of ethnic minorities, we found that the Yi ethnic group was distributed in almost the entire study area, while other ethnic minorities had obvious geographical distribution characteristics, and there were multiple ethnic minorities living together. This research is of great significance to the cultural protection of ethnic minorities, the development of ethnic minorities, and the remote sensing mapping of lights at night.

scholarly journals A Disease Control-Oriented Land Cover Land Use Map for Myanmar

Data ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Dong Chen ◽  
Varada Shevade ◽  
Allison Baer ◽  
Jiaying He ◽  
Amanda Hoffman-Hall ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Population Distribution ◽  
Large Spatial Scale ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Coverage ◽  
Vector Borne ◽  
Do So ◽  
Control And Eradication

Malaria is a serious infectious disease that leads to massive casualties globally. Myanmar is a key battleground for the global fight against malaria because it is where the emergence of drug-resistant malaria parasites has been documented. Controlling the spread of malaria in Myanmar thus carries global significance, because the failure to do so would lead to devastating consequences in vast areas where malaria is prevalent in tropical/subtropical regions around the world. Thanks to its wide and consistent spatial coverage, remote sensing has become increasingly used in the public health domain. Specifically, remote sensing-based land cover/land use (LCLU) maps present a powerful tool that provides critical information on population distribution and on the potential human-vector interactions interfaces on a large spatial scale. Here, we present a 30-meter LCLU map that was created specifically for the malaria control and eradication efforts in Myanmar. This bottom-up approach can be modified and customized to other vector-borne infectious diseases in Myanmar or other Southeastern Asian countries.

Management of Publicly Owned Forests

1988 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Baskerville
Keyword(s):  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Management Actions ◽  
Proper Form ◽  
The People ◽  
Resource Dynamics ◽  
Industrial Use ◽  
Publicly Owned ◽  
Over Exploitation ◽  
Public Forests

For two reasons, planning and implementing management for publicly-owned forests is conducted in an environment that almost guarantees failure. First, group ownership is associated with a strong tendency towards over-exploitation (the tragedy of the commons), and second public ownership entails a heavy administrative overhead.The public allows industry to use publicly-owned forests and spends the revenue from exploitation on roads, schools health care, unemployment insurance and so on. The public owners are unwilling to limit industrial use of the forest to keep it in balance with the productive capacity of the forests because this would limit the benefits they receive and because they do not as individuals experience the shared cost of exploitation. Meanwhile, the people who own 90% of Canada's forests have until recently seen fit to spend only 5% of the taxes derived from their industrial use for maintaining their productive capacity. In effect the people of Canada are slum landlords. Like slum landlords, they have not returned to their properties enough money for their basic maintenance. The biggest problem in managing our public forests is in overcoming the owners' resistance to spending enough of the money generated by the forests to manage them in a technically adequate way over long period of time.The second major problem is the tendency of the agencies managing publicly-owned forests to shift from managing the forest to managing its use. This arises partly from the way in which the owners (the public) participate in the management process and partly because public money is used for management.The public owns the resource and must set goals. Unfortunately because they are so remote from the property and their understanding of resource dynamics is so trivial, the public tend to state vague goals accompanied by specific management actions with little thought to the cause/effect connections between them. Technically designed management tends to be over-ridden by socially comfortable solutions that do not solve the real management problems existing in the woods.Use of public funds necessitates creating a paper trail satisfactory to auditors. Consequently professionals responsible for managing the public forests find themselves spending more and more time ensuring that the administrative reporting of actions taken is up to date and in the proper form, and less and less time ensuring that the actions taken are the technically right ones to achieve the stated goals in the forest.

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