Publications associées à Sensing the air we breathe - The OpenSense Zurich dataset

Overview of the Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) Field Experiment

Roman Pohorsky, Julia Schmale, Athanasios Nenes, Sukriti Kapur, Andrea Baccarini

The Alaskan Layered Pollution And Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) field experiment was a collaborative study designed to improve understanding of pollution sources and chemical processes during winter (cold climate and low-photochemical activity), to investigat ...

2024

Edible Soft Actuators based on Konjac Glucomannan for Underwater Operation

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Ryo Kanno, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Soft robots are being increasingly developed and deployed for underwater applications such as exploration, monitoring, and rescue owing to their innate compliance, mechanical and chemical stability, and waterproof properties. However, they are still predom ...

2024

Organ-specific biotransformation in salmonids: Insight into intrinsic enzyme activity and biotransformation of three micropollutants

Kristin Schirmer, Juliane Hollender

Aquatic ecosystems continue to be threatened by chemical pollution. To what extent organisms are able to cope with chemical exposure depends on their ability to display mechanisms of defense across different organs. Among these mechanisms, biotransformatio ...

Elsevier2024

Addressing chemical pollution in biodiversity research

Kristin Schirmer, Colette vom Berg, Ahmed Tlili

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution are planetary-scale emergencies requiring urgent mitigation actions. As these "triple crises" are deeply interlinked, they need to be tackled in an integrative manner. However, while climate change ...

WILEY2023

Estimating pollution spread in water networks as a Schrödinger bridge problem with partial information

Isabel Haasler

Incidents where water networks are contaminated with microorganisms or pollutants can result in a large number of infected or ill persons, and it is therefore important to quickly detect, localize and estimate the spread and source of the contamination. In ...

Elsevier2023

An innovative autonomous robotic system for on-site detection of heavy metal pollution plumes in surface water

Alexander Haider, Qiuyue Yang, Bhawna Nagar

Smart monitoring has been studied and developed in recent years to create faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly on-site methods. The present study describes an innovative technology for investigative monitoring of heavy metal pollution (Cu and Pb) in sur ...

SPRINGER2022

Mask to identify polluted periods during the Arctic Ocean 2018 expedition

Julia Schmale, Andrea Baccarini

Aerosol and trace gas measurements are strongly affected by the ship exhaust and other human activities (e.g., helicopter flights). Therefore, it is important to discriminate between clean and polluted periods. This mask provides an indication of clean per ...

2020

Effect thresholds of metals in stream sediments based on in situ oligochaete communities

Maria del Carmen Casado Martinez, Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Régis Lionel Vivien

Aquatic oligochaetes, comprising a large number of species showing various degrees of resistance to chemical pollution, are recognized as valuable bioindicators of sediments’ quality. In the Geneva area (Switzerland), oligochaete tools were previously test ...

2020

Overview: Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments (iCUPE) – concept and initial results

Jenny Thomas, Julia Schmale, Jakob Boyd Pernov, Imad El Haddad

The role of polar regions is increasing in terms of megatrends such as globalization, new transport routes, demography, and the use of natural resources with consequent effects on regional and transported pollutant concentrations. We set up the ERA-PLANET ...

Copernicus Publications2020

Sustainable, Reshapable Surfactant-Polyelectrolyte Plastics Employing Water as a Plasticizer

Paul Joseph Dyson, Zhaofu Fei, Antoine Philippe Van Muyden, Zhangjun Huang, Haiyan Jia

Natural polymers such as those present in foods contain abundant noncovalent intra- and intermolecular interactions, notably hydrogen bonds, which make them rigid when dry, but on exposure to water soften, due to disruption of these interactions. This soft ...

2019

Inactivation of waterborne viruses by ozone: Kinetics and mechanisms

Camille Wolf

The growing world population, in conjunction with climate change, cases the global water de-mand to increase. It is, therefore, crucial to protect existing water resources from chemical pollution and contamination by pathogens. An increasingly popular stra ...

EPFL2019

Evidence of traffic-generated air pollution in Havana

François Golay, Alain Clappier, Jessie Madrazo Bacallao

In Havana, transport is blamed as a likely source of pollution issues. which is usually supported on arguments referring to a vehicle fleet mainly made of old cars (i.e., most models are American from the 1950s or Russian from the 1980s) with poor technica ...

2019

Assessment of the effects of wastewater treatment plant effluents on receiving streams using oligochaete communities of the porous matrix

Régis Lionel Vivien

Human activities can disturb the natural dynamics of exchanges between surface water and groundwater in rivers. Such exchanges contribute to the self-purification of the environment and an excess of infiltration can lead to contamination of groundwater. In ...

2019

Alternative Methods for Assessing Air Quality and Energy Strategies for Developing Countries: A Case Study on Cuba

Jessie Madrazo Bacallao

The worldwide increasing energy consumption is mainly based on fossil fuel which leads to a large number of environmental problems. Indeed, the combustion of fossil fuels releases into the atmosphere different greenhouse gases and harmful pollutants which ...

EPFL2018

Physical effects of thermal pollution in lakes

Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard

Anthropogenic heat emissions into inland waters influence water temperature and affect stratification, heat and nutrient fluxes, deep water renewal, and biota. Given the increased thermal stress on these systems by growing cooling demands of riparian/coast ...

American Geophysical Union2017

Microengineered Electrochemical Tools for in-situ Monitoring of Marine Environment

Marianna Fighera

Measuring the concentration of different compounds in aquatic ecosystem and understanding their impact on the environment are some of the main objectives in the environmental monitoring field. Trace metals, nutrients, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), bio ...

EPFL2017

Mobile Sensor Networks for Air Quality Monitoring in Urban Settings

Adrian Arfire

With urban populations rapidly increasing and millions of deaths being attributed annually to air pollution, there is a critical need for a deeper understanding of urban air quality. The locality of urban emissions sources, and the specific topography of c ...

EPFL2016

Integrated stochastic modeling of pharmaceuticals in sewage networks

Pierre Claude Jean Queloz, Timothée Noé Pouchon, Sylvain Coutu

Pharmaceuticals and particularly antibiotics can harm sensitive aquatic species. Their occurrence in urban wastewater systems is the consequence of five successive processes: (i) ingestion of the substance, (ii) accumulation in the urine, (iii) excretion, ...

Springer Verlag2016