To minimize movement of tritium into surface waters at the Mixed Waste Management Facility at the Savannah River Site, tritiumcontaminated groundwater released to the surface along seeps in the hillside is being retained in a constructed pond and used to irrigate forest acreage that lies over the contaminated groundwater. Management of the application of tritium-contaminated irrigation water ne...

Precipitation that falls in a watershed undergoes three hydrological processes: evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and river runoff. Using the long-term average stream discharge of a watershed, one can estimate the long-term average evapotranspiration portion of the precipitation by using the precipitation minus the normalized river discharge. In addition, by partitioning the stream disc...

The “green” water footprint (GWF) of a product is often considered less important than the “blue” water footprint (BWF) as “green” water generally has a low, or even negligible, opportunity cost. However, when considering food, fibre and tree products, is not only a useful indicator of the total appropriation of a natural resource, but from a methodological perspective, blue water footprints ar...

The annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting has been operating for eight years; during this time, it has stimulated discussion about the role of ontologies and their associated technologies for structuring, sharing, analysing, and searching knowledge about biological systems. The format varies; usually, it has a mixture of talks and structured discussions such as panel sessions. It regularly draws a hund...

There is a strong need to map the OBO format to OWL and provide tools that enable end users to easily perform this translation. To fulfill this need, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology created the NCBO OBO to OWL mapping and a set of tools to perform the translations for the Protégé and OBO-Edit editors and for command line use. A group of OBO developers and OWL experts worked cooperat...

There is no single agreed definition of the term drylands. Two of the most widely accepted definitions are those of FAO and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD, 2000). FAO has defined drylands as those areas with a length of growing period (LGP) of 1–179 days (FAO, 2000a); this includes regions classified climatically as arid (Plate 1), semi-arid and dry subhumid. The...

The eighth annual Bio-Ontologies meeting was held on 24th June at ISMB 2005 in Detroit. Its principle aim over the years has been to build a community forum that brings together biologists and computer scientists to discuss the development and use of ontologies within the domain of biology. During this time, it has aimed to stimulate discussion about the role of Ontologies and their associated ...

Multiple linear regressions are used to relate average annual runoff to average annual rainfall and areal potential evapotranspiration (PET) using data from 213 catchments grouped according to location in six of the major Drainage Divisions of Australia. A method is presented for estimating daily runoff from daily rainfall data using the AWBM model, which self-calibrates its surface storage par...