| 1. |
- Beven, Keith, et al.
(författare)
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Epistemic uncertainties and natural hazard risk assessment - Part 1 : A review of different natural hazard areas
- 2018
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Ingår i: Natural hazards and earth system sciences. - : COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH. - 1561-8633 .- 1684-9981. ; 18:10, s. 2741-2768
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper discusses how epistemic uncertainties are currently considered in the most widely occurring natural hazard areas, including floods, landslides and debris flows, dam safety, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic ash clouds and pyroclastic flows, and wind storms. Our aim is to provide an overview of the types of epistemic uncertainty in the analysis of these natural hazards and to discuss how they have been treated so far to bring out some commonalities and differences. The breadth of our study makes it difficult to go into great detail on each aspect covered here; hence the focus lies on providing an overview and on citing key literature. We find that in current probabilistic approaches to the problem, uncertainties are all too often treated as if, at some fundamental level, they are aleatory in nature. This can be a tempting choice when knowledge of more complex structures is difficult to determine but not acknowledging the epistemic nature of many sources of uncertainty will compromise any risk analysis. We do not imply that probabilistic uncertainty estimation necessarily ignores the epistemic nature of uncertainties in natural hazards; expert elicitation for example can be set within a probabilistic framework to do just that. However, we suggest that the use of simple aleatory distributional models, common in current practice, will underestimate the potential variability in assessing hazards, consequences, and risks. A commonality across all approaches is that every analysis is necessarily conditional on the assumptions made about the nature of the sources of epistemic uncertainty. It is therefore important to record the assumptions made and to evaluate their impact on the uncertainty estimate. Additional guidelines for good practice based on this review are suggested in the companion paper (Part 2).
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| 2. |
- Beven, Keith, et al.
(författare)
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Epistemic uncertainties and natural hazard risk assessment - Part 2 : What should constitute good practice?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Natural hazards and earth system sciences. - : COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH. - 1561-8633 .- 1684-9981. ; 18:10, s. 2769-2783
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Part 1 of this paper has discussed the uncertainties arising from gaps in knowledge or limited understanding of the processes involved in different natural hazard areas. Such deficits may include uncertainties about frequencies, process representations, parameters, present and future boundary conditions, consequences and impacts, and the meaning of observations in evaluating simulation models. These are the epistemic uncertainties that can be difficult to constrain, especially in terms of event or scenario probabilities, even as elicited probabilities rationalized on the basis of expert judgements. This paper reviews the issues raised by trying to quantify the effects of epistemic uncertainties. Such scientific uncertainties might have significant influence on decisions made, say, for risk management, so it is important to examine the sensitivity of such decisions to different feasible sets of assumptions, to communicate the meaning of associated uncertainty estimates, and to provide an audit trail for the analysis. A conceptual framework for good practice in dealing with epistemic uncertainties is outlined and the implications of applying the principles to natural hazard assessments are discussed. Six stages are recognized, with recommendations at each stage as follows: (1) framing the analysis, preferably with input from potential users; (2) evaluating the available data for epistemic uncertainties, especially when they might lead to inconsistencies; (3) eliciting information on sources of uncertainty from experts; (4) defining a workflow that will give reliable and accurate results; (5) assessing robustness to uncertainty, including the impact on any decisions that are dependent on the analysis; and (6) communicating the findings and meaning of the analysis to potential users, stakeholders, and decision makers. Visualizations are helpful in conveying the nature of the uncertainty outputs, while recognizing that the deeper epistemic uncertainties might not be readily amenable to visualizations.
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| 3. |
- Carville, N. Craig, et al.
(författare)
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Biocompatibility of ferroelectric lithium niobate and the influence of polarization charge on osteoblast proliferation and function
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Biomedical Materials Research. Part A. - : John Wiley and Sons. - 1549-3296 .- 1552-4965. ; 103:8, s. 2540-2548
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this work, the influence of substrate surface charge on in vitro osteoblast cell proliferation on ferroelectric lithium niobate (LN) crystal surfaces is investigated. LN has a spontaneous polarization along the z-axis and is thus characterized by positive and negative bound polarization charge at the +z and -z surfaces. Biocompatibility of LN was demonstrated via culturing and fluorescence imaging of MC3T3 osteoblast cells for up to 11 days. The cells showed enhanced proliferation rates and improved osteoblast function through mineral formation on the positively and negatively charged LN surfaces compared to electrostatically neutral x-cut LN and a glass cover slip control. These results highlight the potential of LN as a template for investigating the role of charge on cellular processes.
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| 4. |
- Stephens, Lucas, et al.
(författare)
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Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use
- 2019
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Ingår i: Science. - : American Association for the Advancement of Science. - 0036-8075 .- 1095-9203. ; 365:6456, s. 897-902
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth’s surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts). Hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists transformed the face of Earth earlier and to a greater extent than has been widely appreciated, a transformation that was essentially global by 3000 years before the present.Science, this issue p. 897; see also p. 865Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth’s transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.
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