Project description
Scaling relationships for risk assessment underpinned by overarching principles
Over recent decades, anthropogenic pressures on the environment have intensified, leading to over 100 000 pollutants, species, and sites requiring attention. Proper assessment tools are urgently needed to prioritise these environmental problems and select sustainable solutions. With this in mind, the ERC-funded PowerOfSize project will create a cross-disciplinary suite of mechanistic and statistical relationships for environmentally relevant parameters. Unlike existing models hindered by data gaps, PowerOfSize links parameters to size descriptors such as catchment area and organism weight. This approach aims to cover the emission of pollutants, their fate in catchments and cities, accumulation in organisms, and effects on communities. By identifying overarching scaling principles, PowerOfSize aspires to enhance our understanding and significantly reduce the data demands of environmental assessment tools.
Objective
Setting
Over the last decades, anthropogenic pressures on the environment have dramatically intensified and diversified. Nowadays, we have to deal with 100,000+ pollutants, species and sites. To set the right priorities among these environmental problems and to select the best alternatives among sustainable solutions, proper assessment tools are urgently needed.
Relevance
While several models are available, application to thousands of cases is severely limited by data gaps due to financial, ethical, disciplinary and other constraints. As an alternative, missing information can be obtained by linking parameters to size (e.g. catchment area, organism weight). While scaling has been proven valuable for a few parameters, relationships have been derived in a mono-disciplinary context only.
Objectives
Following the urgent scientific and societal needs, the overall aim of PowerOfSize is to obtain a cross-disciplinary suite of mechanistic and statistical relationships for environmentally relevant parameters (quantities) in assessment models as a function of size and other descriptors, underpinned by overarching scaling principles. Based on research gaps and policy priorities, we focus on pollutants, covering emission and fate in catchments and cities, accumulation in organisms and effects on communities.
Methods, expected results and impact
Based on information from reviews, databases and articles, we will derive empirical and theoretical relationships for rate, time, density and other quantities Y (parameters) as a function of city, catchment, organism and community size X, covering, e.g. water in catchments, materials in cities, blood in organisms and biomass in communities as well as the pollutants they generate, carry and degrade. Identifying overarching principles based on shared system characteristics (e.g. dimension), the integrated suite obtained 1) profoundly advances our understanding and 2) crucially reduces data-hungriness of assessment tools.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrologydrainage basins
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands