Soil erosion risk assessment using GIS and CORINE model: a case study from western Shiraz,Iran

This study employs the Coordination of Information on the Environment (CORINE) model with geographic information system to assess soil erosion risk for restoring and protecting areas within the Bonrod Zangane watershed, western Shiraz, Iran. Actual soil erosion risk was determined by combining two main parameters including potential soil erosion risk and vegetation cover. The potential soil erosion risk was generated by integrating soil erodibility, erosivity and slope parameters. Soil texture, depth and stoniness layers were overlaid to form a soil erodibility map. Modified Fournier index and Bagnouls–Gaussen aridity index were integrated to generate the erosivity layer. The slope classes also were generated from digital elevation model. In order to estimate vegetative land cover, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used. The raster-based layers were then integrated to produce erosion risk map. The results showed that 34.7% of the study area has high and only 31.4% of the study area has low soil erosion risk. It is concluded that CORINE model can be used to delineate the soil erosion risk and also to discriminate the potential soil erosion risk areas.     

Molecular approach to determine taxonomic status of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Septoria</Emphasis> sp. causing leaf blotch of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Castanea sativa</Emphasis> in Hyrcanian forests

Castanea sativa is a valuable tree species in Hyrcanian forests, an evolutionary relict ecosystem whose communities suffer from overexploitation and fungal diseases. In the current study, three species delimitation methods were utilized with ITS regions sequencing to determine the taxonomic status of Septoria causing leaf blotch of C. sativa in Hyrcanian forests. The results indicated that the length of ITS region in the genus Septoria (extracted from GenBank) varied from 650 to 680 bp. There were almost three times more variable sites in ITS1 than in ITS2. The ITS2 secondary structure of Hyrcanian Septoria community had the highest similarity with Septoria castaneicola, except for some differences in helix II and III. Also, Hyrcanian samples had minimum genetic distances with S. castaneicola and maximum with Septoria quercicola. The maximum parsimony method divided the studied Septoria genus into three distinct clades, mostly located in clade I. Clade II consisted entirely of Septoria aciculosa, while clade III contained S. castaneicola as well as Hyrcanian samples.     

Synthesis of SBA-15/PAni mesoporous composite for adsorption of reactive dye from aqueous media: RBF and MLP networks predicting models

In this research, SBA-15/polyaniline mesoporous composite was synthesized, characterized, and applied for the adsorption of Reactive Orange 16 (RO 16) as a reactive dye from aqueous media. Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR), field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), and BET were used to examine the structural characteristics of the obtained adsorbent. The input parameters including pH, dosage, temperature, and contact time were investigated and optimized. The obtained optimized conditions are as follows: pH=2, time=60 min, and adsorbent dose=0.4 g/l. Moreover, predictive models based on MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) and RBF (Radial Basis Function) networks were presented to predict the adsorption amount according to the input parameters including pH, dosage, temperature, time, and dye concentration. Two criteria, namely, correlation coefficient (CC) and root mean square error (RMSE) are used between the observed and predicted amounts to validate the models. Comparison of the obtained results using these two models showed that the prediction based on the MLP network model is better than the RBF network.