Sustainable forest management (SFM) practices have started in 1999 in Turkey. A set of criteria and indicators, composed by the General Directorate of Forestry (GDF) on the basis of the criteria and indicators defined in the Pan-European and Near Eastern Processes, was enquired via a survey to serve this purpose. GDF tested the sustainability under the following titles: Situation of forest resources, biodiversity, health and vitality, production capacity and functions, protective functions and environmental and socio-economic functions. There were problems in identification and definition of SFM criteria and indicators. Biological diversity indicators has been selected, described and developed in this study. At this phase, the survey was completed upon receiving the views of the scientists interested in different dimensions of this topic as well as the views of other interest groups affiliated with forestry. As a result, there were 13 indicators that may be used as the basis of a regional or forest management unit level for the purpose of protecting, developing and maintaining biodiversity. Furthermore, these indicators are instruments, which may easily be used by relevant decision-makers in the management of forest resources in a more effective and productive manner.
MeSH terms: Public Opinion; Surveys and Questionnaires; Turkey; Forestry; Biodiversity; Forests
Lyophilized powder (LP) from Algerian arbutus wild berries (Arbutus unedo L.) was obtained. This present paper reports about the dissolution (releasing) properties of LP-based tablets, evaluated through the electric conductivity (EC) of distilled water which is employed as surrounding medium, at three different temperatures (291, 298 and 309 K). In addition to this, secondary physicochemical characteristics such as elementary analysis, color and compressibility were evaluated. Regarding the modeling of ionic transfer, among the three tested models, namely Peleg, Singh et al. and Singh and Kulshestha, the latter seems to be the most appropriate (R2 = 0.99), particularly in the case of compacted tablets under 2000 Pa. The temperature dependence of the dissolution process was also studied applying Arrhenius equation (R2>0.8) which allowed to deduce the activation energy, ranging from 18.7 to 21.4 kJ.mol-1 according to the model and compression force employed.
MeSH terms: Electric Conductivity; Excipients; Fruit; Powders; Solubility; Tablets; Temperature
This study deals with the presence and distinction of bounded m-solutions (type mild) for a family of generalized integral and differential equations of spot order with fractional resolvent and indefinite delay.
PbO nanorods were synthesized by oxidation of lead sheets under an oxygen ambiance with different temperatures at 330, 400, 450 and 550ºC in a tube furnace. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) results showed that the nanorods started growing on the sheet that was placed at 330ºC. On the other hand, by increasing of the temperature to 550°C more nanorods appeared on the Pb sheet, which were lied on the lead sheet. X-ray diffraction pattern (XRD) indicated that the nanorods had α-PbO structures. However, a few β-PbO phases also appeared for the nanorods. Raman measurements confirmed the XRD results and indicated two Raman active modes that belonged to α-PbO phase for the nanorods. In addition, the Raman spectrum of the nanorods showed a weak peak of the β-PbO structure. The optical properties of the products were characterized using a room temperature photoluminescence (PL) technique. The PL result indicated a band gap for the PbO nanorods in the visible region.
Biodiesel was produced via transesterification of palm oil with methanol in the presence of CaO-Nb2O5 mixed oxide catalyst. Response surface methodology (RSM) with central composite design (CCD) was performed to determine the optimum operating conditions and to optimize the biodiesel yield. In this study, the reaction variables being optimized were reaction time, catalyst loading and methanol to oil molar ratio. From the analysis of variance (ANOVA), the most influential parameter on biodiesel production was reaction time. The predicted yield was found in good agreement with the experimental value, with R2= 0.9902. The optimum biodiesel yield of 97.67% was achieved at 2.67 h reaction time, with 3.60 wt. % of catalyst and with methanol to oil molar ratio of 13.04. The high biodiesel yield can be correlated to the synergic effect of basicity between the metallic ions of CaO-Nb2O5 shown in the physicochemical analysis.
Pennisetum purpureum Schumach. is a weed that is currently spreading rapidly to many parts of the world particularly tropical countries. The abundance of P. purpureum in Malaysia is presently a serious problem. A study was conducted to investigate and evaluate the potential allelopathic effects of P. purpureum on Eleusine indica L. Gaertn. using the aqueous leaf extract and plant debris incorporated into the soil. Low concentrations of the P. purpureum aqueous extract (2%) and debris incorporated into the soil (25/500 g) inhibited germination and seedling growth of the bioassay species (E. indica) by >80%. The responses of the bioassay species to the aqueous extract and debris-incorporated soil were concentration dependent. The aqueous extract had higher total phenolic content compared to that from the debris incorporated soil, indicating the presence of certain phytotoxic compounds in the leaf debris and leaf extracts.
Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) especially serotype O157:H7 is one of the important food-borne pathogens because it is able to produce crucial toxins Shiga. However, the outbreak of this organism in Thailand has not been reported. Antibody to O157 antigen was detected in some Thai populations and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli were detected in low numbers of clinical specimens. Interestingly, some E. coli that showed positive to O157 fimbriae probe and lack of virulence gene were isolated from certain patients and one isolate of E. coli O157:H7 which possessed stx1, stx2v was detected in a normal child. In addition, the incidence of E. coli O157:H7 strains were monitored by the samples from cattle and retail beef in Thailand although their inability to produce toxins or produce in a low concentration was demonstrated. This review discusses the incidences of E. coli O157 in clinical and environmental samples of Thailand including the transmission possibility of this bacterium across the Thai border through food trade.
A case-control study was conducted based on medical cases of 100 hospitalized patients with Pseudomonas aeruginosa-isolation at a Malaysian hospital. Cases with 50 multidrug-resistant P. aeruginosa MDRPA and 50 non-multidrug-resistant P. aeruginosa (NMDRPA) were randomly included and compared with socio-demographic and clinical data of the patients, using Chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests as the statistical tool. Analysis found no significant association between MDRPA with ages, gender and ethnicity of patients (p>0.050). Other risk factors being investigated were invasive procedure, immunosuppression, bedridden and clinical diagnosis such as central nervous- and respiratory-system disorder, as well as antibiotic exposure during hospitalization and duration of hospital stay with only the last two were found to have significant association (p=0.035 and 0.019, respectively). Some other studies also reported a similar association indicating that the two factors could serve as an important predictive tool for isolation of MDRPA. More studies involving a larger sampling size are warranted to establish the association.
The issue of age difference in hospital admission should be given special attention since it affects the structure of hospital care and treatments. Patients of different age groups should be given different priority in service provision. Due to crucial time and limited resources, healthcare managers need to make wise decisions in identifying priorities in age of admission. This paper aimed to propose a construction of a daily composite hospital admission index (CHAI) as an indicator that captures relevant information about the overall performance of hospital admission over time. It involves five different age groups of total patients admitted to seven major public hospitals in the Klang Valley, Malaysia for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases for a period of three years, 2008 - 2010. The criteria weights were predetermined by aggregating the subjective weight based on rank ordered centroid (ROC) method and objective weight based on entropy - kernel method. The highest and lowest scores of CHAI were marked, while the groups of patients were prioritized according to the criteria weight ranking orders.
MeSH terms: Attention; Body Weights and Measures; Cardiovascular Diseases; Health Resources; Hospitalization; Hospitals, Public; Humans; Malaysia; Entropy
Cyanide is highly toxic to the living organisms as it inhibits respiration system in the cell mitochondria. Cyanide is commonly used in gold extraction process and its discharge into the environment not only causes pollution but it also brings harm to the surrounding population. Chemical treatment is expensive and the use of hazardous compound can exacerbate the problem. Biodegradation offers cheap and safe alternative as it overcomes the problems faced by chemical treatment. In this study, indigenous bacteria from mining wastewater were isolated. Cyanide degradation was done via shake flask method. A bacterium, designated W2 was found able to grow in the mining wastewater. 16S rRNA analysis identified the strain as Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes which could tolerate up to 39 mg/L cyanide concentration and growth was depleted at 52 mg/L. 60% cyanide degradation was achieved in wastewater containing medium. End-product analysis from high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) detected formamide implicating the role of cyanide hydratase in cyanide degradation. It can be concluded that P. pseudoalcaligenes is capable of biodegrading cyanide and its potential in wastewater treatment containing cyanide is feasible.
Seven species of tropical seagrass found at seagrass bed located in Johor, Malaysia were analysed for As, Cu and Cd accumulation. The species were identified as Enhalus acoroides, Halophila minor, Halophila spinulosa, Halophila ovalis, Thalassia hemprichii, Halodule uninervis and Cymodocea serrulata. Seagrass plant is rapidly becoming one of the methods to determine the overall health condition of aquatic environment. Each seagrass samples were collected and divided into three parts i.e roots, rhizomes and leaves. Samples were grinded, digested and the correlation between each part was analysed using SPSS version 16. Each part of seagrass tissues have the ability to assimilate metals for example the concentration of As, Cu and Cd in tropical seagrass were in the range of 5-48, 6-60 and 10-69 μg/gDW, respectively. Halophila minor and Halophila ovalis indicates positive correlations to translocate metals (As, Cu and Cd) in plants parts (leaves-rhizomes, rhizomes-roots and roots-leaves). Seagrass can accumulate metals depending on pollution that occur, seasonal variation and internal capabilities to translocate metals. The seagrass species especially Halophila ovalis and Halophila minor can act as bioindicator for metal pollution.
In Malaysia, the greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions reduction via composting of source-separated organic waste (SOW) in municipal solid waste (MSW) has not been assessed. Assessment of GHG emissions reduction via composting of SOW is important as environmental impacts from waste management are waste-specific and local-specific. The study presents the case study for potential carbon reduction via composting of SOW in University of Malaya (UM). In this study, a series of calculations were used to evaluate the GHG emission of different SOW management scenarios. The calculations based on IPCC calculation methods (AM0025) include GHGs emissions from landfilling, fuel consumption in transportation and SOW composting activity. The methods were applied to assess the GHG emissions from five alternative SOW management scenarios in UM. From the baseline scenario (S0), a total of 1,636.18 tCO2e was generated. In conjunction with target of 22% recycling rate, as shown in S1, 14% reduction in potential GHG emission can be achieved. The carbon reduction can be further enhanced by increasing the SOW composting capacity. The net GHG emission for S1, S2, S3 and S4 were 1,399.52, 1,161.29, 857.70 and 1,060.48 tCO2e, respectively. In general, waste diversion for composting proved a significant net GHG emission reduction as shown in S3 (47%), S4 (35%) and S2 (29%). Despite the emission due to direct on-site activity, the significant reduction in methane generation at landfill has reduced the net GHG emission. The emission source of each scenario was studied and analysed.
Water from the dental unit waterlines (DUWLs) is known to contaminate with microbial from the biofilm that formed in the tubing system. The water quality from DUWLs is important to patients and dental health care professionals as they could be infected either directly from the contaminated water or aerosol that is generated during dental procedures. Suppliers claimed that dental units supplied to the hospital can only use a specific disinfectant which is uneconomic compared with the others. The aims of this study were to evaluate and compare the efficacy of different disinfectant on the water quality of DUWLs. Four disinfectants (Calbenium, A-dec ICX tablet, Dentel 5, Metassys) and distil water were evaluated. 350 mL water sample was collected separately, from the outlet of high-speed handpiece, scaler, 3-ways syringe and cup filler into a sterile thiosulfate bag on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th, 12th and 24th weeks of the study. The samples were tested on the following day for total viable count (TVC). There is significant difference in the efficacies of the different disinfectants. Only one disinfectant consistently produces water quality within the recommended level of American Dental Association (ADA). Within the limitation of this study, it was found that there is alternative disinfectant that can reduce the TVC to the level recommended by ADA. However, the water qualities produced with these disinfectants were not consistent although they did not cause any technical problem to the dental units during the period of study.
MeSH terms: Aerosols; American Dental Association; Disinfectants; Humans; Sterilization; Syringes; Tablets; Thiosulfates; United States; Water; Water Pollution; Biofilms; Water Quality
Let A denote the class of functions f that are analytic in the unit disc D and normalized by f (0) = f ʹ(0) – 1 = 0. In this paper conditions are determined for starlikeness of the Libera integral of functions such that ⎪arg {f ʹ}⎪ < δ in D. The results of Miller and Mocanu (2002) on Libera transform of functions with bounded turning are improved.
The effect of turbulent fluctuations on the threshold criteria for incipient grain motion over a wide range of sediment size is investigated. In this work, attention is paid to the comparison of the critical Shields parameter θc profile obtained when the near-bed fluid forces induced sediment motion are oscillating-grid turbulence and a single idealised eddy of vortex ring. For experimental work, near-spherical monodisperse sediments were used throughout with relative densities of 1.2 and 2.5 and mean diameters d ranging between 80 and 1087 μm. The measured values of θc on a horizontal bed α = 0 (hence denoted as θc0), were compared to the θc0 profiles obtained by grid turbulence and vortex ring experiments. Although different in magnitude, the θc0 profiles were comparable, that is the θc0 were seen to increase monotonically for hydraulically smooth bedforms and to be approximately constant for hydraulically rough bedforms. However the limit of hydraulically smooth region was found to vary between the oscillating-grid turbulence experiments, where wider smooth region was found when the turbulent fluctuations used to calculate θc0 is not the near-bed velocity.
In this paper, we have examined the effectiveness of the quarter-sweep iteration concept on conjugate gradient normal residual (CGNR) iterative method by using composite Simpson's (CS) and finite difference (FD) discretization schemes in solving Fredholm integro-differential equations. For comparison purposes, Gauss- Seidel (GS) and the standard or full- and half-sweep CGNR methods namely FSCGNR and HSCGNR are also presented. To validate the efficacy of the proposed method, several analyses were carried out such as computational complexity and percentage reduction on the proposed and existing methods.
Bio-pesticides are becoming increasingly important as pest management tools in various cropping systems in the tropics essentially to remedy problems associated with the indiscriminate use of ‘hard’ and non-environmental friendly inorganic pesticide. In these past few decades, many bio-pesticidal products, both microbial-based (bacteria, fungi, microsprodia, entomopathogenic nematodes and viruses) and plant-based botanicals (rotenone and azadiracthin) have been studied for their use against insect pests in the tropics. In this study, the effects of the concentration process with respect to the yield of rotenone (mg) and its concentration (mg/mL) are presented extensively. The raw plants were collected from Kota Johor Lama, Johor and sorted to obtain the roots and stems. Only the roots and stems were utilized as raw materials of the extraction process. The rotenone from roots and stems was extracted using the normal soaking extraction (NSE) at 28 to 30oC with 95% (v/v) of acetone as a solvent and the solvent-to-solid ratio of 10 mL/g. The extraction was carried out for 24 h. Next, the liquid crude extract was concentrated using the rotary evaporator at 50oC and 80 mbar of vacuum pressure to remove approximately 90% of solvent. The fractions of the liquid crude extract were collected (15 min/mL/fraction), diluted (1/100 with acetone) and cleaned up (to remove any fine debris) prior to determination of rotenone content (mg) and concentration (mg/mL) by using the reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC). Finally, the results showed that there was a significant effect of thermal degradation or dissipation of rotenone content at higher operating temperature (greater than 40oC) with a rapid rotenone reduction for the first 15 min of exposure. The possibilities for better exploitation and identification of the effective operating parameters based on the above mentioned results will be perhaps discussed in the future.
Conventional forest inventory practice took huge of effort, and is time- and cost- consuming. With the aid of remote sensing technology by light detection and ranging (LiDAR), those unbearable factors could be minimized. LiDAR is able to capture forest characteristic information and is well known for estimating forest structure accurately in many studies. Forest monitoring related to forest resource inventory (FRI) becomes more effective by utilizing LiDAR data and it is tremendously useful, especially to distinguish information on density, growth and distribution of trees in a selected area. In this study, LiDAR data was utilized aimed to delineate crown cover and estimate upper-storey canopy area in Yambaru Forest using object-based segmentation and classification techniques. Agreement between field survey and LiDAR data analysis showed that only 33.7% of upper-storey canopy area was successfully delineated. The low accuracy level of canopy detection in Yambaru Forest area was expected mainly due to tree structure, density and topographic condition.
MeSH terms: Biological Phenomena; Costs and Cost Analysis; Physiological Phenomena; Surveys and Questionnaires; Remote Sensing Technology; Forests
The paper making industry is characterized by high rate of water consumption and hence high rate of wastewater generation. The purpose of this research was to assess and optimize the existing complete mix activate sludge treatment plant that is used to treat the high strength paper mill effluent with the highest possible efficiency at a reasonable cost. The collected paper mill wastewater is equalized in an equalization tank before being pumped to the treatment plant. The treatment plant includes chemical treatment unit, complete mix activated sludge and granular media filtration unit. The results showed that effluent of a chemical treatment unit was found to be relatively similar to the laboratory simulated plain sedimentation unit. It can be concluded that addition of chemical coagulant can be eliminated with an overall saving of chemical addition costs. The complete mixing activated sludge achieved good removal of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Furthermore, the results showed that the plant is operated under low BOD:P ratio. The treatment efficiency of the plant can be improved by increasing the phosphorous dose to the plant to have BOD:P ratio of 100:0.5 to 100:1. It was found that 50% of the treated effluent is recycled to the manufacturing process, however this percentage can be increased through proper plant optimization and control of nutrient addition to the activated sludge unit.
Freshwater fish has been studied and reported numerously. However, little attention has been made and limited studies available on local marine fish in Malaysia. Thus, in this study, concentrations of heavy metals (Cd, Cr, Pb and Cu) were studied in four major local marine fish Megalaspis cordyla (hardtail scad), Rastrelliger kanagurta (Indian mackerel), Selaroides leptolepis (yellowstripe scad) and Sardinella fimbriata (fringescale sardinella). The study was also intended to estimate potential health risk assessment from these heavy metals to the consumption of fish and assess maximum allowable fish consumption rate. The range of heavy metal concentrations were 0.053-0.096 mg/kg for Cd, 1.16-2.34 mg/kg for Cr, 8.34-12.44 mg/kg for Pb and 1.40-3.21 mg/kg for Cu in four major self-caught saltwater fish. Heavy metal levels of Cd and Cu in the local marine fish from Port Dickson are below the limit enforced by Food Regulations (1985) while the levels of Cr and Pb have exceeded the limit. Potential health risks associated with Cd, Cr, Cu and Pb were assessed based on target hazard quotients. HQ values calculated for Cd, Cr and Cu were less than 1, thus indicate that no adverse effects while HQ values for Pb exceeded 1 for all the fish species assessed with the exception of Megalaspis spp and Sardinella sppa. Cr was the highest while Pb concentrations were the lowest in all the studied fish samples for maximum allowable fish consumption rate. A long term monitoring program is crucial to be done in coastal areas with high consumption of local marine fish along Port Dickson to obtain real consumption rates and other cofounders factors in local population.