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    Machine Learning for Determining Interactions between Air Pollutants and Environmental Parameters in Three Cities of Iran
    (Basel : MDPI, 2022) Rad, Abdullah Kaviani; Shamshiri, Redmond R.; Naghipour, Armin; Razmi, Seraj-Odeen; Shariati, Mohsen; Golkar, Foroogh; Balasundram, Siva K.
    Air pollution, as one of the most significant environmental challenges, has adversely affected the global economy, human health, and ecosystems. Consequently, comprehensive research is being conducted to provide solutions to air quality management. Recently, it has been demonstrated that environmental parameters, including temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, air pressure, and vegetation, interact with air pollutants, such as particulate matter (PM), NO2, SO2, O3, and CO, contributing to frameworks for forecasting air quality. The objective of the present study is to explore these interactions in three Iranian metropolises of Tehran, Tabriz, and Shiraz from 2015 to 2019 and develop a machine learning-based model to predict daily air pollution. Three distinct assessment criteria were used to assess the proposed XGBoost model, including R squared (R2), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Preliminary results showed that although air pollutants were significantly associated with meteorological factors and vegetation, the formulated model had low accuracy in predicting (R2PM2.5 = 0.36, R2PM10 = 0.27, R2NO2 = 0.46, R2SO2 = 0.41, R2O3 = 0.52, and R2CO = 0.38). Accordingly, future studies should consider more variables, including emission data from manufactories and traffic, as well as sunlight and wind direction. It is also suggested that strategies be applied to minimize the lack of observational data by considering second-and third-order interactions between parameters, increasing the number of simultaneous air pollution and meteorological monitoring stations, as well as hybrid machine learning models based on proximal and satellite data.
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    The impact of land-use/land cover changes on water balance of the heterogeneous Buzi sub-catchment, Zimbabwe
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2020) Chemura, Abel; Rwasoka, Donald; Mutanga, Onisimo; Dube, Timothy; Mushore, Terence
    The nature of interactions between ecological, physical and hydrological characteristics that determine the effects of land cover change on surface and sub-surface hydrology is not well understood in both natural and disturbed environments. The spatiotemporal dynamics of water fluxes and their relationship with land cover changes between 2009 and 2017 in the headwater Buzi sub-catchment in Zimbabwe is evaluated. To achieve this, land cover dynamics for the area under study were characterised from the 30 m Landsat data, using the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm. After the land cover classification, the key water balance components namely; interception, transpiration and evapotranspiration (ET) contributions for each class in 2009 and 2017 were estimated. Image classification of Landsat data achieved good overall accuracies above 80% for the two periods. Results showed that the percentage of the plantation land cover types decreased slightly between 2009 (25.4%) and 2017 (22.5%). Partitioning the annual interception, transpiration and ET according to land cover classes showed that the highest amounts of ET in the basin were from plantation where land cover types with tea had the highest interception, transpiration and ET in the catchment. Higher ET, interception and transpiration were observed in the eastern parts of the catchment. At catchment level, results show that 2017 had a higher water balance than 2009, which was partly explained by the decrease in plantation cover type.