Epifanio Vaccaro
Petrology Curator
Geological Sciences at Palermo University
UK
Biography
Epifanio Vaccaro has completed his MSc in Geological Sciences at Palermo University in 2005, Italy, and started working at The Natural History Museum in London from 2009 covering several roles including: Petrology Curator, Mineral Curator and Researcher. In 2017, obtained his PhD from The Open University on the Physical and Chemical Properties of Primitive Chondrites. He is the now the Petrology Curator at The Natural History Museum in London.
Research Interest
The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is home to an estimated 80 million items dating back as far as 1753. The NHM is recognised as a world leading centre of natural history collections and research. Many of the collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as The Ocean Bottom Deposit (OBD) collection. This includes the Sir John Murray, HMS Challenger expedition (1872-76) collections as well as samples from about 40,000 sea bed locations around the world. It is the most comprehensive British collection of seabed samples and cores but also includes approximately 65 per cent from the Atlantic Ocean, 20 per cent from the Pacific Ocean and 15 per cent from the Indian Ocean. The OBD collection is invaluable for studies of the ocean and ocean floor, including research looking at global change, climatic warming, ocean acidification and marine pollution. This historical collection has a large number of calcifying organisms that provide a benchmark for changes in carbonate production in marine ecosystems through time. A project led by museum researchers has compared the calcification capability of today’s plankton species with their counterparts from pre-and early-industrial time. This has been based on plankton tows collected during historical expeditions and has provided new insights into anthropogenic climate change. Recent work has also investigated the foraminiferal content of benthic samples from the collection and shown a method for selecting samples that show a late 19th Century baseline for the marine environment.
Biography
Remus Prăvălie is a teaching assistant and a researcher at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography. His interdisciplinary research is concerned with the field of global environmental issues such as climate change, impact of climate change on environmental systems or environmental pollution, but also with the solutions of these environmental issues, like renewable energies. He has completed his PhD at the age of 27 years at the University of Bucharest and is currently manager of a postdoctoral project at the same university. Remus Prăvălie has published more than 20 papers in prestigious journals in the field of environmental sciences. Georgeta Bandoc is a professor at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography. Her main scientific work is generally concerned with the field of renewable energy resources, climate change or environmental protection. She has a broad expertise in the field of environmental sciences and currently is a member of various professional associations and centers. Since 2016 is an Associate Member in the Academy of Romanian Scientists. Georgeta Bandoc has published more than 20 papers in prestigious journals in the field of environmental sciences.
Research Interest
Forests are probably the most important type of terrestrial ecosystem for ensuring the planet's health in an age of major environmental changes. These ecosystems are among the Earth's few biophysical systems that are able to substantially influence the climatic system on a global scale, especially by controlling and storing immense carbon amounts in their biomass, but also through energy exchanges with the atmosphere and by changing the terrestrial surface radiation balance. Also, these biotic systems are a vital support for the global terrestrial biodiversity and an essential pillar for the very existence of humanity, via large-scale delivery of ecosystem services they provide. However, forest ecosystems are currently being subjected to a wide range of negative transformations (natural and anthropic disturbances) that pose a real threat not only to forest health and the various benefits forests provide for human society, but also to the overall functioning of the Earth's climate system. This work is a review that aims to analyse the current main perturbations of the global forest ecosystems, both the obvious (e.g. deforestation) and discrete ones (e.g. defaunation) that have generally not yet been tackled strictly as ecological forest issues in the international scientific literature. Also, the paper aims to investigate the possible consequences caused by forest perturbations in the global climate changes (warming process), through carbon fluxes and biogeophysical feedbacks between these biotic systems and the atmosphere. Following a vast, current and representative scientific literature, it was found there currently are 12 major forest disturbances that can be grouped into three categories based on the importance of triggering causes, i.e. climatic (phenological shifts, range shifts, die-off events, insect infestations), anthropic (deforestation, fragmentation, air pollution) and mixed (defaunation, fires, composition shifts, net primary productivity shifts, biogeochemical shifts) perturbations. These forest perturbations have already significantly eroded the forests' capacity to mitigate climate change through key processes such as carbon sequestration and the evaporative cooling process. All these ecological disturbances can destabilize the Earth's climate system by accelerating global warming in various ways, including by means of many positive feedback mechanisms in the case of climatic perturbations. In this respect, this review paper finally proposes five major anthropogenic strategies to fight this multiple forest crisis (mitigate, adapt, repair, protect and research actions), which, if applied rapidly, on a large scale and in a mixed manner, can successfully mitigate forest ecological issues and climate change by the end of this century.
Biography
Kwangjin Park has completed his PhD at the age of 30 years from Korea Advanced Institute of Scienece and Technology (KAIST). He has published more than 30 papers in reputed journals and has been serving as an editorial board member of repute.
Research Interest
For developing the industrially feasible Ni-rich layered oxide cathode with extended cycle life, it is necessary to mitigate both the mechanical degradation due to intergranular cracking between primary particles and gas generation from the reaction between the electrolyte and residual Li in the cathode. To simultaneously resolve these two issues, we herein propose a simple but novel method to reinforce the primary particles in LiNi0.91Co0.06Mn0.03O2 by providing a Li-reactive material, whose spinel interphase is coherent with the surface of the cathode. The modified structure significantly outperforms analogous bare samples: they conserve more than 90% of the initial capacity after 50 cycles and also exhibit a greater rate capability. By tracking the same particle location during cycling, we confirmed that the current method significantly reduces crack generation because the provided coating material can penetrate inside the grain boundary of the secondary particle and help maintain the volume of the primary particle. Finally, first-principles calculations were implemented to determine the role of this spinel material, i.e., having intrinsically isotropic lattice parameters, superior mechanical properties, and only a small volume change during delithiation. We believe that the proposed method is straightforward and cost-effective; hence, it is directly applicable for the mass production of Ni-rich cathode material to enable its commercialization.
