Landscape, Legal, and Biodiversity Threats that Windows Pose to Birds: A Review of an Important Conservation Issue
Windows in human residential and commercial structures in urban, suburban, and rural landscapes contribute to the deaths of billions of birds worldwide. International treaties, federal, provincial, state, and municipal laws exist to reduce human-associated avian mortality, but are most often not enforced for bird kills resulting from window strikes. As an additive, compared to a compensatory mortality factor, window collisions pose threats to the sustainability and overall population health of common as well as species of special concern. Several solutions to address the window hazard for birds exist, but the most innovative and promising need encouragement and support to market, manufacture, and implement.
Shooting is still a main threat for raptors inhabiting urban and suburban areas of Rome, Italy
Abstract Assessing threats and causes of mortality is crucial for understanding the factors driving population dynamics and planning effective conservation actions. Investigating the causes for admission into wildlife rehabilitation centres can contribute to assessing the main threats affecting animal populations inhabiting urban and suburban habitats. After analysing 2367 raptors belonging to 28 species admitted at the LIPU/Bioparco wildlife rehabilitation centre of Rome during 12 years (2000–2011), we found that collisions with man-made structures were the most frequent cause for admission, with shooting the second most frequent cause of admission. However, for Falconiformes, excluding kestrels, shooting was the most common cause for admission (52% of all admissions). Comparing urban with suburban landscapes, we found that the occurrence of birds admitted with evidence of gunshot wounds was higher in the suburban landscape for both Strigiformes and Falconiformes. Considering only the 17 species listed in Annex I to Bird Directive 147/2009/EC, shooting was the most frequent cause of admission and accounted for more than 40% of cases. The high frequency of admissions of raptors due to shooting in urban and suburban Rome shows that persecution of raptors is not restricted to rural areas of Italy.
Impact of Nuclear Data Uncertainties on Transmutation of Actinides in Accelerator-Driven Assemblies
Abstract The potential impact of nuclear data uncertainties on a large number of performance parameters of reactor cores dedicated to the transmutation of radioactive wastes is discussed. An uncertainty analysis has been performed based on sensitivity theory, which underlines the cross sections, the energy range, and the isotopes that are responsible for the most significant uncertainties. To provide guidelines on priorities for new evaluations or validation experiments, required accuracies on specific nuclear data have been derived, accounting for target accuracies on major design parameters. The required accuracies (mostly in the energy region below 20 MeV), in particular for minor actinide data, are of the same order of magnitude of the achieved accuracies on major actinides. Specific requirements also concern the improvement of minor actinide data related to decay heat and effective delayed-neutron fraction assessment.