ABSTRACT
Assessing the potential of non-point source pollution to assist in the planning of Best Management Practice (BMP) is significant for improving pollution prevention and control in a river basin. In many cases, however, the grid-based modelling analysis is prohibitively laborious and hindered because of insufficient information. This paper presents a new and fast methodology for catchment land-use identification and waste load estimation by properly integrating the skills of remote sensing (RS), geographic information system (GIS), global positioning system (GPS), and the Generalized Watershed Loading Functions (GWLF) model. In this analysis, eight types of land-use patterns in the watershed area of the Kao-Ping River Basin were classified with the aid of SPOT satellite images, Erdas Imagine image processing system, and ArcView GIS system. Hydrologic and geographical features were obtained or derived by the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and GIS technique simultaneously. The GWLF model was used to estimate the waste loads of non-point sources in terms of the total phosphorus (TP) and total nitrogen (TN). It shows that the variations of TN and TP loadings are closely related to the amount of rainfall over seasons. Final managerial policy can be made with respect to the identified three impact levels of nutrient loadings in the Kao-Ping River Basin, southern Taiwan, which could eventually perform as part of the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) study in this region.
Subject(s)
Environmental Monitoring/methods , Geographic Information Systems , Models, Theoretical , Water Pollutants/analysis , Water Supply , Ecosystem , Nitrogen/analysis , Phosphorus/analysis , Rain , Seasons , Spacecraft , TaiwanABSTRACT
Thyrotropin (TSH), free thyroxine (fT4) and testosterone assays have been used as a probe to evaluate the performances of a new modular chemiluminescence (CL) immunoassay analyser, the Abbott Architect 2000. The evaluation was run in parallel on other systems that use CL as the detection reaction: DPC Immulite, Chiron Diagnostics ACS-180 and ACS Centaur (TSH functional sensitivity only). TSH functional sensitivity was 0.0012, 0.009, 0.033 and 0.039 mU/I for the Architect, Immulite, ACS Centaur and ACS-180, respectively. Testosterone functional sensitivity was 0.38, 3.7 and 2.0 nmol/l for Architect, Immulite and ACS-180, respectively. Good correlation was obtained between the ACS-180 and Architect for all assays. The Immulite correlation did not agree well with the Architect or ACS-180 for fT4 and testosterone but was in good agreement for TSH. Regarding fT4 and testosterone, equilibrium dialysis and isotopic dilution gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry (GC-MS) respectively were used as reference methods. For both within- and between-run precision, the Architect showed the best reproducibility for all three analytes (CV < 6%).
