Jan Peters

Flemish Institute for Technological Research | VITO · Department of Environmental Quality

A mobile monitoring campaign was conducted (by bicycle) to assess the BC concentrations in Cluj-Napoca city, Romania, in 2020, before, during and after COVID-19 lock-down. Over the entire study period, the BC concentrations ranged between 1.0 and 25.9 μg/m³ (averaged per street section and period characterized by different traffic conditions). Mark...

(1) Background: This work evaluated the usability of commercial “low-cost” air quality sensor systems to substantiate evidence-based policy making. (2) Methods: Two commercially available sensor systems (Airly, Kunak) were benchmarked at a regulatory air quality monitoring station (AQMS) and subsequently deployed in Kampenhout and Sint-Niklaas (Bel...

This blueprint was developed together with municipalities and the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM), based on insights from the project "Municipal sensor network for air quality measurements", a cooperation of municipalities Kampenhout, Sint-Niklaas, Schoten, Dilbeek and Oudenaarde, funded through the CoT call (2018) of the Flemish Agency for Innov...

A new prototype air–liquid interface (ALI) exposure system, a flatbed aerosol exposure chamber termed NAVETTA, was developed to investigate deposition of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) on cultured human lung A549 cells directly from the gas phase. This device mimics human lung cell exposure to NPs due to a low horizontal gas flow combined with cell...

There is a clear scope and added value for participatory air quality monitoring to complement the measurements from official air quality monitoring stations. However, the actually available monitoring tools do not yet allow widespread do-it-yourself approaches. Meanwhile targeted monitoring campaigns can already be implemented with existing devices...

This chapter provides a technical description of the EveryAware applications for air quality and noise monitoring. Specifically, we introduce AirProbe, for measuring air quality, and WideNoise Plus for estimating environmental noise. We also include an overview on hardware components and smartphone-based measurement technology, and we present the a...

A new prototype air-liquid interface (ALI) exposure system, a flatbed aerosol exposure chamber termed NAVETTA, was developed to investigate deposition of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) on cultured human lung A549 cells directly from the gas phase. This device mimics human lung cell exposure to NPs due to a low horizontal gas flow combined with cell...

The goal of this paper is to explore the potential of opportunistic mobile monitoring to map the exposure to air pollution in the urban environment at a high spatial resolution. Opportunistic mobile monitoring makes use of existing mobile infrastructure or people's common daily routines to move measurement devices around. Opportunistic mobile monit...

Inorganic arsenic species in ambient particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) have been determined in an urban area, in the vicinity of a metallurgical industrial plant. The developed high performance liquid chromatography inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (HPLC/ICP-MS) method allows monitoring of particulate As(III) and As(V)-species, with a...

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an...

We propose three estimation strategies (local, remote and mixed) for ultrafine particles (UFP) at three sites in an urban air pollution monitoring network. Estimates are obtained through Gaussian process regression based on concentrations of gaseous pollutants (NOx, O3, CO) and UFP. As local strategy, we use local measurements of gaseous pollutants...

Mobile monitoring is increasingly used as an additional tool to acquire air quality data at a high spatial resolution. However, given the high temporal variability of urban air quality, a limited number of mobile measurements may only represent a snapshot and not be representative. In this study, the impact of this temporal variability on the repre...

This paper describes the development of a novel particle sensing system employing zinc oxide based solidly mounted resonator (SMR) devices for the detection of airborne fine particles (i.e., PM2.5 and PM10). The system operates in a dual configuration in which two SMR devices are driven by Colpitts-type oscillators in a differential mode. Particles...

Gaussian process regression is used to predict ultrafine particle (UFP) number concentrations. We infer their number concentrations based on the concentrations of NO, NO2, CO and O3 at half hour and five minutes resolution. Because UFP number concentrations follow from a dynamic process, we have used a non-stationary kernel based on the addition of...

Culicoides imicola is the main vector of the bluetongue virus in the Mediterranean Basin. Spatial distribution models for this species traditionally employ either climatic data or remotely sensed data, or a combination of both. Until now, however, no studies compared the accuracies of C. imicola distribution models based on climatic versus remote s...

The use of distance variables expressing the likelihood of species occurrence at a given site in relation to the distance to observed species presence is demonstrated to improve species distribution models, especially when combined with environmental variables which relate species occurrence to the environmental habitat characteristics. In this stu...

Culicoides imicola is the main biological vector in the transmission of the Bluetongue virus in the Mediterranean basin. Its geographical range is constrained by environmental characteristics, and soil moisture has been proposed as an important constraint because of its effect on C. imicola breeding habitat. The few field studies on breeding habita...

Ultrafine particles (UFP) and black carbon (BC) concentrations show a highly dynamic micro-variability in urban area. Mobile monitoring using a bicycle platform (354 runs in 1 month) was adopted in this study to characterize the micro-variability in relation to traffic intensity, street topology and meteorological conditions. For UFP and BC a posit...

Mobile platforms are increasingly used to acquire air quality data at a high spatial and temporal resolution in complex urban environments. As such, mobile measurements provide a solution for short-term studies to acquire a spatially spread data set that would not be feasible if using stationary measurements. Mobile monitoring campaigns were carrie...

Radar backscatter depends mainly on the characteristics of observed covers and on the configuration of the sensor. In agricultural areas, as crops grow, their characteristics vary, and their backscattering behavior changes. The main objective of this study is to perform a multitemporal analysis of the variations in backscatter coefficients and rati...

Fixed air quality stations have limitations when used to assess people's real life exposure to air pollutants. Their spatial coverage is too limited to capture the spatial variability in, e.g., an urban or industrial environment. Complementary mobile air quality measurements can be used as an additional tool to fill this void. In this publication w...

It is widely acknowledged that model inputs can cause considerable errors in the model output. Since land cover maps obtained from the classification of remote sensing data are frequently used as input to spatially explicit environmental models, it is important to provide information regarding the classification quality of the produced map. Map qua...

Although the use of multidate polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for highly accurate land cover classification has been acknowledged in the literature, the high dimensionality of the data set remains a major issue. This study presents two different strategies to reduce the number of features in multidate SAR data sets: an accuracy-ori...

Bluetongue is a viral vector-borne disease transmitted between hosts, mostly cattle and small ruminants, by some species of Culicoides midges. Within the Mediterranean basin, C. imicola is the main vector of the bluetongue virus. The spatial distribution of this species is limited by a number of environmental factors, including temperature, soil pr...

A change detection algorithm is applied on a three year time series of ASAR Wide Swath images in VV polarization over Calabria, Italy, in order to derive information on temporal soil moisture dynamics. The algorithm, adapted from an algorithm originally developed for ERS scatterometer, was validated using a simple hydrological model incorporating m...

Variations in surface thermal inertia-the resistance to temperature variations-can be indicative for variations in soil moisture. In this paper, we present a flexible multitemporal approach to derive an approximation of thermal inertia, called apparent thermal inertia (AT!), from daily Aqua and Terra MODIS observations. In a first step, a varying n...

A change detection algorithm is applied on a three year time series of ASAR Wide Swath images in VV polarization over Calabria, Italy, in order to derive information on temporal soil moisture dynamics. The algorithm, adapted from an algorithm originally developed for ERS scatterometer, was validated using a simple hydrological model incorporating m...

This study investigates the potential of very high resolution (VHR) optical and radar data for olive grove landscape mapping. VHR data were fed into a four-step processing chain performing an object-based land-use classification. The four steps included (i) image segmentation, (ii) object feature calculation, (iii) object-based classification and (...

Data-driven models for the prediction of bluetongue vector distributions are valuable tools for the identification of areas at risk for bluetongue outbreaks. Various models have been developed during the last decade, and the majority of them use linear discriminant analysis or logistic regression to infer vector-environment relationships. This stud...

Topsoil water content - an important parameter for several hydrological and biological processes - can be linked to the amplitude of the diurnal temperature variation of land surfaces through the concept of thermal inertia, i.e. the resistance of the material to external temperature driving forces. Approximations of thermal inertia, called apparent...

The availability of space-borne radar sensors with polarimetric capabilities, such as RADARSAT-2, brings new expectations for the retrieval of soil moisture and roughness from remote sensing. The additional information provided by those sensors is expected to enable a separation of the confounding effects of soil moisture and roughness on the radar...

Knowledge on the spatial distribution of crops in a watershed is of high importance when running spatially distributed hydrologic models. Remote sensing may provide such crop maps through classification of the obtained imagery. Although crop classification is mainly performed on optical imagery, some studies have investigated the potential of SAR t...

In this paper, results from an intensive two-year monitoring campaign of a wetland gradient are presented and analyzed. Two spatially adjacent sites along a wetland gradient are described by means of abiotic variables, groundwater level, and soil temperature and soil moisture at several depths throughout the vertical soil profile. The vegetation of...

Ensemble learning techniques are increasingly applied for species and vegetation distribution modelling, often resulting in more accurate predictions. At the same time, uncertainty assessment of distribution models is gaining attention. In this study, Random Forests, an ensemble learning technique, is selected for vegetation distribution modelling...

Wetland ecosystems are of primary concern for nature conservation and restoration. Adequate conservation and restoration strategies emerge from a scientific comprehension of wetland properties and processes. Hereby, the understanding of plant species and vegetation patterns in relation to environmental gradients is an important issue. The modelling...

Fluctuations in wetland hydrology create an interplay between aerobic and anaerobic conditions, controlling vegetation composition and microbial community structure and activity in wetland soils. In this study, we investigated the vegetation composition and microbial community structural and functional changes along a wetland hydrological gradient....

Vegetation patterns arise from the interplay between intraspecific and interspecific biotic interactions and from different abiotic constraints and interacting driving forces and distributions. In this study, we constructed an ensemble learning model that, based on spatially distributed environmental variables, could model vegetation patterns at th...

An important issue in ecohydrological research is distribution modelling, aiming at the prediction of species or vegetation type occurrence on the basis of empirical relations with hydrological or hydrogeochemical habitat conditions. In this study, two statistical techniques are evaluated: (i) the widely used multiple logistic regression technique...

A three-step methodology to assess the carbon sequestration and the environmental impact of afforestation projects in the framework of the Flexible Mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol (Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism) was developed and tested using a dataset collected from the Jonkershoek forest plantation, Western Cape, South Afr...

Ecohydrology investigates how hydrological processes affect plant growth and vice versa. As these mutual interactions are important in many ecosystems, ecohydrology has wide applicability. An important aspect of ecohydrological research is the assessment and prediction of the occurrence of plant species or vegetation types in relation to hydrologic...