Virgil Alexandru Iordache

University of Bucharest | Unibuc · "Dan Manoleli" Research Centre for Ecological Services

Phytostabilisation projects for tailing dams depend on processes occurring at spatial scales of 106 m2 and at decadal time scales. Most experiments supporting the design and monitoring of such projects have much smaller spatial and time scales. Usually, they are only designed for one single scale. Here, we report the results of three coupled experi...

Soil micrrorganisms have effects on brown and green food webs and influence processes up to the ecosystem scale. It is difficult to separate and quantify such effects at site and landscape scale because of negative and positive feed-backs between the various communities and the large numbers or variables. There is not a single research strategy to...

An anthropic ecosystem from Romania was investigated from acarological, vegetation and chemical point of view. The community structures of two groups of mites were studied (Acari: Mesostigmata, Oribatida) from a tailing pond, using transect method, in correlation with concentrations of heavy metals (As, Cu, Pb, Ni, Mn and Zn), with abiotic factors...

The idea of linking stressors, services providing units (SPUs), and ecosystem services (ES) is ubiquitous in the literature, although is currently not applied in areas contaminated with heavy metals (HMs), This integrative literature review introduces the general form of a deterministic conceptual model of the cross-scale effect of HMs on biogeoche...

Smelters contaminate grasslands over large areas, leading to a decrease in ecosystem services. We analyzed the concentrations of elements and the values of other potential control variables in soil and plants (26 species) from 156 locations distributed over contamination and altitude gradients in a small polluted catchment. The regression analysis...

The paper explores the problem of resilience in the context of classical comparative economic system (CES) literature, as well as a set of key issues and challenges regarding the ways we conceptualize and think about resilience when it comes to economic systems. Part 1 overviews the classical CES literature. It notes the relative lack of interest i...

Schița unor modele structurale pentru a da seamă de rolul capitalului cultural în producția de servicii publice.

Wet deposition is influencing air quality because air pollutants are washed away from the surrounding air. Consequently, particulate matter and associated compounds are transported in the rainwater and enter into soil, surface waters, and groundwater. Nonpoint sources of heavy metals from stormwater runoff have increased in urban areas due to indus...

PC2 MODSPA-NUTRITOX se încadrează în programul de cercetare pe termen lung inițiat în 2007 de UB, ICPA, IBB și ISMMA Prin PC2 a avut loc extinderea programului către procese de interfață relevante pentru evapotranspirație Mobilizarea partenerilor s-a făcut prin formularea unor ținte mai ambițioase decât cele contractate Au fost realizate toate livr...

Noi, profesorii și studenții școlii de vară INTER-ASPA “Radu Lăcătușu”, afirmăm că valorile noastre științifice sunt căutarea adevărului, rigoarea metodologică, meritul științific, modestia epistemică și responsabilitatea morală. Noi credem într-o comunitate colegială, în care tinerii sunt ucenici ai celor mai în vârstă, în care seniorii se respect...

Școala se aliniază obiectivelor Planului Național de Redresare și Reziliență oferind un model de responsabilitate și bune practici care va avea un impact pozitiv asupra rezilienței sistemului de cercetare, dezvoltare și inovare. Școala de vară INTER-ASPA din iulie 2021 are ca scop stimularea maturizării organizaționale în etapa de cercetare a inovă...

The notion of time is fundamental in understanding the status of any theoretical program dealing with evolution. From the perspective of evolutionary biologists, economists, and psychologists it is an assumption, its meaning is not explicitly described. Here we make a reconstruction of the notion of time used in evolutionary biology by a textual an...

The problem we started with was how to model the effects of heavy metals on the role of plants in the production of ecosystem services, in particular of erosion control in small catchments. We started from simple bioaccumulation models (2009-2011), then developed a research line from 2012 to 2021 consisting in three projects: “Accounting for the se...

This remediation guide is a first draft that can serve to both students and researchers for interdisciplinary work. What is specific to our approach is the explicit inclusion of multiscale experimental methodology (from pot to field plot), and an up-scaling procedure from field plots to ecosystem scale. The document is structured in four chapters,...

The institutional objective of INTER-ASPA project is the consolidation of research groups with high potential within an innovation ecosystem. Part of this process consists in the creation and adoption of management procedures in order to increase the scientific output in terms of data and knowledge. Here we report the first version of a “Procedure...

In the autumn 2017 we have launched “The structure of a transdisciplinary research consortium for bio-geo-interactions research and integrated river basin management” (Lăcătușu et al. 2017). We have targeted in partnerships since 2007 the trans-disciplinary topic of river basin management under the pressure of pollutants and climate changes at diff...

Ontologia de plecare trebuie să fie una compatibilă cu rezultatele științifice, cu teoriile evoluției, nu una speculativă, un „sistem ontologic care se constituie plecând de la problemele puse de știință și în concordanță cu legile și rezultatele ei fundamentale” (Pârvu 1977 p8). Investigarea statutul ontologic ca diferit de statutul ontic m-a obli...

În acest text pornesc de la reconstrucția obiectelor productive din „Originea speciilor” făcută într-un text anterior și de la direcțiile generale de cercetare care ar putea duce la construcția unei teorii generale a evoluției identificate de Pârvu (2010). Formulez și apoi dau un răspuns următoarelor întrebări: care este relația dintre entitățile î...

Elementele de cunoaştere ştiinţifică transferate prin popularizare şi educaţie către publicul larg sunt stabilizate în timp în discursurile culturale prin procese distincte de cele care au susţinut producţia lor în contextul comunităţilor ştiinţifice. De exemplu, reducţionismul biologic darwinian al culturii, acum anacronic din punct de vedere ştii...

Riparian vegetation provides a wide range of ecosystem services including water quality regulation, flooding avoidance, and the natural control of stream temperatures. Changes in land use and the increase of anthropogenic activities in the proximity of rivers affect the growth and development of riparian buffers. The aim of the work was to assess t...

In this paper we present a project and its preliminary results after one year of research. The project aims to implement in Romania the research directions recently identified at European level within the concerted action AROMIS (Assessment and Reduction of heavy metal input into agro-ecosystems). The objectives of the project are: 1) the assessmen...

This text presents an example of research strategy for social-ecological systems supported by four objectives: 1. To develop ontologies for the integrated modeling of socio-ecological processes; 2. To produce scientific knowledge about the role of plant-soil systems in the production of ecosystem services associated to hydrological and biogeochemic...

The data set consists in a file with two sheets: one includes a matrix of 297 rows and 46 columns, and the second one a matrix of 12 rows and 24 columns. In the first sheet each row is a replicate of an experimental variant with Agrostis capillaris growing on tailing substrate belonging to three experiments witch have the same variants, but are org...

The models of man used as basis in social research have a crucial implication for the ways social theory is articulated as well as for the impact of the social scientific insights. Biological sciences have an increasing influence on representations about what man is, and, in turn, the concept of man adopted in the scientific literature is under the...

The paper presents the results obtained from monitoring the evapotranspiration processes in riparian grasslands located in Poeni village, Romania near Glavacioc River and the testing of portable instrumentation developed to monitor continuously the potential evapotranspiration (PET). The Penman-Monteith method was selected for the experimental stud...

Ontologies are theories about existing entities and can be general, of philosophical interest, and regional, accounting for specific epistemic fields. Developing regional scientific and / or management ontologies is a growing research field in biology, ecology and socio-ecological research. We propose an ontology accounting for 1) the integrating m...

Introducere: Luncile râurilor furnizează servicii ecosistemice cum sunt retenția poluanților și menținerea diversității specifice și ecologice. Procesele care susțin producția acestor servicii ecologice sunt cuplate în cadrul funcționării sistemelor ecologice astfel încât ne putem aștepta ca retenția poluanților să aibă o influență de exemplu asupr...

Introducere: În bazinele hidrografice cu activități miniere în timpul inundațiilor o parte fluxul de sedimente poluate este reținut în lunca inundabilă. Din considerente geomorfologice și hidrologice este posibil să apară zone intens poluate și la distanță relativ mare de sursă. Obiectivul cercetării raportate aici a fost compararea caracteristicil...

Seven institutional partners from four Romanian development regions joined in a consortium focused on the sustainable administration of water resources, river basins and wetlands. The goal of INTER-ASPA project is to create an innovation environment able to support over multiple strategic cycles the disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and trans-discip...

The project had three objectives: Objective 1 To produce cost-effective tools for the evaluation of metals’ stocks and their mineralogical forms in tailing dams, Objective 2 To produce effective tools for the remediation of tailing dams, Objective 3 To develop innovative environmental services for the design of coupled monitoring systems and couple...

Introducere: O tehnică de îmbunătățire a fitostabilizării face apel la inoculurarea substratului de pe iazuri cu fungi micorizali. Obiectivul cercetării a fost să caracterizăm efectul procentului de fungi micorizali cu care s-a făcut inocularea substratului asupra concentrației de pigmenți asimilatori și gradului de peroxidare a lipidelor din plant...

Several studies have shown that hairy roots (HRs) can increase the phytoextraction of organic and inorganic pollutants. In addition, microorganisms colonizing the rhizosphere of hairy roots have demonstrated the efficacy of HRs either in removing or in stabilizing of pollutants. This growth chamber study aimed to determine the effect of colonizatio...

The heavy metal pollution level of soil from twelve grasslands and its impact on soil mite communities was assessed. The impact assessment was investigated, taking into account the distance from pollution source, the degree of pollution and the cumulative influence of heavy metals and other environmental variables. These variables were: temperature...

There are very few studies of the influence of heavy metal pollution on soil mite communities in European grasslands. The objectives of this study were to provide quantitative information about the diversity of the Acari in mountain grasslands and to establish the influence of heavy metal pollution on them. It was found that the species diversity a...

We investigated two Romanian industrial regions- Copşa Mică and Zlatna, to assess the current situation of soil pollution and bioaccumulation of Pb, Cd, Cu and Zn in different vegetable species and possible risks to consumers. Both total and mobile forms of the metals were determined in soil samples, and metal content in the edible parts of root ve...

Using fungi inoculation coupled with phyto-remediation on tailing dams in the quantities recommended by agricultural practices is cost prohibitive. In previous study we obtained better results with 1% fungi than with 7% fungi due to the negative effect associated to the expanded clay (support for fungi spores) in the particular conditions of the ta...

It is well known that changing the vegetation cover by bioremediation leads to changes in runoff and erosion intensity. However, this relation is not easy to be quantified. One possibility is to have direct measurements in the field using large experimental plots. The weakness of this approach is the lack of generality. At the other extreme another...

Producing large geo-referenced data sets for characterizing environmental variables is a major objective of the current national research programs. In Romania such public raw data sets are practically absent. In the framework of one past and two ongoing research projects we adopted a framework focusing the production of such data on coupled enviro...

Lanthanides are a group of non-essential elements with important imaging and therapeutic applications. Although trivalent lanthanide ions (Ln3+) are used as potent blockers of Ca2+ channels, the systematic studies correlating Ln3+ accumulation and toxicity to Ca2+ channel blocking activity are scarce. In this study, we made use of the eukaryotic mo...

The Romanian Government adopted in august 2015 the national strategy and the national plan for the management of contaminated sites. The total costs for risk assessment and rehabilitation of these sites is estimated to be about 8.5 billion euros. About 2.6 billion of there will be needed for the management of contaminated sites related to mining in...

In 2013–2014, the soil mite communities from six overgrazed grassland ecosystems located in the Trascău Mountains, Romania, were investigated. Forty-six species were identified, with 645 individuals. Some abiotic factors from soil were measured (soil temperature – T, soil water content – H, soil acidity – pH, carbon content – C, total nitrogen – Nt...

A mathematical model for the water flow on a hill covered by variable distributed vegetation is proposed in this article. The model takes into account the variation of the geometrical properties of the terrain surface, but it assumes that the surface exhibits large curvature radius.After describing some theoretical properties for this model, we int...

La baza acestui studiu stă un text publicat în anul 2006 în revista Idei în Dialog. Din raţiuni editoriale, textul a apărut în două părţi: „Obiectul ca fapt instituțional.” (1: 11-13); „Credința în ceilalți ca temei al eticii” (2: 35-37). Faţă de studiul iniţial, am efectuat modificări de conţinut la început, la sfârşit și în note cu referire la de...

The ecotoxicological effects in the field can be directly assessed by measuring the concentration of the pollutant in soil or plant samples, and also by measuring response variables such as biochemical ones. However, there are few such studies integrating data on pollutants and plant biochemical variables and there is a knowledge gap about how domi...

The influence of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi (Glomus intraradices) and of heavy metal stress on the characteristics of biomass production, as well as non-enzymatic and enzymatic variables in the roots, shoots and leaves of sunflower ( Helianthus annuus L.) plants were studied at pot and field scales. The intensity of the mycorrhizal colonizat...

The presented work is part of a larger research program dealing with developing tools for coupling biogeochemical models in contaminated landscapes. The specific objective of this article is to provide researchers with a data porting tool to build hexagonal raster using information from a rectangular raster data (e.g. GIS format). This tool involve...

The distributed variables required by erosion and other spatial models result either from the processing of remote sensing images or from the interpolation of variables measured in a network of sampling sites. The variables needed for bioaccumulation and dispersion models include: concentrations of heavy metals (total concentrations by different me...

A pot experiment was carried out to determine to what extent the N and P uptake into A. capillaris influence the accumulation of metals from contaminated soil supplied with these fertilizers. The experiment consisted of 80 polyethylene pots which were placed in turn into larger glass beakers without drainage holes. This prevents loss of any nutrien...

The grasslands around the smelter area Zlatna (Romania) have been strongly contaminated with Pb, Cu and Zn by atmospheric deposition. This has led to the destruction of the vegetation cover in some areas followed by erosion and transport of the contaminated top soil, while in other areas the interplay between plant resistance to toxic effects and g...

In this talk we provide a tool to analyse discrete spatial data. The method is based on aninterpolation method; the distribution of the data is irregular but with some restrictions. The interpolant function is a bicubic spline which can exactly reconstruct polynomials up to degree three in each variable. We validate the method by analyzing errors i...

The involvement of Ca2+ in the response to high Mn2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Cu2+, Zn2+, Cd2+, and Hg2+ was investigated in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The yeast cells responded through a sharp increase in cytosolic Ca2+ when exposed to Cd2+, and to a lesser extent to Cu2+, but not to Mn2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Zn2+, or Hg2+. The response to high Cd2+ depended mainly on...

We performed an experiment at pot scale to assess the effect of plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) on the development of five plant species grown on a tailing dam substrate. None of the species even germinated on inoculated unamended tailing material, prompting use of compost amendment. The effect of inoculation on the amended material was to i...

Applied research programs in the remediation of contaminated areas can be used also for gaining insights in the physiological and ecological mechanisms supporting the resistance of plant communities in stress conditions due to toxic elements. The research hypothesis of this study was that in the heavily contaminated but nutrient-poor substrate of m...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are integral functioning parts of plant root systems and are widely recognized for enhancing plant growth on severely disturbed sites, including those contaminated with heavy metals. However, the generality of detailed patterns observed for their influence on various metals and oxidative-stress parameters in multi...

In this chapter we introduce a concept relating the biogeochemical role of microorganisms explicitly to cross-scale effects in the frame of an approach we termed objective scale integrated biogeochemistry. By objective, we mean that the scale of analyses is that of the environmental objects involved in the cycling, and is not assumed a priori based...

The concept of hazard in the current interpretation of the regulations is directed to local and short term effects and its assessment is based on the distribution in space of the concentration of contaminants in abiotic and biotic compartments. We criticize this concept and introduce a potential hazard with full space-time dimension, i.e. from shor...

We have applied a concept framework for scale-specific processes in order to characterize the role of the organic matter in the mobility of metals. At very small scale, we identified roles by immobilization of metals (immobilization in litter, immobilization in soil aggregates, dissolved organic carbon chelates in fine pores), by mobilization of me...

We performed a rational reconstruction of the relationship between biogeochemistry and the study of ecological productive systems. A structural and a functional possibility for building biogeochemical integrated models with optimal complexity have been identified. The conceptual framework was then applied to metals in contaminated areas. Metal mobi...

As environmental issues become more and more stringent, the biotechnological approaches to maintain clean environments are receiving increasing attention. Heavy metal pollution is of great concern as it ultimately forces heavy metals into the food chain leading to serious ecological and health problems. Removal of excess heavy metals from contamina...

After reviewing the limits of the current approaches, we introduce an analytical framework for up-scaling analyses of ecological processes. The framework attempts to produce a conceptual unification and leads to a ten-step approach for up-scaling from a source to a target scale. The literature on ectomycorrhizal fungi is then screened following eac...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AM) are integral functioning parts of plant root systems which are widely recognized in enhancing plant growth on severely disturbed sites, including those contaminated with heavy metals. They play also an important role in metal tolerance and accumulation, providing an attractive system to advance plant-based environm...

We investigated the structure of biological communities at ecosystem and landscape scale in four small catchments including in their structure contaminated areas resulted from mining and processing of heavy metals ores. The contaminated hot spots (ecosystems) were mining dumps, tailing dams and areas polluted by atmospheric deposition around a smel...

The Small Island of Braila Natural Park (ROSPA0005 and ROSCI0006) is a wetland with international importance, declared Ramsar site and Natura 2000 site. The Natural Park preserves on 245 km2 the last wetland complex of flood-free ecosystems after the impoundment of Braila and Ialomita marshes (i.e. of former Danube Inner Delta 2,413 km2, Vadineanu...

Am făcut o analiză a textului darwinian prin care am identificat ce tipuri de obiecte productive sunt asociate limbajului teleologic utilizat în „Originea speciilor” şi prin ce fel de proprietăţi observabi le obiec-tiv sunt ele caracterizate de Darwin. Pe baza rezultatelor analizei textuale şi folosind un set de presupoziţii cu privire la ce înseam...

Controlling the metals pollution is not a matter of controlling only the areas directly polluted by the mining industry but also the areas where the metals have been transported by socioeconomic and natural mechanisms. The socio-ecological mechanisms are linked to the life cycle of the products containing metals, and the natural processes are relat...

Ectomycorrhiza (ECM) communities can be described on a species level or on a larger scale at an ecosystem level. Here we show that the species level approach of successional processes in ECM communities is not appropriate for understanding the diversity patterns of ECM communities at contaminated sites. An ecosystem based approach improves predicta...

Lysimeter experiments were performed in order to investigate the effects of two bioremediation methods on the export of metals from a former uranium mine site located near Ronneburg, Thuringia, Germany. The first method consisted of the application of topsoil and compost to contaminated soil. Soil was sampled from two amended plots and from an unam...

We performed an analysis of a family of models relevant for the integrated modeling in metals biogeochemistry by two approaches: a hierarchical one and a disciplinary one. The hierarchical approach was performed in a theoretical framework accepting the existence of a hierarchy of ecological systems, and split the population of analyzed models into...

Wetlands, and particularly floodplain ecosystems, can function both as sinks and as sources of elements. This have a practical importance in the case of pollutants carried hydrological fluxes. In the lower Danube floodplain nitrogen, phosphorous and metals are recognized as important pollutants carried by the Danube River. In this context, our stud...

My purpose here is to underline some weak points of WFD at the level of the economic analyses and of the monitoring system design. If the weak points could eventually be eliminated or mitigated, this would be favourable to the maximization of the production of natural resources and services by river basins. The method used is a comparative analyses...

In 1981 North stated that Hayek’s theory and Marxist theory are of the same kind, but in 1999 he textually admitted that the neoinstitutionalism is complementary with the theoretical framework elaborated by Hayek. In 1981 Hayek is referred in two footnotes, while in 1999 North contributes to a volume dedicated to Hayek’s work. Why did North change...

There are two ideal types of models produced in environmental sciences: 1. reductionist (R) approaches in the frame of various disciplines and traditions 2. holistic (H) approaches: utopian attempts to integrate the existing models and efforts The economic and epistemic characteristics of the two approaches are: • R approaches may have acceptable...

The Romanian cultural landscape enriched recently with several articles strongly criticizing the ecologism as a fundamentalist discourse. This gave us the opportunity to approach in a more analytical style the problem: is the ecologism necessarily fundamentalistic ? It is shown that a diversity of ecologist ideologies is possible, combining differe...

1. Denitrification in floodplain soils is one of the main biological processes emitting and reducing nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, and the main process responsible for the buffering capacity of riparian zones against diffuse nitrate pollution. 2. The aim of this study was to measure denitrification rates under a wide range of current climatic co...