• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2007

The use of information on natural resources is indispensable to most agricultural activities to avoid disasters, to improve input efficiency, and to increase lam income. Most information is prepared and managed at a spatial scale called the "Hydrologic Unit" (HU), which means watershed or small river basin, because virtually every environmental problem can be handled best within a single HU. South Korea consists of 840 such watersheds and, while other watershed-specific information is routinely managed by government organizations, there are none responsible for agricultural weather and climate. A joint research team of Kyung Hee University and the Agriculture, forestry and Fisheries Information Service has begun a 4-year project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and forestry to establish a watershed-specific agricultural weather information service based on "high definition" digital climate maps (HD-DCMs) utilizing the state of the art geospatial climatological technology. For example, a daily minimum temperature model simulating the thermodynamic nature of cold air with the aid of raster GIS and microwave temperature profiling will quantify effects of cold air drainage on local temperature. By using these techniques and 30-year (1971-2000) synoptic observations, gridded climate data including temperature, solar irradiance, and precipitation will be prepared for each watershed at a 30m spacing. Together with the climatological normals, there will be 3-hourly near-real time meterological mapping using the Korea Meteorological Administration's digital forecasting products which are prepared at a 5 km by 5 km resolution. Resulting HD-DCM database and operational technology will be transferred to local governments, and they will be responsible for routine operations and applications in their region. This paper describes the project in detail and demonstrates some of the interim results.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.34 no.7
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• pp.445-453
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• 2012

An investigation for removal of 1-indanone (1-ID), which were commonly produced from the biological and/or chemical treatment and natural weathering of the PAHs-contaminated soils, via oxidative transformation mediated by birnessite in the presence of various phenolic mediators is described. This study also examines the potential effect of the natural occurring substance humic acid (HA) on the oxidative transformation. The experiment was carried out in aqueous phase as a batch test (10 mg/L 1-ID, 0.3 mM phenolic mediators, $1.0g/L\;{\delta}-MnO_2$, at pH 5). All of the 11 tested phenoilic mediators belong to the group of natural occurring phenols and are widely used as model constituents of humic substances. From the results of HPLC analysis, it is demonstrated that 1-ID was not reactive to birnessite itself, but it can be effectively removed in birnessite-mediated cross coupling reactions in the presence of the phenolic mediators. The percent removals of 1-ID after 2 day incubation were ranged from 9.2 to 71.2% depending on the phenolic mediators applied. The initial rate constant ($K_{int}$, $hr^{-1}$) values for the 1-ID removals obtained from the pseudo-first-order kinetic plots also widely ranged from 0.18 to 15.0. Results of the correlative analysis between the removal efficiencies and structural characteristics of phenolic mediators indicate that the transformation of the 1-ID was considerably enhanced by the addition of electron-donating substituents (e.g., -OH, $-OCH_3$) at the benzne ring, and much less enhanced by the addition of electron-withdrawing substituents (e.g., -COOH, -CHO). The presence of HA showed that removal efficiencies of 1-ID in the birnessite-phenolic mediator systems decreased with increasing HA concentrations. However at low concentration of HA (< 2 mg/L), it caused some enhancement in the removals of 1-ID as compared to the control.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.24 no.9
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• pp.988-994
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• 2014

The effluents of chemical and petroleum industries often contain non-biodegradable aromatic compounds, with phenol being one of the major organic pollutants present among a wide variety of highly toxic organic chemicals. Phenol is toxic upon ingestion, contact, or inhalation, and it is lethal to fish even at concentrations as low as 0.005 ppm. Phenol biodegradation has been studied in detail using bacterial strains. However, these microorganisms suffer from substrate inhibition at high concentrations of phenol, whereby growth is inhibited. A phenol-degrading bacterium, P21, was isolated from oil-contaminated soil. The phenotypic characteristics and a phylogenetic analysis indicated the close relationship of strain P21 to Rhodococcus pyridinovorans. Phenol biodegradation by strain P21 was studied under shaking condition. The optimal conditions for phenol biodegradation by strain P21 were 0.09% $KNO_3$, 0.1% $K_2HPO_4$, 0.3% $NaH_2PO_4$, 0.015% $MgSO_4{\cdot}7H_2O$, 0.001% $FeSO_4{\cdot}7H_2O$, initial pH 9, and $20-30^{\circ}C$, respectively. When 1,000 ppm of phenol was added to the optimal medium, the strain P21 completely degraded it within two days. Rhodococcus pyridinovorans P21 could grow in up to 1,500 ppm of phenol as the sole carbon source in a batch culture, but it could not grow in a medium containing above 2,000 ppm. Moreover, strain P21 could utilize toxic compounds, such as toluene, xylene, and hexane, as a sole carbon source. However, no growth was detected on chloroform.