The full programme of the conference is available here (pdf format).
Dan Cogălniceanu (Universitatea Ovidius Constanța): Lacurile alpine din Parcul National Retezat
O percepție comună asupra ecosistemelor alpine este că acestea sunt foarte puțin expuse sau afectate de factori antropici. În prezent, însă, schimbările climatice, alături de o serie de alte activități antropice, reprezintă amenințări în creștere rapidă pentru zonele alpine. Biodiversitatea acvatică este esențială pentru funcționarea ecosistemelor și pentru serviciile ecosistemice pe care acestea le furnizează. De aceea, studiul ecosistemelor acvatice alpine și a diversitatii specifice a acestora este atât oportună, cât și necesară. Lacurile alpine in Parcul National Retezat constituie un excelent laborator pentru studiul biodiversitatii alpine si a modificarilor cauzate de activitatile umane.
Carmen Roba, Nicoleta Brișan (Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca): Heavy metal pollution of aquatic ecosystems
Due to their high toxicity, persistence, and bioconcentration, biomagnification capacity in the food chain, heavy metals represent a significant threat to environmental health. Metals are distributed among different aquatic environmental compartments (water, suspended solids, sediments and biota) and can occur in dissolved, particulates or complex form. Metals can reach an aquatic reservoir, by both natural and anthropic sources and depending on their chemical form, their toxicity, bioavailability, and solubility may undergo significant changes. The present study is focused on some important aspects in assessing the impact on aquatic ecosystems associated with the presence of heavy metals, namely: the main natural and anthropic sources, heavy metals toxicity versus their chemical forms, process which influence their transport in aquatic environment, sequential extraction of heavy metals in sediments, their bioavailability, historical trend analysis, different treatment options for heavy metal removal, calculation of heavy metal pollution indices, and carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic health risk assessment.
Liviu Chelcea, Transnational Bottled Water: Eastern European And Ex-Ussr Imported Bottled Water In Immigrant Neighborhoods In New York City
As it is well known, bottled water consumption grew exponentially in the last two decades, in many parts of the globe. This form of water consumption created huge water sustainability problems because of plastic and micro-plastic pollution and aquifer depletion, but it also fill in the gaps of network water provision in poor and minority communities in the Global North, and cities with fragmented water supply in the Global South. This presentation focuses on the bottled water consumed in immigrant communities from Eastern Europe and ex-USSR in New York City.
Unlike all other immigrant communities, ethnic supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants sell bottled water imported from such countries, together with the regular domestic, American brands, and the international brands imported primarily from Europe. Using a personal census of such stores in the neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, which has Greek, Balkan and Eastern European immigrants, and Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which is home to immigrants from the ex-USSR countries (see figure below), I describe the scale of this process, as well as the brands and countries that export water to New York City. Findings indicate that out of the 33 countries that export bottled water to New York City, 19 are from Eastern Europe and ex-USSR. Such waters are sold almost exclusively in ethnic supermarkets and restaurants. They are used differently in the two ethnic areas.
In Eastern European communities, water is part, materially and symbolically, of the foodstuff and drinks that are on the table, often combined with wine, and other liquors. In ex-Soviet space, mixing water and alcohol is not part of dining and drinking. In both regions, however, bottled water from home, especially if it is strongly mineralised is associated medicinal properties, a medical discourse that disappeared in the US, but continued in Eastern Europe and ex-USSR countries. For both, what I call transnational bottled water, is also a part of home, and identity. This mobility of bottled water raises interesting questions about the carbon footprint of bottled water, notions of health, imagined communities, and the causes for drinking bottled water.
Calin Cotoi, University of Bucharest, The Socialist Ecology of Reeds: Plant Lives and Hydro-modernities in the Danube Delta
This presentation follows the historical emergence of the Danube delta as hydro-modernity, the creation of political and scientific representations of the dynamic landscape of waters, silt, reeds, animals, and humans. This process started with the first staging of the landscape as an undeveloped, lacking in modernity “green sea,” in mid-nineteenth century, and then evolved, before and after WWI, into a mixed ecological-economic model. Because of the large scale and increasingly accurate map-making of the area, the delta gradually emerged as a passive repository of free resources.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, the socialist delta was re-imagined around a new techno-science of reeds. Reedbeds became visible as a potentially reachable treasure chest to be soon opened in a modernizing land. It was no longer the sign of “inhospitable” lands, as it became a potentially civilizing resource, ready to upgrade the Danube Delta region to the higher agro-industrial socialist status, but becoming unexpectedly internally differentiated, both biologically and technologically. In the Romanian socialist cash-strapped economy, after WWII, almost no effort was spared for this project. The economic development of large wetlands through biological and technological research was deeply entangled with plants’ lives and histories.
The rhizomatic character of the common reed, its ways of moving, changing and aggregating in the Delta was framed by heavy machinery, political and scientific imaginaries. The present-day partially ruined landscape of socialist reed has become an ambiguous part of contemporary understandings of the governance of “wild nature,” in the wetlands of Eastern Europe.
Vasile Pârvulescu, University of Bucharest: Strategic Approaches for Water Pollution Mitigation
The crucial concern regarding water pollution goes far beyond the presence of macroscopic floating objects, which mainly cause aesthetic distress. The real impact is driven by micropollutants, dissolved or dispersed as colloidal particles in water, that can bioaccumulate and lead to severe adverse effects on biota, from individual organisms to ecosystem levels. Mitigating pollution in aquatic systems is extremely challenging. Chemical treatment processes might result in even more complex consequences.
The talk will explore strategies for pollution reduction, rather than complete elimination, and alternative approaches meant to protect aquatic systems. Ultimately, the research conducted within the ResPonSE project investigates solutions for pollution mitigation, going beyond simple contamination with individual compounds to complex water matrices containing pollutant mixtures, including case studies involving actual wastewater.