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The relocation of nutrients and water fluxes to the forest floor varies spatially due to partition of rainfall into throughfall and stemflow by tree canopies. In this study, nutrient concentrations of rainfall and stemflow were measured for seven rainfall events in Chaboksar area in the Hyrcanian ecozone of Iran composed of Juglans regia Linn and Cup. Sempervirens L. Var. Fastigiata where such information was absent. In the course of the study, a total of 24 samples were collected, and stemflow samples of these species were analysed in relation to rainfall. The results of this study suggest that the nutrient concentrations in stemflow are mainly influenced by vegetation species. The concentrations of CaCO3, nitrate, calcium, magnesium, sodium, zinc, and chloride, were all higher in the stemflow of cypress tree than that of the walnut tree. The concentration of iron in both stemflow samples was zero. The pH level in the stemflow of Juglans regia Linn and Cup. Sempervirens L. Var. Fastigiata was slightly lower than rainfall pH level. However, in terms of heavy metals, the concentration of lead in cypress stemflow was found to be higher than that in walnut stemflow. Furthermore, a very small amount of copper was detected in the stemflow of cypress tree. Electrical conductivity of cypress stemflow was also higher than that of walnut stemflow.

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Treatment of organic leachate is one the most controversial topics around the world which led this study to assess the efficiency of the combined oxidation and adsorption treatment (COAT) process in the treatment of leachate by considering local experiments. The removal of effluent parameters (TDS, COD, BOD) was enhanced by oxidizing the GAC surface as a catalyst with NaOH before the process and by ozone within the procedure as well. Assessing the interacting effect of operating variables (i.e., ozone concentration, GAC density, reaction time and pH) provides valuable information for optimization. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was employed. The optimized model’s circumstances are the reaction time of 30.77 min, ozone dosage of 141.29 mg/l, pH of 7.2, and the GAC density of 1.29 gr/cm³ with the predicted removal percentage of 51.63%,62.84% and 56.13% for TDS, COD and, BOD respectively.
 

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The effect of ozonized ice on shelf-life of Indian mackerel (Rastrelliger kanagurta) muscle was studied during 16 days storage period, based on chemical and microbial assessments. Chemical analysis (pH, total volatile nitrogen bases, peroxide, trimethylamine) and microbial analysis (total bacterial load and psychrophillic bacteria) was done every four days. The lowest pH, TVB-N and TMA values were observed in the ozonized ice treatment, while its PV value was higher. The ozonized ice effectively reduced the total viable count (TVC) and psychrophillic bacterial count (PTC) by 2.22 and 2.07 log₁₀ CFU cm^-2, respectively, at 12 days period. Thus, the ozonized ice protected fish quality better than the control treatment until the end of storage.

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The nitrogen (N) nutrition, crop yield, and responses of wheat to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) were tested in an experimental field under free-air ozone concentration [O₃] enrichment (FACE) conditions. The experiment included three treatments: ambient [O₃] (Ambient), elevated [O₃] (FACE, targeted at ambient [O₃]×1.5), and elevated [O₃] inoculated with an AMF consortium consisting of several Glomus species (FACE+AMF). AMF inoculation responsiveness of wheat was estimated by comparing plants grown in unsterilized soil inoculated with the exogenous AMF and in untreated soil containing indigenous AMF. Compared with the Ambient, relatively higher N contents but lower shoot biomasses of wheat plants were observed in the FACE treatment without AMF inoculation from the tillering stage in February and heading stage in April, respectively, which significantly (P< 0.05) decreased grain yield by 28% at harvest in June. Under the FACE condition, compared with the non-inoculated treatment, AMF inoculation significantly (P< 0.05) increased root colonization rates both at the tillering stage and heading stage, and also significantly (P< 0.05) increased shoot biomass at the heading stage and, hence, significantly (P< 0.05) increased grain yield by 40% at harvest. However, AMF inoculation significantly (P< 0.05) decreased total N content in wheat shoots at the tillering stage, suggesting that AMF consortia may enhance plant tolerance to elevated [O₃] by elevating root colonization rate rather than plant total N content at early growing stages.

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Air pollution as a silent murderer of metropolitan areas demanded huge amounts of attractions. During the past few decades, after London 1954 black days, the world encountered a novel problem which was made by anthropologic actions. Scientific researches for scrutinizing the air pollution and its effects on humankind and the environment, started and improved after chronic influences of contaminations which in this era prognostication of pollutants and finding the relationships between parameters out, seems to be undeniable. Ozone as a tropospheric gas, has severe impacts on the all creatures while the human beings are more delicate in conjunction with this gas where it can destroy ability lungs and cause asthma and other pulmonary diseases. In the present article, the two most prevailing approaches for prediction, applied to the forecast tropospheric ozone value considering eight other photochemical precursors and meteorological parameters. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matters (PM2.5, PM10) as photochemical precursors, and also humidity, air temperature and wind speed as meteorological parameters, after data preparation, used for ground level ozone prognostication in Tehran, Iran, with a condensed population where suffers from severe air contaminations and high rate of daily death, related to the air pollution. Used data series, have been collected from 22 regions of the cited city during 2 years (2014 and 2015). Two evaluation criteria, root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (R), selected for comparison of applications. Support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) as capable soft computing approaches which have been used in numerous areas of science, opted in this research. Support vector machine with classification of other eight parameters and by 286 vectors as a classifier and 97 border vectors, sorted the 70 percent of data sets as training and the residual amount of parameters used as testing data sets. Radial basis function (RBF) selected as Kernel function. Artificial neural network works as like as human brains and neurons between layers transfer datasets and process them during the run time, where in the recent paper the layer number of the created network is one for hidden layer and one for the output layer and 10 neurons have been selected for hidden layer and one for the output layer. Network type of this system is feed-forward with back propagation and TRAINLM used as training function and LEARNGDM used for adaption learning function. Both approaches depicted reliable and acceptable results, where RMSE and R values for support vector machine, respectively 0.0774 and 0.8456, also artificial neural network resulted 0.0914 for RMSE and 0.8396 for R, which are reasonable outcomes. As the outcomes for training datasets were better than the results for testing datasets, both approaches showed acceptable performances because of over-training controlling, which is a serious and prevalent difficulty of soft computers. Support vector machine, with lower root mean square error and higher correlation coefficient selected as better application for ground level ozone prediction. These series of studies are supportive for calibration of measuring systems and due to their expensiveness, soft computing is the most reliable and affordable substitute for the past machines. Also the analysis of tolerances among the parameters illustrated that CO, Temperature and NO2 are the most effective where, PM2.5 had the least amount impact on O3 forecasting process.

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By developing of the consumerism and rapidly progress of industrial and commercial lifestyle in most of the countries, the solid waste production has been growth rapidly in the recent years. The leachate production starts shortly after the production of waste and cause the pollution of environment and especially contamination of the soil. Chemical processes are usually considered as the most effective processes for degradation of soil pollutants. In these processes, the chemical reagents are added to make the desired reactions take place. But it is sometimes necessary to increase the amount of reagents so that the reactions take place completely. This may cause chemical reagents to remain in the soil. Ozone, which acts as a powerful oxidizer, is capable of degrading organic pollutants in a short period of time without producing any toxic residuals. Nowadays ozonation has become one of the most favorable processes in soil remediation technologies. Ozone is used in the treatment of a wide range of pollutants. Due to the high diffusion coefficient of ozone, all of the present pollutants in soil are theoretically available for this oxidant. Since leachate contains a range of organic and inorganic pollutants, ozonation process is therefore can be a useful process in treating soils contaminated with leachate. In this study, application of ozonation process as an ex-situ method on the treatment of composting leachate polluted soil was studied in laboratory scale and in batch mode. Experiments were conducted using a cylindrical Plexiglas reactor with the diameter of 3 cm and the height of 60 cm. Ozone gas was continuously passed through a diffuser at the bottom of the reactor. Ozone generator with 5 g/h nominal capacity was used to produce ozone gas from pure and dry oxygen. Ozone content was measured with a digital ozone analyzer. A rotameter was also applied to measure the volume of gas injected to the reactor. The leachate used in this study has been collected from one of composting plant in north of Iran. The soil used in this study was mainly silica with the particle size of 0.12-0.3 mm. In order to pollute the soil; a certain amount of leachate was well mixed with the soil and then dried to the desired humidity. According to the results the maximum removal of soil organic content was obtained at pH=9 after 120 minutes ozonation with a flow of 200 ml/min. By increasing the initial organic content of the soil, the removal via ozonation has been also increased. In other word the soil with higher initial contaminations has shown better removal efficiencies compared with the one with lower initial pollutants. In this study, the presence of trivalent iron oxide caused 42% increases in soil organic content removal efficiency. In this research applying gas washing technique with acid also greatly enhanced the removal efficiency of ozonation process. According to the conducted experiments, after pre washing of ozone with acid, the removal of soil organic content with nearly 90% increase, reached to 21.2%. The results were also shown that, the change in the type of acid did not have a significant effect on the soil organic matter removal efficiency.

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Patulin a major human health problem, especially in the juice. The global standard of patulin in fruit juices is about 50 ppb. Studies show that using different physical, chemical and biological methods can reduce the amount of patulin. Therefore, the amount of mycotoxin patulin in apple concentrate samples and their reduction by ozone, activated charcoal and their combined effects were evaluated. One-way ANOVA and two-way ANOVA were used to analyses effects of the two factors separately and combination form and for compration of means Tukey test at the 5% level of significance were used too. According to the results of this study on the reduction of patulin concentration by two variables of activated charcoal concentration and ozonation time showed that there is a direct relationship between increase the activated charcoal concentration and also ozonation time. The highest decrease in patulin concentration was obtained in 0.2 g of activated charcoal and 9 minutes ozonation. The results also showed that there was an interaction between the two variables (P = 0.006 and the highest decrease in patulin was observed at 8 minutes of ozonation and 1.5 g of activated charcoal. patulin in the juice and concentrate factories and can be an effective step in health by GAP (Green Agricultural Practice) and exports of fruit juice and concentrates.
Keywords: Mycotoxin, Patulin, Ozone, Activated charcoal, Apple concentrate

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In this study, the effect of ozone treatment on the microbial population, color of the flour samples and the rheological properties of the dough (Farinograph, Extensograph and Alveograph) were evaluated in different rates of extraction (72, 83 and 90%). the flour samples were treated with ozone gas using a machine at a pressure of 1.5 bar with air capacity of 350 lit/min and a flour capacity of 2000 kg/h. The results indicated that the thermophilic and mesophilic bacteria and total mold count in ozone treated samples decreased compared to the control. The use of ozone as an oxidizing agent increased the water absorption, dough development time, the P (Dough resistance) and L (dough extensibility) parameters. The results of the color test also showed an increase in L* as lightness of ozone treated flour samples.

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Today, the desire to use ozone as a strong antimicrobial compound, cost-effective, and eco-friendly innovation, has increased to increase the shelf life of food products. This study was conducted in order to evaluate the chemical and microbial properties of thermally pasteurized skim milk treated with pressurized ozone injection at concentrations of zero, 1.5, 5, and 10 ppm. The chemical, microbial and sensory characteristics of the treated milk samples were evaluated on days 0, 4, 7 and 15 of storage in the refrigerator. The total viable count (TVC) in the treated samples with ozone compared to the control had a noticeable decrease in all storage days. The highest antimicrobial effect was observed on the 15th day of storage with 10 ppm ozone and the lowest effect was observed on the 4th day with 1.5 ppm ozone. However, there was no significant difference in pH (6.8-6.88) and acidity (0.16-0.18) between treated and control samples. Although the peroxide number (PV) in the treated samples and the control samples was higher than the standard, but its reduction was evident in the treated samples compared to the control samples. Also, by comparing the sensory characteristics among the samples, no significant differences were observed. In general, treatments with 5 and 10 ppm ozone had the best efficiency in increasing the shelf life of pasteurized milk. According to the results, ozone can be used as an auxiliary method to increase the effectiveness of thermal processes in pasteurization and increase the shelf life of milk.