• KOREAN JOURNAL OF PACKAGING SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.175-182
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• 2022

Heavy metals can be intentionally or unintentionally introduced into plastic food utensils, containers, and packaging (PFUCP) as additives or contaminants, which can be ingested with food by humans. Here, seven-heavy metals (lead, cadmium, nickel, chromium, antimony, copper, and manganese) with toxicity concerns were selected, and risk assessment was done by establishing their migration from 137 PFUCP products made of 16 materials distributed in Korea. Migration of heavy metals was examined by applying 4% acetic acid as a food simulant (70℃, 30 minutes) to the PFUCP products. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was employed for the analysis of migrated heavy metals, and the reliability of quantitative results was confirmed by checking linearity, LOD, LOQ, recovery, precision, and expanded uncertainty. As a result of monitoring, heavy metals were detected at a level of non-detection to 8.76 ± 11.87 ㎍/L and most of the heavy metals investigated were only detected at trace amounts of less than 1 ㎍/L on average. However, antimony migrated from PET products was significantly higher than other groups. Risk assessment revealed that all the heavy metals investigated were safe with a margin of exposure above 311. Collectively, we demonstrated that heavy metals migrated from PFUCP products distributed in Korea appear to be within the safe range.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1255-1272
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• 2023

Satellite-based chlorophyll-a concentration, produced as a long-term time series, is crucial for global climate change research. The production of data without gaps through the merging of time-synthesized or multi-satellite data is essential. However, studies related to satellite-based chlorophyll-a concentration in the waters around the Korean Peninsula have mainly focused on evaluating seasonal characteristics or proposing algorithms suitable for research areas using a single ocean color sensor. In this study, a merging dataset of remote sensing reflectance from the geostationary sensor GOCI-II and polar-orbiting sensors (MODIS, VIIRS, OLCI) was utilized to achieve high spatial coverage of chlorophyll-a concentration in the waters around the Korean Peninsula. The spatial coverage in the results of this study increased by approximately 30% compared to polar-orbiting sensor data, effectively compensating for gaps caused by clouds. Additionally, we aimed to quantitatively assess accuracy through comparison with global chlorophyll-a composite data provided by Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI) and GlobColour, along with in-situ observation data. However, due to the limited number of in-situ observation data, we could not provide statistically significant results. Nevertheless, we observed a tendency for underestimation compared to global data. Furthermore, for the evaluation of practical applications in response to marine disasters such as red tides, we qualitatively compared our results with a case of a red tide in the East Sea in 2013. The results showed similarities to OC-CCI rather than standalone geostationary sensor results. Through this study, we plan to use the generated data for future research in artificial intelligence models for prediction and anomaly utilization. It is anticipated that the results will be beneficial for monitoring chlorophyll-a events in the coastal waters around Korea.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2012

BACKGROUND: Many edible mushrooms are known to accumulate high levels of heavy metals. This research was focused on health risk assessment to investigate the mushrooms in Korea, arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg) contaminations in edible mushrooms in cultivated areas were investigated, and health risk was assessed through dietary intake of mushrooms. METHODS AND RESULTS: The heavy metals in mushrooms were analyzed by ICP/MS after acid digestion. Probabilistic health risk were estimated by Monte-Carlo simulation techniques. The average contents of As, Cd, Pb, and Hg were $0.035{\pm}0.042$ mg/kg, $0.017{\pm}0.020$ mg/kg, $0.043{\pm}0.013$ mg/kg, and $0.004{\pm}0.004$ mg/kg, respectively. The results showed that contents of Cd and Pb did not exceed maximum residual levels established by European Uion regulation (Cd 0.20 mg/kg and Pb 0.30 mg/kg). For health risk assessment, estimated intakes in all age populations did not exceed the provisional tolerable daily intake of As and Hg, provisional tolerable monthly intake of Cd, provisional tolerable weekly intake of Pb. The Hazard Index (HI) were ranged from $0.03{\times}10^{-4}{\sim}0.01{\times}10^{-3}$ for As, $0.02{\times}10^{-3}{\sim}0.81{\times}10^{-3}$ for Cd, $0.06{\times}10^{-3}{\sim}0.38{\times}10^{-3}$ for Pb, and $0.08{\times}10^{-4}{\sim}0.14{\times}10^{-3}$ for Hg at general population. CONCLUSION: The HI from the ratio analysis between daily exposure and safety level values was less than 1.0. This results demonstrated that human exposure to heavy metals through dietary intake of mushrooms might not cause adverse effect.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.174-184
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• 2009

Evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the major hydrologic processes in terrestrial ecosystems. A reliable estimation of spatially representavtive ET is necessary for deriving regional water budget, primary productivity of vegetation, and feedbacks of land surface to regional climate. Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) provides an opportunity to monitor ET for wide area at daily time scale. In this study, we applied a MODIS-based ET algorithm and tested its reliability for nine flux tower sites in East Asia. This is a stand-alone MODIS algorithm based on the Penman-Monteith equation and uses input data derived from MODIS. Instantaneous ET was estimated and scaled up to daily ET. For six flux sites, the MODIS-derived instantaneous ET showed a good agreement with the measured data ($r^2=0.38$ to 0.73, ME = -44 to $+31W\;m^{-2}$, RMSE =48 to $111W\;m^{-2}$). However, for the other three sites, a poor agreement was observed. The predictability of MODIS ET was improved when the up-scaled daily ET was used ($r^2\;=\;0.48$ to 0.89, ME = -0.7 to $-0.6\;mm\;day^{-1}$, $RMSE=\;0.5{\sim}1.1\;mm\;day^{-1}$). Errors in the canopy conductance were identified as a primary factor of uncertainty in MODIS-derived ET and hence, a more reliable estimation of canopy conductance is necessary to increase the accuracy of MODIS ET.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.51 no.10
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• pp.863-874
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the future climate change impact on stream aquatic ecology health of Han River watershed ($34,148km^2$) using SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) and random forest. The 8 years (2008~2015) spring (April to June) Aquatic ecology Health Indices (AHI) such as Trophic Diatom Index (TDI), Benthic Macroinvertebrate Index (BMI) and Fish Assessment Index (FAI) scored (0~100) and graded (A~E) by NIER (National Institute of Environmental Research) were used. The 8 years NIER indices with the water quality (T-N, $NH_4$, $NO_3$, T-P, $PO_4$) showed that the deviation of AHI score is large when the concentration of water quality is low, and AHI score had negative correlation when the concentration is high. By using random forest, one of the Machine Learning techniques for classification analysis, the classification results for the 3 indices grade showed that all of precision, recall, and f1-score were above 0.81. The future SWAT hydrology and water quality results under HadGEM3-RA RCP 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios of Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) showed that the future nitrogen-related water quality in watershed average increased up to 43.2% by the baseflow increase effect and the phosphorus-related water quality decreased up to 18.9% by the surface runoff decrease effect. The future FAI and BMI showed a little better Index grade while the future TDI showed a little worse index grade. We can infer that the future TDI is more sensitive to nitrogen-related water quality and the future FAI and BMI are responded to phosphorus-related water quality.

• The Journal of Korean Society for Radiation Therapy
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• v.33
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• pp.25-33
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• 2021

Purpose : The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of the Trigger mode for the Respiratory Gated Radiation Therapy (RGRT) Materials and methods : A QUASAR respiratory phantom that inserted a 3 mm fiducial marker (a gold marker) was used to estimate the accuracy of the Trigger mode. And the 20 bpm was used as reference respiration rate in this study. The marker that placed at the center of the phantom was contoured, and the lower threshold of a gating window was fixed at 2.0 mm using an OBI with Truebeam STx^TM. The upper threshold was measured every 0.5 mm from 1.0 mm to 3.0 mm. The respiration rates were changed every 10 bpm from 10 bpm to 60 bpm. We repeatedly measured five times to check the error rate of the trigger mode in the same condition. Result : The differences of a distance from a peak phase to upper threshold, 1.0 to 3.0 mm at a 20 bpm as a reference for 3 days in a row were 0.68±0.05 mm, 0.91±0.03 mm, 1.23±0.03 mm, 1.42±0.04 mm, and 1.66±0.06 mm, respectively. Measurement result of changes in respiratory rate compared to baseline respiratory rate in maximum absolute difference. The coefficient of determination (R2) to estimate the correlation between the respiration velocity and variation of absolute difference was on average 0.838, 0.887, 0.770, 0.850, and 0.906. The p-values of all the variables were below 0.05. Conclusion : Using Trigger mode during respiratory gated radiation therapy (RGRT), accuracy and usefulness of trigger mode at reference breathing rate were confirmed. However, inaccuracies depending on the rate of breathing it could be uncertain in case of respiration rate is faster than 20 bpm as a standard respiration rate compared to slower than 20 bpm. Consequently, when conducting a RGRT using the trigger mode, real time monitoring is required with well educated respiration.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.322-334
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• 2024

This study investigated the content of heavy metals (Pb, Cd, As, and Hg) and SO₂ and conducted a risk assessment of 1,340 samples of 60 herbs used for food and medicine in Seoul between 2019 and 2023. The analysis was performed using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), a mercury analyzer, and the Monier-Williams method. The mean values and ranges of the heavy metals were as follows: Pb, 0.327 mg/kg (not detectable [ND]-36.933); Cd, 0.083 mg/kg (ND-1.700); As, 0.075 mg/kg (ND-2.200); and Hg, 0.004 mg/kg (ND-0.047). Pb exceeded the permissible limit of 36.933 mg/kg in one sample of Poria Sclerotium. Cd exceeded the permissible limit of 1.700 mg/kg and 0.650 mg/kg in the two samples of Chrysanthemi Zawadskii Herba. The mean and range of SO₂ was 0.75 mg/kg (ND-192.00), with two samples of Gastrodiae Rhizoma exceeding the permissible limit at 192.00 mg/kg and 42.00 mg/kg. Pb was highest in the perithecium (1.377 mg/kg), followed by Cd in the cortex (0.156 mg/kg) and caulis (0.144 mg/kg), As in leaves (0.149 mg/kg), and Hg in the herba (0.009 mg/kg) and leaves (0.009 mg/kg). SO₂ was the highest in the rhizomes (4.12 mg/kg). The Pb, Cd, and Hg levels did not differ significantly between the domestic, Chinese, and imported products; however, As and SO₂ levels were the highest in the Chinese products. As a result of the risk assessment, all the margins of exposure (MOE) values of Pb, except for Poria Sclerotium, were ≥1, indicating that most samples were safe. The hazard index (HI) for Cd, As, and Hg were <100%, indicating a safety level for food and medicine. In addition, the HI for SO₂ did not exceed 1 for any of the items, indicating safe levels.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.53-64
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• 2006

A study on the restoration process of a stream ecosystem and the water quality renovation technique by removing algae, vegetation and fish monitoring as evaluating the removal of the algae by dietetic characteristics of fishes were performed on Sangdong stream in the B city after stream restoration it to the artificial stream as the cases, restoring urban stream into close-to-nature stream are being increased domestically with the aim of ecological city. As a result, restoration and rehabilitation of the fundamental stream ecosystem was well maintained 4 years later the reclamation at the moment and total 93 diagnosis which were all vascular plant phylum including 44 families, 73 genuses, 79 species and 14 varieties in flora and vegetation community were observed. 3 families, 8 species and 354 populations in total among Fishes were found and Pseudorasbora Parva, Cyprinus Carpic and Carassius Auratus strongly resistant to water pollution were dominantly appeared in order of 50.5% of Pseudorasbora Parva 21.2% of Cyprinus Carpic, 20.9% of Carassius Auratus, 7.1% of Macropodus chinensis and 0.3% of Misqurnus anguillicaudatus according to relative richness index. It turned out to be that Cyprinus Carpic ingests algae over 90% and Carassius Auratus takes it over 30% according to the analysis about the alimentary object of the fishes as a consequences of algae's excrescent from characteristics of the tested experimental stream. It is reported that a Cyprinus Carpic, about 34 cm in length, ingested wet-weight 43.2g algae on the rough analysis toward the sample which makes us recognize how effective a macro community Cyprinus Carpic is for removing algae.As a consequence of this research, the effect of stream ecosystem characteristics and water quality purification could not be expected by aquatic plants and trees which were eliminated at experimental stream. From now on, a close-to-nature stream should be formed of ecological hydraulic and hydrologic engineered modeling from the beginning so that it can perform the water quality purifying function. It is determined that the structure of food chain will be abundantly influenced by the induction of oversized macro community like Cyprinus Carpic because a biomass of a consumer of higher order is increased. It is estimated that the removal algae by fishes is not effective despite in some cases of dietetic characteristics so much more studies should be executed in the future.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.596-612
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• 2020

Purpose: This study was conducted to evaluate the dietary behaviors of preschool children using the nutrition quotient for preschoolers (NQ-P) and investigate factors that influence NQ-P in preschool children. Methods: Subjects were 214 parents with children aged 3-5 years residing in Busan and Gyeongnam, Korea. The survey was conducted from March to April, 2019 using a questionnaire that included demographic characteristics, the NQ-P questions, and health consciousness. All data was statistically analyzed by the SPSS program (Ver 25.0) and the statistical differences in variables were evaluated by the chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, t-test, one-way ANOVA, and Tukey's multiple comparison test. Results: The mean score of NQ-P of the total subjects was 58.28, which was within the medium-low grade. The mean score of 'balance' was 60.08, 'moderation' was 47.64, and 'environment' was 67.83. The analysis of related-factors influencing NQ-P scores showed that there was a significant difference according to the frequency of dining out. The scores of the NQ-P (p < 0.05), moderation (p < 0.001), and environment (p < 0.05) were significantly higher in the 1-2 times per week group compare to 3-4 times and 5-6 times per week group. The scores of NQ-P (p < 0.01), environment (p < 0.01) were significantly higher in the high group of parents' health consciousness compared to the those with low health consciousness. Conclusion: According to the results of the evaluation by NQ-P, the dietary behaviors of preschool children residing in Busan and Gyeongnam need to be improved and monitored. For improving their eating behavior and nutritional health status, preschool children and their parents need proper nutrition education programs.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.263-272
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• 2012

Carbon dioxide, emitted by human activities since the industrial revolution, is regarded as a major contributor of global warming. There are many efforts to mitigate climate change, and carbon dioxide capture and geological storage (CCS) is recognized as one of key technologies because it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions from large point sources such as a power station or other industrial installation. The inclusion of CCS as clean development mechanism (CDM) project activities has been considered at UNFCCC as financial incentive mechanisms for those developing countries that may wish to deploy the CCS. Although the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol (CMP), at Cancun in December 2010, decided that CCS is eligible as CDM project activities, the issues identified in decision 2/CMP.5 should be addressed and resolved in a satisfactory manner. Major issues regarding modalities and procedure are 1) Site selection, 2) Monitoring, 3) Modeling, 4) Boundaries, 5) Seepage Measuring and Accounting, 6) Trans-Boundary Effects, 7) Accounting of Associated Project Emissions (Leakage), 8) Risk and Safety Assessment, and 9) Liability Under the CDM Scheme. The CMP, by its decision 7/CMP.6, invited Parties to submit their views to the secretariat of Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), SBSTA prepared a draft modalities and procedure by exchanging views of Parties through workshop held in Abu Dhabi, UAE (September 2011). The 7th CMP (Durban, December 2011) finally adopted the modalities and procedures for CCS as CDM project activities (CMP[2011], Decision-/CMP.7). The inclusion of CCS as CDM project activities means that CCS is officially accredited as one of $CO_2$ reducing technologies in global carbon market. Consequently, it will affect relevant technologies and industry as well as law and policy in Korea and aboard countries. This paper presents a progress made on discussion and challenges regarding the issue, and aims to suggest some considerations to policy makers in Korea in order to demonstrate and deploy the CCS project in the near future. According to the adopted modalities and procedures for CCS as CDM project activities, it is possible to implement relevant CCS projects in Non-Annex I countries, including Korea, as long as legal and regulatory frameworks are established. Though Korea enacted 'Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth', the details are too inadequate to content the requirements of modalities and procedures for CCS as CDM project. Therefore, it is required not only to amend the existing laws related with capture, transport, and storage of $CO_2$ for paving the way of an prompt deployment of CCS CDM activities in Korea as a short-term approach, but also to establish the united framework as a long-term approach.