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Energy efficiency in buildings can be enhanced by several actions: encouraging users to comprehend and then adopt more energy-efficient behaviors; aiding building managers in maximizing energy savings; and using automation to optimize energy consumption, generation, and storage of controllable and flexible devices without compromising comfort levels and indoor air-quality parameters. This paper proposes an integrated Information and communications technology (ICT) based platform addressing all these factors. The gamification platform is embedded in the ICT platform along with an interactive energy management system, which aids interested stakeholders in optimizing “when and at which rate” energy should be buffered and consumed, with several advantages, such as reducing peak load, maximizing local renewable energy consumption, and delivering more efficient use of the resources available in individual buildings or blocks of buildings. This system also interacts with an automation manager and a users’ behavior predictor application. The work was developed in the Horizon 2020 FEEdBACk (Fostering Energy Efficiency and BehAvioral Change through ICT) project.

Green algal communities were investigated in clean and pollution-impacted tundra soils around the large coal mine industrial complex of Vorkuta in the E. European Russian tundra. Samples were collected in three zones of open-cast coal mining with different degrees of pollution-impacted soil transformation. A total of 42 species of algae were found in all zones. The species richness decreased from 27 species in undisturbed zones to 19 species in polluted zones. Under open-cast coal mining impacts the community structure simplified, and the dominant algae complexes changed. Algae that are typical for clean soils disappeared from the communities. The total abundance of green algae (counted together with Xanthophyta) ranged between 100-120 × 10 3 (cells/g dry soils) in undisturbed zones and 0.5-50 × 10 3 in polluted zones. Soil algae appear to be better indicators of coal mine technogenic pollution than flowering plants and mosses.

Distribution of migration (state) forms of microelements in the sediments of the ports of Klaipėda and Gdańsk