Study of biocapacity areas to reduce ecological footprint deficits: A case study of Turkey.

Our world has had difficulty meeting humans' needs in recent years. To ensure that the world can sustain its inhabitability and self-sufficiency in terms of natural resources, it is required to make the total amount of biocapacity areas equal to or higher than the ecological footprint. An analytical study has been carried out to remedy the biocapacity deficit by utilizing this information for Turkey and then these areas are optimized with heuristic optimization techniques. As a result, Artificial Bee Colony provides better objective function results (fewer errors) compared to Particle Swarm Optimization and Global Optimization Method Based on Clustering and Parabolic Approximation in terms of minimum, maximum, average value, and standard deviation. The rates of change according to the current situation of the biocapacity areas in 2016 are 277.97 %, 30.28 %, -29.28 %, 14.97 %, and -44.85 % for cropland, grazing land, forestland, fishing grounds, and built-up land, respectively. Depending on the population growth, these rates should additionally change by 83.24 %, -0.69 %, 3.97 %, 6.22 %, and -14.24 % respectively in 2050. The developed model can be used in industry or within the frame of government development policy and thus the balance between ecological footprint and biocapacity can be kept under control.

Future prediction of biogas potential and CH4 emission with boosting algorithms: the case of cattle, small ruminant, and poultry manure from Turkey.

Animal waste can be converted into a renewable energy source using biogas technology. This process has an impact on greenhouse gas emissions and is a sustainable source of energy for countries. It can reduce the effects of climate change and protect the planet for future generations. Tier1 and tier2 approaches are commonly used in the literature to calculate emissions factors. With boosting algorithms, this study estimated each animal category's biogas potential and CH4 emissions (tier1 and tier2 approach) for 2004-2021 in all of Turkey's provinces. Two different scenarios were created in the study. For scenario-1, the years 2020-2021 were predicted using data from 2004 to 2019, while for scenario-2, the years 2022-2024 were predicted using data from 2004 to 2021. According to the scenario-1 analysis, the eXtreme Gradient Boosting Regressor (XGBR) algorithm was the most successful algorithm with an R2 of 0.9883 for animal-based biogas prediction and 0.9835 and 0.9773 for animal-based CH4 emission predictions (tier1 and tier2 approaches) for the years 2020-2021. When the mean absolute percentage error was evaluated, it was found to be relatively low at 0.46%, 1.07%, and 2.78%, respectively. According to the scenario-2 analysis, the XGBR algorithm predicted the log10 values of the animal-based biogas potential of five major cities in Turkey for the year 2024, with 11.279 for Istanbul, 12.055 for Ankara, 12.309 for Izmir, 11.869 for Bursa, and 12.866 for Antalya. In the estimation of log10 values of CH4 emission, the tier1 approach yielded estimates of 3.080, 3.652, 3.929, 3.411, and 3.321, respectively, while the tier2 approach yielded estimates of 1.810, 2.806, 2.757, 2.552 and 2.122, respectively.

Modeling of energy and emissions from animal manure using machine learning methods: the case of the Western Mediterranean Region, Turkey.

In Turkey, facilities for the use of biomass resources in energy production are increasing, and new conversion facilities are commissioned every year to provide environmentally friendly energy production. Therefore, reliable energy potential estimates are needed. In this study, the animal manure-based-biogas potentials of Antalya, Isparta, and Burdur provinces in the Western Mediterranean Region of Turkey were calculated. Here, special information on cattle, small ruminants, and poultry, and animal age, number, and manure amount information were used in detail. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions, coal, electricity, and thermal energy, methane emission values with the Tier 1 and Tier 2 approaches were calculated and predicted by machine learning algorithms. To determine the model with the best results, machine learning algorithms support vector machine (SVM), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and linear regression (LR) were used, and hyper-parameter optimization was performed. According to the results of biogas potential, CO2 emission, electricity production, and thermal energy estimations SVM models are seen as the best models with R2 = 0.999. When the coal amount estimation is examined, the LR models produce better results than SVM and MLP with R2 = 0.997. In the estimation of CH4 using the Tier 1 approach, the MLP model can perform the best estimation with R2 = 0.977. In the CH4 modeling obtained using the Tier 2 approach, the LR models were superior to the other models with the performance value of R2 = 0.962.