Home – Home – Jornals – Advanced Search

The article provides a rationale for a comprehensive analysis of major investment projects and their impact on natural and social environment of the Baikal Region. The investment projects currently under way in the region have been characterized; most of them deal with resource development and raw material processing. Their impact on the environment largely controlled by their proximity to major zones of displacement of population has been determined. The Baikal Region is remarkable for a combination of abundant natural resources and its unique natural landscapes. This requires a balance between the economic value of a project and its negative impact on the environment. The government must act as an arbiter, providing legislational regulation for any contractual relationships between the production activity, environment and regional community. However, the decline in investment activity and reduced fiscal opportunities could provoke implementation of a project by compromising requirements for the environmental attributes to production activities. Therefore, a critical criterion for evaluating a specific project’s feasibility is to be the impact on public health, which will be assessed in public expenditures for its recovery. This may be benefited by an integrated approach to the assessment of the impact by means of involving medical research institutes in the solution of this common issue. Prom oting green economy principles should become the main direction in economic the development of the territories like the Baikal Region, which makes it possible to preserve the unique ecosystems in conjunction with the industries modernization for the benefit of people living here.

In the central ecological zone of the Irkutsk Region the local population employment is a challenge especially in the settlements located beyond the tourist routes. Small businesses (individual entrepreneurship) are limited by the legislative framework and many are not allowed. The total amount of investments in the capital assets in Olkhon, Slyudyanka, and Irkutsk districts does not exceed 3 % of the total amount financial injections into the region economy. The article briefly outlines business activities of each of the three municipal districts. Olkhon district is the most active in business, with 13,3 companies per 1,000 people registered there. Most of them are service providers (cafes, restaurants, hotels and other places of temporary accommodation). Three core business activities allowed on the analyzed territory have been distinguished (environmentally friendly or safe). It is shown that wild collection and processing as well as herbal tea production are particularly promising for development. A low investment requirement of affiliated enterprises, the readily recognizable “Baikal” brand, diversity of growing plants, mushrooms and medicinal herbs satisfactory for the manufacture of tea, herbal mixtures, tea drinks, and berry syrups make these enterprises feasible for small businesses in the central ecological zone. The existing companies from the mentioned sectors active in Irkutsk Region have been studied. Depending on the product range the main directions of activities and presumably marketable products have been identified.

According to its Russian and International status, the Baikal Region is destined to be a model territory for sustainable development of worldwide importance. Today, the raw material sector plays a key role, which is likely to remain so in the future, in the economies of Irkutsk Region, Trans-Baikal Territory (Zabaykalsky Krai) and the Republic of Buryatia. Given that, how ever, in the past 25 years some of the institutional, legislative and organizational provisions for the mineral resources management turned out ineffective, the achievement of goals of sustainable development has been largely impeded. Among main subsoil users in the Baikal Region are large, vertically integrated companies. The hefty incomes of large holdings have thus far neither risen life standards of the population, nor contributed to the innovative economic development of the regions they have been active in, though. It is critical therefore to improve the effectiveness of the state management in the field of the subsurface use, particu larly in the replenishment of the mineral resource base in the region. At present, the recovery of raw materials is way ahead of their pre-development stage, which will soon grow into an obstacle to the resource development and raw materials production and processing and, as a result, their following redistribution. Large-scale geological mapping of the territory, regional geological prospecting and exploration, and areas licensing should be conducted by the state institutions, e. g. large state-owned specialized holdings. A significant contribution can be made by the Federal targeted programs for geological studies of the subsurface in the centers of the most promising mineral resource occurrences. The sustainable development of the Baikal Region, including its mineral resource base, should imply a continuous rise in living standards of the people residing on its territory, their ecological welfare, as well as an increase in population.

In the context of social and market-based economy, a new type of economic relations has been developing in Russia, as sociated with a fundamentally different approach to the responsibility for the population’s health improvement. Moreover, the society has adopted a new outlook on many traditional things, even established concepts in science are subject to revisiting or changes, and health therefore acquires not only the status of social value, but also an important economic resource (or asset) of the society. Based on the synthesis of the achieved level of quality of life and economic well-being, the public health factor mea sures progress in socio-economic development of the country. The article considers the personnel’s health as a valuable resource and its key role in the development of the Irkutsk Sci entific Center, SB RAS. We conducted morbidity study and analyzed its structure including incidence, prevalence, susceptibility to disease as the main indications of the employees’ health. The analysis results revealed that in the structure of morbidity, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) take the highest rank, being a major cause of morbidity, disability and mortality in most countries; the second leading position in the structure of morbidity is occupied by respiratory diseases, reflecting the environmental factors that contribute to the disease progression. The majority of cardiovascular diseases can be prevented by taking reasonable measures against such risk factors as to bacco use, unhealthy diets and obesity, physical inactivity, high blood pressure, diabetes and elevated lipid levels. The most effective way to combat the disease have always been its timely diagnosis and prevention. These allow one to dramatically reduce the risk of CVD and increase life expectancy by about 10-15 years. The factors that are potentially dangerous to human health and that promote the incidence of cardiovascular diseases (smoking, overweight, diabetes mellitus, etc.) have been studied, with their prevalence revealed in the group of the ISC SB RAS employees, registered with the ISC SB RAS Hospital for regular health services. The results of a molecular genetic tests that had 30 leading members of ISC SB RAS provided valuable information about their predisposition to various diseases, including CVD. Having revealed subgroups of patients with/no hypertension, it was possible quite confidently differentiate between the groups with chronic kidney disease and with type 2 diabetes. The conclusion to be drawn is that health is governed by both genetic and environmental factors. The research has shown that health problems of the population are multifactorial and a comprehensive approach is recom mended in addressing the problems of public health preservation as a fundamental component of human asset and improvement of the population’s health.

In geological terms the section of the Kovykta gas condensate field and the surrounding areas is composed by three geo electric complexes-the post-salt terrigenous-carbonate; carbonate-halogen; and the pre-salt terrigenous-carbonate, lying at the basement. Within the two lower complexes reservoir horizons are spread regionally, with some of them bearing commercial hyd rocarbon deposits. Due to the presence of conductive saline pore solutions, the reservoirs are characterized by low electrical re sistivity. This leads to the geological effectiveness of the use of electromagnetic methods in the delineation of the zones of reservoir development. Transient electromagnetic soundings in the near field zone (TEM) is traditionally applied in Eastern Siberia in prospecting and exploration of hydrocarbon accumulations. Modern technologies of mathematical modeling and inversion of TEM signals allow to define geoelectric characteristics not only in the intervals whose thickness measures hundreds of meters, but also di rectly in thin reservoirs. Accordingly, the question arises on the accuracy of the electrical resistivity determination in each of the horizons. To solve this problem an original technique was developed consisting in synthesizing and noising of TEM signals and their inversion with estimation of resistivity recovery error of each horizon. Using the proposed method allows to evaluate the accu racy of the of reservoirs prediction in the sedimentary cover from TEM studies. To provide the inversion the automated minimi zation procedure based on the algorithm of the Monte Carlo method was used. The starting models based on the results of manual inversion and optimal scale of layers resistivity variations were used for reduction of the inversion time. The model of the longitudinal resistance of the layer comprising different conductivity horizons, evaluates the integrity of these geoelectric parameters considered. The use of the proposed method allowed us to estimate the accuracy of prediction of the presence of reservoirs in the sedimentary cover, depending on the resistivity contrast their properties and depth.

The main oil and gas promising resources of the southern Siberian platform are related to subsalt terrigenous rocks of the Riphean and Vendian-Lower Cambrian age occurring in the lower sedimentary cover, as well as the Cambrian carbonate ho rizons of subsalt and overlying carbonate-halogen complexes. The specific geological framework of the sedimentary cover of the southern Siberian platform is associated with intermittent nature of reservoir distribution and lack of anticlinal structural forms. This causes particular localization of oil and gas accu mulations, and influences the effectiveness of standard geological and geophysical methods used in their exploration. Petrophysical analyses results show that reservoir properties of rocks are most clearly reflected in their electrical resistivity. This provides an objective basis for widespread applications of electromagnetic methods in oil and gas exploration, the near-field transient electromagnetic sounding (NTES) in particular. Modern methods of electromagnetic sounding data interpretation allow estimating conductivity of the geologic intervals containing productive horizons with an accuracy of a few tens of percent. Using resistivity of formation water and available data on the relationships between volume porosity and porosity factor allows estimating capacity of water-saturated reservoir voids by their conductivity. Given the data on average value of the re sidual water saturation factor and average HC-saturated-to-water-saturated reservoir ratio, we can estimate hydrocarbon re sources on a regional scale. The proposed method for reservoir voids calculation by their geoelectric properties can be used as the basis for appraisal of C3 hydrocarbon reserves.

The problem of geological studies carried out in prospective areas characterized by complex landscape-morphological con ditions and their remoteness from infrastructure has been analyzed. The paper provides an overview of available approaches to conducting magnetic surveys, a universal method applicable for geological mapping and prospecting that proved very efficient in various geologic settings. The main technical features of a hardware and software system developed by the authors for unmanned low-altitude aeromagnetic surveys are described. This aeromagnetic system is meant to operate in difficult environment conditions. Some actual problems of developing airborne geophysical systems are considered and their solutions proposed by the authors are introduced. Due to original techniques and procedures the designed aeromagnetic complex provides large scale data, which is achieved due to the low cost of the used components and their high reliability, as well as a possibility for making taking measure ments at extremely low altitudes with a relief flow even in mountainous areas. For this purpose, the authors have developed a geoinformation module named a SibGIS Flight Planner which provides an automated preparation of flight missions taking into account accurate information about a terrain model and its uploading in a data format supported by common autopilot systems. Like the rest of the complex software modules, this plugin is designed for freeware GIS QuantumGIS. It provides a true layout of networks with profiles and measurement stakes, determination of flight altitudes for mission points, setting a large number of flight parameters and uploading resulting files in the *.awm format. Since this software can be used in a wide range of tasks related to professional use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the authors consider it possible to open the source code of the module (https://github.com/raulett/SibGIS-Flight-Planner), as well as provide a link to download the finished plug-in, which now can be used by any interested specialist. We also give some internet links to field exploration videos demonstrating the UAV complex abilities mentioned in the article, in particular a flight at extremely low altitudes around the terrain relief, and activities in difficult weather conditions and at low temperatures.

The article provides an overview of techniques and procedures used in the low-altitude unmanned aeromagnetic survey technology developed by the authors. The main procedure methods are aimed to develop a digital terrain model and prepare flight missions taking into account the relief flow; to pre-verify a flight mission; to perform measurements and data post-process ing. A digital terrain model can be developed based on a combination of global elevation coverage data and conditioned topo graphic maps or preliminary aerial imageries. A flight mission is verified by a lighter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a camera. The flight mission planner tool is described in the previous part of this article. The authors present survey results obtained by testing the UAV-magnetic exploration technology in solving prospecting and evaluation problems on the black shale type gold objects located within the Baikal-Patom Highland. The technology was tested in adverse weather conditions and com posite topography. Some of the explored objects presented a real challenge to magnetic survey due to low contrast of the mag netic field, which required a high absolute precision and sensitivity of magnetometers. The results obtained by the new unmanned method have been compared with the data of traditional pedestrian survey. It is shown that in complex environment the UAV technology produces good conditioning data, their quality is even better than that of the ground surveys. Productivity and eco nomic efficiency of the UAV magnetic survey technology are therewith significantly higher, the cost is about two times less, and there is no need for deforestation. As a result, we draw a conclusion that it is possible and advisable to replace the traditional pedestrian magnetic prospecting with the new unmanned technology, at least in the surveys of scales from 1:10 000 to 1:1000.

As the information technologies are actively developing, the volume of data that needs to be processed constantly increases, which requires keeping hard- and software technologically advanced and finding new approaches to data processing. Based on the distributed computations model MapReduce, the original method of raster images processing is proposed in this paper. The MapReduce model proposes to split initial dataset into pieces using Map operation, process these data pieces and gather all results using Reduce operation. Service-oriented distributed environment of ISDCT SB RAS also faces problems of large data volumes processing, particu larly processing the raster images. In order to increase the processing speed of spatial data within the service-oriented infrastruc ture, the distribution of raster images among computational nodes was organized. Mapping of the raster images is implemented using the specifications - sets of rules of how the data should be split and gathered. The mechanism of definition and application of specifications is implemented as a part of ISDCT SB RAS Geoportal. The Geoportal allows executing distributed services in a centralized way. The use of specification during the service execution allows to effectively utilize the available computational resources. The proposed approach allows using the instruments for spatial analysis of raster images within the distributed environment without theirs modification. Execution of distributed services that work with large volumes of spatial data within the MapReduce model allows decreasing the overall services execution time and using available computing resources at higher rates.

The field of service-oriented computations is actively developed in today’s world of information science. Tasks, which require use of multiple services, arise constantly. The combination of multiple services for the solution of a problem is called service composition. Dependencies between services can be usually described with the directed acyclic graph (DAG). There are a lot of ways to define service compositions; most of them use the graphic interface software or various markup standards. However, it is a common situation when it is convenient to define the composition of services as a piece of program code, at the same time the processing of intermediate service results and extraction of service dependencies graph should be available. The method of defining service compositions as the JavaScript programs was designed in ISDCT SB RAS in order to ex ecute service compositions. In order to define the composition, user calls services inside of the JavaScript code as regular functions. The intermediate processing of service results and building of complex control structures with standard programming language are available. During the processing and execution of scenarios the services dependencies graph is automatically built. The built graph can be later used, for example, for finding of optimal schedule for services execution in the distributed environment. The method of defining the services composition scenarios with JavaScript programs was successfully tested with real tasks and was integrated into the Portal of ISDCT SB RAS.