The “Loss of the Night” project, funded by the EU COST programme, terminated its four years of activity at the end of October.

This article provides a brief summary of the project and of its relations to Italy.

Some context

Artificial light at night, if used in excess or inappropriately, will generate light pollution, which represents an issue for its negative effects on human health, fauna, flora, landscape, and energy consumption.
This issue can be controlled without compromising the need for illumination for security and life at night.
From this standpoint, guidelines and regulations have been established, for the reduction of light pollution. These have historically spawned from the experience of lighting engineers and astronomers (who were the first community, back in the early 20th century, to perceive the effect of light pollution on their observations). Much progress has been made in this field, especially in the past 10-15 years. However, the overall understanding of cause-effect relations between artificial light at night and the surrounding environment (and, thus, the definition of effective strategies to reduce light pollution) has yet to be attained.

The European Network

Loss of the Night started four years ago with the idea of connecting technicians and researcher interested in evaluating the effects of artificial light at night in an interdisciplinary context. This trend was already visible in several research initiatives, but was not until then structured in an international project.

Attivarti.org was invited to participate to the Loss of the Night Network since its first steps, given the experience we had developed in outreach, monitoring and citizen science with the della BuioMetria Partecipativa and CORDILIT projects.

Since February 2013 Attivarti.org operated as the primary representative of Italy in the LoNNe management committee, and was joined by the Italian National Research Council Institute of Biometeorology, base in Florence, in 2014.

The Loss of the Night network saw the participation of about 40 organisations from 18 countries, facilitating the exchange of knowledge across experts from numerous disciplines: a core of ecologists and physicists, together with chronobiologists, statisticians, sociologists, natural reserve managers, and lighting engineers, just to mention some of the expertise.

Among other outcomes, the Loss of the Night network helped to

• Create a literature database on the effects of artificial light at night
• Define guidelines on light at night
• Hold conference, primarily creating the “Artificial Light at Night” series, as well as workshops, courses and outreach events
• Organize scientific missions. The main one was a four-year intercomparison campaign, allowing the joint testing of various sensors and technologis for night sky quality monitoring. The 2015 edition of the campaign was held in Tuscany, with measurements taken in the Farma Valley and Sesto Fiorentino.

Italy and LoNNe

The participation in the Loss of the Night helped Attivarti.org to establish new contacts also at the national level.

In the research arena, in addition to the above mentioned collaboration with the Institute of Biometeorology (which installed some night sky brightness sensors and started observations on the effects of nocturnal lighting on trees in Florence), at the end of 2015 we started a collaboration with the Department of Biology and the University of Pisa, with studied on the effect of light pollution on marine ecology. We also had initial contacts with researchers in Trento, Bologna, Venice, and Milano, and had a chance to meet young Italian researchers currently working abroad.

Concerning outreach, Attivarti.org hosted some interns from the Scuola Superiore di Mediazione Linguistica in Pisa, for the translation of interviews and other material in English and Spanish.

We gave lectures in Portugal and Catalunya to present the issue of artificial light at night and our experiences in the BuioMetria Partecipativa project in architecture and design schools, and also presented our work from Italy at the ALAN conferences in Leicester, UK, and Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and at the Balkan Lighting conference in Athens, Greece.

Finally, we launched a series of short interviews, pubblished in Italian and English, to give voice to lesser known subjects (young researchers, civil servants, activists) who are committed in the study and the mitigation of light pollution.

During these four years, we have not interrupted our activities on BuioMetria Partecipativa, with data collection and events in various locations in Italy, and with our contribution to the CORDILIT monitoring network.

Conclusions

With the formal part of the Loss of the Night project now over (thanking once more the coordinators for inviting us back in 2012), we maintain the relationships developed during the project and the interest in continuing our activities of protection and promotion of the night sky. Our primary area of interest is Southern Tuscany, where the BuioMetria Partecipativa project started in 2008, but we are always interested to establish connections with other regions in Italy and the rest of the globe.

For more information: buiometria@attivarti.org

Nightscape: San Galgano Abbey (Siena), Federico Giussani

Following the June 30, event about protection and promotion of the night sky at the Museum of Vine and Wine in Roccastrada, Southern Tuscany, the BuioMetria Partecipativa project left on site one of their sky quality meters.

At the end of the presentation, the Municipality agreed to turn of the public lighting in the central part of the village, in order to take some initial measurements of night sky quality.

The sensor was subsequently made available to guests and staff of the Museum. We had to wait for the Summer hustle-bustle to wind down, but it was then possible for the Museum’s team to take measurements during September and October in various parts of the village, thus expanding the BuioMetria Partecipativa database. In addition to identifying some new sampling points, repeated measurements were taken on different days, so as to consolidate the readings.

Kudos to Andrea, Laura, Cinzia, and Paola for this collaboration, hoping that the exercise may be replicated, and that the campaign may suggest a more aware approach to artificial light at night.

For more information: buiometria@attivarti.org

The fourth international conference on Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) was held in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) from Sep. 26 to Sep. 28. The event was organized by the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the COST Action ES1204 LoNNe, Loss of the Night Network.

Since 2013 this event has drawn experts and scientists from all over the world -with 22 countries represented this year- to share experiences, best practices, and studies on artificial light at night and light pollution.

About 100 participants with a very diverse background, from lighting engineering to chronobiology, from environmental sciences to statistics, astrophysics and visual arts created an interdisciplinary melting pot.

During the three days it was possible to learn about the state of the art related to different aspects of artificial light at night. The conference sessions covered human health, technologies for light pollution monitoring, social aspects, ecology and promotion of nightscapes.

The talks spanned across different scales of observation: from very high detail experiments concerning micro-organism in streams, up to continental-scale assessment of light pollution.

Across this extremely diverse range of experiences and viewpoints, it was in fact possible to identify some common points.

All of the experts agree on the fact that artificial light at night is an essential resource to support our lives, from business to recreation, to safety and security.

At the same time, there are many cases where the negative effects of too much artificial light at night cannot be ignored. While many of these are in the process of being investigated, cautions should be taken against the proliferation of lighting systems which do not consider such aspects.

The technical guidelines created over the past fifteen years, following the first studies on light pollution, were primarily aimed at the reduction of upward lighting and of the number of luminaires.

With the growing presence of LED lighting, a new issue emerged: first-generation LEDs insured an extremely high efficiency (with energy savings up to 80%), while providing a light with a very high component of blue.

Many studies, proposed also at the ALAN conference, have re-iterated that the blue component in light has various negative effects, the main one being the suppression of melatonin production in many species.

Considering that a lighting system can have a life span of 15-20 years, and that in the coming years the replacement of millions of luminaires is foreseen all over the world, the challenge will be to install lighting systems which can provide the best trade-off between energy efficiency and impact on humans and on the living environment.

In this respect, innovation never stops, starting from the availability of new generations of LEDs, with a reduced emission of light in the blue part of the spectrum (with a colour temperature around 3000K).

While many norms and guidelines have not yet completely accounted for such innovations, it is important that all the stakeholders involved in lighting (technicians, administrator, and citizens) be aware of the negative effects of too much artificial light at night, and of the solutions to counter such effects.

The ALAN conference also had the participation from Italian specialists. These included some young researchers (mostly active outside of Italy), and a joint presentation by the BuioMetria Partecipativa project with the National Research Council’s Biometeorology Institute. The presentation summarized various awareness raising and data collection efforts taking place since 2008, in Italy and abroad (see POSTER).

After the first four editions, the ALAN conference will be switching to a bi-annual schedule. The next edition is expected to take place in the USA in 2018.

The abstracts of the Cluj-Napoca conference are available in PDF format.

For more information: bmp@pibinko.org