This book brings together a unique collection of chapters to facilitate a broad discussion on food education that will stimulate readers to think about key policies, recent research, curriculum positions and how to engage with key stakeholders about the future of food. Food education has gained much attention because the challenges that influence food availability and eating in schools also extend beyond the school gate. Accordingly, this book establishes evidence-based arguments that recognise the many facets of food education, and reveal how learning through a futures' lens and joined-up thinking is critical for shaping intergenerational fairness concerning food futures in education and society. This book is distinctive through its multidisciplinary collection of chapters on food education with a particular focus on the Global North, with case studies from England, Australia, the Republic of Ireland, the United States of America, Canada and Germany. With a focus on three key themes and a rigorous food futures framework, the book is structured into three sections: (i) food education, pedagogy and curriculum (ii) knowledge and skill diversity associated with food and health learning (iii) food education inclusivity, culture and agency. Overall, this volume extends and challenges current research and theory in the area of food education and food pedagogy and offers insight and tangible benefits for the future development of food education policies and curricula. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, policymakers and education leaders working on food education and pedagogy, food policy, health and diet and the sociology of food.

This textbook explores the complex nature of soil biological communities and their environments, and covers deserts, rainforests, seasonal tropical forests, dry deciduous forests, and island environments in the tropical zone. It provides essential information on soil biology concepts, ecological processes, plant-soil feedback, trophic structure, and land use effects on soil's biological properties. The book also offers an updated approach to soil biota and microbiota and their interactions with plants that regulate the structures and functions of tropical ecosystems. Uniquely, it addresses island environments and natural disasters, shedding new light on soil organisms recovering tropical ecosystem functions. Further topics include ecological processes, plant-soil interactions, trophic communities, molecular approaches, and land use, making the book a valuable asset for students, educators and researchers engaged in the Environmental Sciences, Biodiversity and Conservation, Soil Ecology, Soil Biology, Ecology, Zoology, and Soil Biota Classification using classical and molecular tools.

Now in its second edition, Agriculture in World History presents a unique exploration of farmers and farming, and their relationships to non-farmers and urban societies from the ancient world to the 21st century. From its origins, civilization has depended on the food, fiber, and other goods produced by farmers. This book illustrates how urban societies both exploited and supported farmers, and together endured economic and environmental crises. Viewing farmers as the crucial interface between civilization and the natural world, Mark Tauger examines the environmental changes, political and social transformations, and scientific and technological developments in farming. The second edition draws attention to the modern period, particularly the effects of war, depression, and authoritarianism on world agriculture, scientific advances and the problems they created, increased international competition between countries with the expanding role of corporations, the threats posed by climate change, and some of agriculture's future prospects. Accessibly written and following a chronological structure, the volume enables readers to easily gain a foundational understanding of an important aspect of world history. This survey will be an indispensable text for world history students and for anyone interested in the historical development of the present agricultural and food crises.

Textiles and Clothing are key sectors and apparel is one of the necessities of human life. Environmental brunt of the textile sector and cradle to grave life cycle impacts of textiles and clothing products are a subject of constant investigation. There have been a lot of advancements in the textile sector in terms of materials such as textile fibres, yarns, fabrics, garments and also in terms of processes. All these innovations demand an environmental profile as well. Life Cycle Assessment is one of the widely used and popular scientific tools which has been utilized to measure the environmental footprints of various products and processes. This volume presents recent advances on LCA in the textiles and clothing sector.

Somatic hybrids through the fusion of plant protoplasts have widened the genetic variability of cultivated plants. As "Somatic Hybridization in Crop Improvement I", published in 1994, this volume describes how this discipline can contribute to the improvement of crops. It comprises 24 chapters dealing with interspecific and intergeneric somatic hybridization and cybridization. It is divided into four sections:I. Cereals: Barley, rice, and wheat.II. Vegetables and Fruits: Arabidopsis, Asparagus, Brassica, chicory, Citrus, Cucumis, Diospyros, Ipomoea, and various Solanaceous species, e.g., tomato, potato, and eggplant.III. Medicinal and Aromatic Plants: Atropa, Dianthus, Nicotiana, and Senecio.IV. Legumes/Pasture Crops: Alfalfa.This book is tailored to the needs of advanced students, teachers and researchers in the fields of plant breeding, genetic engineering, and plant tissue culture.

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyse the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of soy. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth, used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social and ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes by considering the soybean’s future role in a desirable agrofood system which improves human health, culture and livelihoods, and the provision of ecosystem services. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

This book describes the development of genetic resources in amaranths, with a major focus on genomics, reverse, and forward genetics tools and strategies that have been developed for crop improvement. Amaranth is an ancient crop native to the New World. Interest in amaranths is being renewed, due to their adaptability, stress tolerance, and nutritional value. There are about 65 species in the genus, including Amaranthus caudatus L., A. cruentus L., and A. hypochondriacus L., which are primarily grown as protein-rich grains or pseudocereals. The genus also includes major noxious weeds (e.g., A. palmeri). The amaranths are within the Caryophyllales order and thus many species (e.g., A. tricolor) produce red (betacyanin) or yellow (betaxanthin) betalain pigments, which are chemically distinct from the anthocyanins responsible for red pigmentation in other plants. A. hypochondriacus, which shows disomic inheritance (2n = 32; n= 466 Mb), has been sequenced and annotated with 23,059 protein-coding genes. Additional members of the genus are now also been sequenced including weedy amaranths, other grain amaranths, and their putative progenitors.

This book provides applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in environmental monitoring, with an emphasis on livestock disease detection and agricultural management in Africa to aid farmers. This proposed system entails current and innovative monitoring technologies intended to improve agricultural conditions in Africa, with a focus on Botswana, and addresses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a set of remote monitoring protocols using WSNs to improve and ensure proper environmental maintenance. In this book, the author introduces WSNs, and how the IoT can be applied to develop a system of "smart agriculture" in Africa, taking into account livestock health, climate change impacts on crops and wildlife, and technological innovations in response to climate change such as windmills and solar panels. The book will be interesting to students and researchers in engineering and life sciences, as well as practitioners working with sensing technologies for agricultural monitoring and improvement.

This book explores recent advances in the microbial production of xylitol and its applications in food and medical sector. Xylitol is an important biomolecule from lignocellulose biorefinery which is produced from the xylose by chemical reactions or microbial fermentation methods. Currently, the demand of xylitol at commercial scale is being met through chemical methods. However, recent breakthroughs made in plant cell wall destruction, genetic engineering to develop the designer microorganisms, fermentation methods and media formulations and downstream processing have led the ways for sustainable production of xylitol at commercial scale in lignocellulose biorefineries. Microbial production of xylitol is preferred over the chemical processes as it is environmentally friendly, higher process efficiency with the desired product yield, and product recovery with minimum impurities. This book is a unique compilation of 11 book chapters written by experts in their respective fields. These chapters present critical insights and discuss the current progress and future progress in this area into fermentative xylitol production. Chapter 9 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For further details see license information in the chapter.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption. Being the only vegetatively propagated species among the world's main five staple crops creates both issues and opportunities for the potato: on the one hand, this constrains the speed of its geographic expansion and its options for international commercialization and distribution when compared with commodity crops such as maize, wheat or rice. On the other, it provides an effective insulation against speculation and unforeseen spikes in commodity prices, since the potato does not represent a good traded on global markets. These two factors highlight the underappreciated and underrated role of the potato as a dependable nutrition security crop, one that can mitigate turmoil in world food supply and demand and political instability in some developing countries. Increasingly, the global role of the potato has expanded from a profitable crop in developing countries to a crop providing income and nutrition security in developing ones. This book will appeal to academics and students of crop sciences, but also policy makers and other stakeholders involved in the potato and its contribution to humankind's food security.

-- Covers the most relevant production and distribution channels of aquafeed and the ingredients used commonly as sources of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. This will help the industry understand how to position itself to meet the challenge of securing aquafeed to sustain aquaculture. -- 20 chapters cover different aspects of aquafeeds, from the market to cutting-edge technologies, including nutritional aspects and the impact of aquafeeds on climate change. This enables aquafeeds to be approached from different perspectives. -- Up until now, aquafeed-related issues were addressed as secondary subjects in undergraduate textbooks, being part of books covering a broad spectrum of subjects. Other book focus on processing techniques with aquafeed products mentioned in a tangential manner. This means a book focused on aquafeeds, covering different aspects of their production and commercialization chain, is a real necessity. -- Interdisciplinary chapters, with collaborations between academic researchers and industry professionals, cover not only technical aspects but also market analysis.

Cereal Crops: Genetic Resources and Breeding Techniques provides the reader practical tools for understanding relationships and challenges of successful farming; improvements to genetic modifications; and environmentally sound methods of production of bulk and quality cereals including wheat, maize, rice, barley, and millets. It explores the trait mapping, cropping systems, genome engineering, and identification of specific germplasms needed for the more effective development of biotic and abiotic stress resistant cereals within the framework of ensuring future food supplies around the world. Features: Focuses on cropping systems, genetics and genome engineering for higher crop production at a global level. Features information on specific prebiotic formulas to ward off adverse effects of antibiotics. Covers mechanistic as well as practical approaches for enhancing crop production in a sustainable way. Includes further in depth analysis of various topics following each chapter. This is a vital resource for researchers, crop biologists, and students working with crop production and climate changes that have a significant impact on crop production, spanning basic to advanced level discussions of plant breeding, molecular genetics, and agronomy. Covering mechanistic and practical approaches for enhancing crop production in a sustainable way, this text is beneficial to intensive farmers and stakeholders in the field of crop production.

Originally published in 1971, this book is a systematic study of the major features and factors of the location and distribution of global agricultural enterprises. Special emphasis is given to approaches to the subject developed by economists and economic geographers, but all aspects of agricultural geography are reviewed including physical environmental problems. An introduction to the problem of classification and data collection together with instruction in some simple analytical techniques is given to equip the student with the basic methods for their own research.

Both authors are ideally suited to prepare this book, offering a nice mix of biological and geological expertise on coral reef systems. There is a glaring gap in the market for this book - there is no literature or database that comprehensively summarises the latest remote sensing imagery for global atolls. There is no comparable book. The treatment employs state-of-the-art satellite imagery and updates the existing Atlas of Coral Reefs by Spalding et al which came out more than 20 years ago. Atolls are a favorite topic of research in the biological/ecological and geological sciences due to their unusual ring-like reef form and their laboratory-like, isolated settings. The great strength and contribution of this book is the comprehensive analysis and summary of all these different atolls and their main characteristics in one place. The writing is excellent, striking a nice balance between providing enough detail while also being accessible to a general reader. A useful resource for a range of higher education courses, undergraduate and masters level courses i.e., coastal processes and environments, coral reefs and climate change, oceans coasts and climate. One reviewer says: "This is a superb volume, which I suspect will be much referred to. The authors a pre-eminent in this, and it will be authoritative as well as useful to a wide range of people."

This book discusses basic and applied aspects of somatic embryogenesis, one of the most powerful tools in plant biotechnology. It is divided into three parts; Part I includes topics such as the history of this research field, how differentiated plant cells can (re)acquire totipotency, molecular features, as well as the epigenetics and proteomics of somatic embryogenesis. Part II covers the somatic embryogenesis of different crops, such as Agave spp. maize, Cocos nucifera, Bixa orellana, Capsicum spp., Coffea spp., Musa spp., Pinus spp., and Arabidopsis thaliana. Various applications, like scale-up propagation and genetic engineering are discussed in detail in Part III. The book will appeal to plant scientists, plant breeders and experts working in industry.

Agronomic crops have provided food, beverages, fodder, fuel, medicine and industrial raw materials since the beginning of human civilization. More recently, agronomic crops have been cultivated using scientific rather than traditional methods. However, in the current era of climate change, agronomic crops are suffering from different environmental stresses that result in substantial yield loss. To meet the food demands of the ever-increasing global population, new technologies and management practices are being adopted to boost yields and maintain productivity under both normal and adverse conditions. Further, in the context of sustainable agronomic crop production, scientists are adopting new approaches, such as varietal development, soil management, nutrient and water management, and pest management. Researchers have also made remarkable advances in developing stress tolerance in crops. However, the search for appropriate solutions for optimal production to meet the increasing food demand is still ongoing. Although there are several publications on the recent advances in these areas, there are few comprehensive resources available covering all of the recent topics. This timely book examines all aspects of production technologies, management practices and stress tolerance of agronomic crops.

During the past 20 years, behavioral and social scientists following advances in physics and mathematics have shown an increasing interest in complex, adaptive, self-organizing, dynamic systems. The appeal of this perspective is fueled by the fact that there are a handful of properties that are common to all dynamic systems that can be used to explain the spontaneous emergence of novel forms, the mechanisms of continuity and change, and the dynamics of a large number of interacting factors. From animal population dynamics to human neural processes, there is growing evidence that human individual and social interactions may be understood as a dynamic system. In the field of psychology, there was a flurry of books during the early 1990s that explored the dynamic human system. These titles, and those that have been published since, fall into two general categories: those that integrate dynamic systems ideas into psychological theories and those that provide methods of modeling dynamic human systems (see list of competitive titles below).

Despite the enrichment that dynamic systems principles have afforded psychological theories, the methods provided to test these theoretical assumptions have not been readily adopted. The reason is that, unlike the physical scientists, social scientists are not as familiar with the mathematical formulations (i.e., differential and difference equations) required for these methods, nor are their data particularly amenable to such manipulations or models. Furthermore, the psychological relevance of some of the parameters extracted from these methods (i.e., Lyupanov exponents, chaotic attractors) is very difficult to interpret. What is needed is a methodological middle road to bridge theory and analysis. The proposed book on the state space grid method is perfectly poised to provide that bridge.

State space grids were first developed by Marc Lewis and colleagues (Lewis, Lamey, and Douglas, 1999) to depict sequences of infant attention and distress. This technique has since been applied to the study of parent-child interactions (Granic & Lamey, 2002; Granic, Hollenstein, Dishion, & Patterson, 2003; Hollenstein, Granic, Stoolmiller, & Snyder, 2005; Hollenstein & Lewis, under review; Lewis, Zimmerman, Hollenstein, & Lamey, 2004), and peer interactions (Dishion, Nelson, Bullock, & Winter, 2005; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hollenstein, 2005). At this time, there are projects in progress that extend this work into the study of marital interactions, young adult group drinking patterns, eye gaze and eye contact in response to questioning, diary studies, and peer pressure dynamics.
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This book presents a broad range of technologies for sustainable agrochemistry, e.g. semiochemicals for pest management, nanotechnology for release of eco-friendly agrochemicals, and green chemistry principles for agriculture. It provides a concise introduction to sustainable agrochemistry for a professional audience, and highlights the main scientific and technological approaches that can be applied to modern agrochemistry. It also discusses various available technologies for reducing the negative impacts of agrochemicals on the environment and human health.

This book focuses on analysing how legal systems set the terms for interactions between human beings and plants. The story that the book recounts is one of experimental lawmaking in Ecuador, a country where over the past decade, governmental officials and civil society advocates have attempted to reconfigure how human individuals and institutions relate to nature, by following an "eco-centric" approach to lawmaking. In doing so, Ecuadorian legislators, administrators, and judges have taken seriously the ontologies of non-human entities, including plants, through a process that has required the continuous navigation of tensions with certain "logics" that pervade conventional legal regimes. The book endeavours to disrupt these conventional assumptions and approaches to lawmaking by taking seriously alternative strategies to reconstitute interactions between people and plants. In doing so, the book argues in favour of an "ecological turn" in laws that govern vegetal life. The analysis is based on a close examination of the experiences that lawmakers in Ecuador have had when experimenting with innovative approaches to re-form relationships between human and non-human beings. Concretely, these experiments have yielded constitutional, legislative, and regulatory changes that inform the inquiry of how intellectual property and plant genetic resources laws - both in Ecuador and worldwide - could become more "ecological" in nature. The argument that the book develops is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and empirical research in Ecuador, complemented by archival and doctrinal legal analysis. The contents of the book will be of interest to an academic audience of legal scholars and postgraduate students in law, in addition to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, sociology, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies.

This book explores the development of nanopesticides and tests of their biological activity against target organisms. It also covers the effects of nanopesticides in the aquatic and terrestrial environments, along with related subjects including fate, behaviour, mechanisms of action and toxicity. Moreover, the book discusses the potential risks of nanopesticides for non-target organisms, as well as regulatory issues and future perspectives.

Fungi are an important link in the food webs of all ecosystems. They have immense potential and comprise a myriad of useful bioactive compounds. Fungi feature in a wide range of diverse processes and applications in modern agriculture, the food science industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. In the food and drink arena, the role of fungi is historically important in the form of mushrooms and in fermented foods as yeasts for baking and brewing. These roles are supplemented by the use of fungal food processing enzymes and additives, and more recently in the development of protein-based foodstuffs from fungi. Additionally, they are used in the formulation of biofertilizers and biopesticides used as biostimulants and bioprotectants of crops. The practical use of newer techniques such as genetic recombination and robotics have revolutionized the modem agricultural biotechnology industry, and have created an enormous range of possible further applications of fungal products. Myco-materials created from mycelia (the root-like parts of fungi) are gaining attention as a sustainable alternative for a wide range of materials. They are being used as insulation, sustainable packaging, foam inserts, and even "eco-leather." In fact, mycelium bricks are pound-for-pound stronger than concrete. In addition, medicinal uses of fungal species have been historically recorded as important agents in the pharmaceutical sciences. The potential for myco-materials seems limitless. The field of mycology and its application has become an increasingly important component in the education of industrial biotechnology. This book on applied mycology provides information helpful for developing entrepreneurial opportunities with fungi. This volume explains both the basic science and the applications of mycology and bio-resource technology with special emphasis on entrepreneurial applications. It offers a complete, one-stop resource for those interested in microbiology, food and agricultural science, medical mycology, and for those in industrial biotechnology.

In this second edition of a bestseller, authors Paul H. Brunner and Helmut Rechberger guide professional newcomers as well as experienced engineers and scientists towards mastering the art of material flow analysis (MFA) from the very beginning to an advanced state of material balances of complex systems. Handbook of Material Flow Analysis: For Environmental, Resource, and Waste Engineers, Second Edition serves as a concise and reproducible methodology as well as a basis for analysis, assessment and improvement of anthropogenic systems through an approach that is helpfully uniform and standardized. The methodology featured in this book is a vital resource for generating new data, fostering understanding, and increasing knowledge to benefit the growing MFA community working in the fields of industrial ecology, resource management, waste management, and environmental protection. This new second edition takes into account all new developments and readers will profit from a new exploration of STAN software, newly added citations, and thoroughly described case studies that reveal the potential of MFA to solve industrial ecology challenges.

This first volume in the series "Advances in Agricultural Economic History," includes articles on the topics of Italian sharecropping, agricultural wage discrimination, factor endowment and contract choice, as well as new total factor productivity measures for the United States.