This volume examines the interrelated fields of food security, energy security and sustainable agriculture as the key to a stable global agricultural platform and is arranged in six parts. The first part is focused on policy considerations relating to food and energy security and sustainable agriculture. The authors from this part include Former Under Secretary of Agriculture Gale Buchanan, Former Under Secretary of Energy Raymond Orbach (Chapter 1), Stephen Hughes, Bryan Moser and William Gibbons (Chapter 2) and Thomas Redick (Chapter 3). Part II addresses soil and water, which are two of the key components in secure and sustainable food production. Authors from this part are Jerry Hatfield (Chapter 4) and Mahbub Alam, Sharon Megdal et al. (Chapter 5). The third part covers sustainable and secure food production specifically addressing genetically modified traits in Chapter 6 (James McWilliams) and omega-3 fatty acids in Chapter 7 (Jay Whelan et al.). Agronomic implications relative to food security and sustainable agriculture are described in Part IV. Authors include Ravi Sripada, Pradip Das et al. (Chapter 8), Duska Stojsin, Kevin Matson and Richard Leitz (Chapter 9) and S.H. Lee, David Clay and Sharon Clay (Chapter 10). International sustainable agriculture and food security is addressed in Part V with authors Jeff Vitale and John Greenplate (Chapter 11), Julie Borlaug et al. (Chapter 12) and Sylvester Oikeh et al. (Chapter 13). The final part covers the use of chemicals in sustainable agriculture and food/energy security with Leonard Gianessi and Ashley Williams communicating the role of herbicides and Harold Reetz emphasizing the importance of fertilizers both in maximizing crop yields to maintain a sustainable secure source for food production."

The mystique of the rainforest has captured the imaginations of generations of young people, explorers, authors, and biologists. It is a delicate ecosystem whose myriad sounds and smells, whose vibrancy of life, is balanced by constant cycles of death and decay. It is a place of fierce competition where unusual partnerships are forged and creative survival strategies are the norm. In this book, you will meet the scientific pioneers who first attempted to quantify and understand the vast diversity of these tropical forests, as well as their successors, who utilize modern tools and technologies to dissect the chemical nature of rainforest interactions.

This book provides a general background on biodiversity and the study of chemical ecology before moving into specific chemical examples of insect defenses and microbial communication. It finishes with first-hand accounts of the trials and tribulations of a canopy biology pioneer and a rainforest research novice, while assessing the state of modern tropical research, its importance to humanity, and the ecological, political, and ethical issues that need to be tackled in order to move the field forward.

Crop production in greenhouses is a growing industry, especially in mild climates, and is very important for the population as a source of income and clean, fresh food. Greenhouses create optimal climate conditions for crop growth and protect crops from outside pests. At the same time greenhouse production increases water use efficiency and makes integrated production and protection (IPP) possible. This book provides technical instructions for practice (what to do and what not to do) and gives answers to the question: How to produce more clean crops and better quality with less water, less land and less pesticide. Suitable greenhouse constructions and their design, adapted to local climates in subtropical, tropical and arid regions and infrastructure conditions are presented. The necessary climate control measures - light transmittance, ventilation, cooling, heating, and CO2 enrichment - and physical measures for pest control, as well as methods for using solar energy to desalinate salty water are described. The results of theoretical research are transferred into methods for practical use, so that readers are equipped to solve their problems in practice as well as to get stimulation for further research and development.

After the generation of genome sequence data from a wide variety of plants, databases are filled with sequence information of genes with no known biological function, and while bioinformatics tools can help analyze genome sequences and predict gene structures, experimental approaches to discover gene functions need to be widely implemented. In Plant Reverse Genetics: Methods and Protocols, leading researchers in the field describe cutting-edge methods, both high-throughput and genome-wide, involving the models Arabidopsis and rice as well as several other plants to provide comparative functional genomics information. With chapters on the analysis of high-throughput genome sequence data, the identification of non-coding RNA from sequence information, the comprehensive analysis of gene expression by microarrays, and metabolomic analysis, the thorough methods of the book are fully supported by scripts to aid their computational use. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology (TM) series format, the chapters contain introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and notes on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and essential, Plant Reverse Genetics: Methods and Protocols is an ideal guide for researchers seeking an understanding of how the complex web of plant genes work together in a systems biology view.

Cinnamon is the common name for the spice obtained from the dried inner bark of several species of the genus Cinnamomum in the Lauraceae family. In world trade, Cinnamomum cassia (L.) J. Presl Cinnamomum burmannii dominate, but it is of a different quality to 'true' or 'Ceylon' cinnamon produced from Cinnamomum zeylanicum Blume (C. verum J. Presl), with the latter much easier to process, giving a more delicate, sweeter flavor with nuances of clove, but more importantly with only traces (often below detection thresholds) of coumarin, compared with 5-7 g/kg in other species. Cinnamon has been a popular and expensive spice in many civilizations, including ancient Egypt, Rome and in 14th and 15th century Europe, where it was used primarily to preserve meat for its antibacterial properties, fine aroma and flavor. Ancient Egyptians used cinnamon in mummification process due to its antibacterial properties and fragrance. The quest for cinnamon brought many explorers to Ceylon, whose ancient history is intertwined with the cinnamon trade. Ancient Egyptians and Romans used cinnamon as a valued spice and as an incense. In recent years, much research has been conducted in crop improvement, processing and value addition in cinnamon. In addition to direct use as a condiment/spice, cinnamon has found a multitude of uses in the food and beverage, traditional medicine, pharmacology, nutraceutical and cosmetics industries. Ceylon cinnamon is unique in that oils distilled from the bark (major constituents are cinnamaldehyde and oleoresins), leaf (eugenol is the major constituent used in dentistry, perfumes, flavorings and as an antioxidant) and roots (camphor) have different industrial uses. Cinnamaldehyde is now a proven natural bactericide widely used in food and beverage industry, effective against Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli. Thus, it has become an important natural component of organic fruit and vegetable juices to enhance microbial safety of these nutritious beverages. Because of its manifold uses, cinnamon is an important crop. There have been many recent publications on its ethnobotany, genetics, crop improvement, agronomy, processing, biotechnology, chemistry, food and medicinal uses, and industrial applications. However, one book condensing all these findings is lacking. Our publication, with chapters devoted to all these aspects of cinnamon written by experts in these fields, condenses current knowledge into a single source and contribute to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and technology. Contributors to the book constitute internationally renowned senior scientists and academics with hands-on experience as well as movers and shakers of industry, thereby striking a right balance between theory and practice. Therefore it is a valuable source for students, teachers, scientists, planners policy makers, practicing agriculturists and industrialists, and a prized acquisition to any library in higher education institutions, R & D institutions and public and private sector institutions in agriculture and allied fields.

This volume presents a compelling collection of state-of-the-art work in algorithmic computational biology, honoring the legacy of Professor Bernard M.E. Moret in this field. Reflecting the wide-ranging influences of Prof. Moret's research, the coverage encompasses such areas as phylogenetic tree and network estimation, genome rearrangements, cancer phylogeny, species trees, divide-and-conquer strategies, and integer linear programming. Each self-contained chapter provides an introduction to a cutting-edge problem of particular computational and mathematical interest. Topics and features: addresses the challenges in developing accurate and efficient software for the NP-hard maximum likelihood phylogeny estimation problem; describes the inference of species trees, covering strategies to scale phylogeny estimation methods to large datasets, and the construction of taxonomic supertrees; discusses the inference of ultrametric distances from additive distance matrices, and the inference of ancestral genomes under genome rearrangement events; reviews different techniques for inferring evolutionary histories in cancer, from the use of chromosomal rearrangements to tumor phylogenetics approaches; examines problems in phylogenetic networks, including questions relating to discrete mathematics, and issues of statistical estimation; highlights how evolution can provide a framework within which to understand comparative and functional genomics; provides an introduction to Integer Linear Programming and its use in computational biology, including its use for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem. Offering an invaluable source of insights for computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and statisticians, this illuminating volume will also prove useful for graduate courses on computational biology and bioinformatics.

This volume considers current and future challenges for nature law and policy in Europe. Following the Fitness Check evaluation of the Birds and Habitats Directives, in 2017 the EU adopted an Action Plan for nature, people and the economy to rapidly improve the Directives' implementation and accelerate progress towards the EU's biodiversity targets for 2020. More recently, the EU has adopted a Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and proposed an EU Nature Restoration Law. This book makes a timely contribution by examining the current state of play in light of recent and historical developments, as well as the post-2020 nature law and policy landscape. While evidence suggests that Natura 2000 and the Habitats and Birds Directives have delivered conservation benefits for wildlife in Europe, biodiversity loss continues apace. The book reviews the requirements for an effective international nature conservation system, with reference to the Birds and Habitats Directives. It examines regulatory regimes, current legal issues in the fields of site protection and species protection, the protection of areas outside Natura 2000, recent developments in the EU and the UK, including the implications of Brexit, agriculture and nature conservation, litigation, science and access to justice. Written by leading experts in the field, from a range of stakeholder groups, the volume draws on diverse experiences as well as providing interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in European environmental policy and law, including lawyers, ecologists, environmental scientists, political scientists, natural resource managers, and planners. It will also be of interest to conservation practitioners, policy-makers and NGOs.

This book provides a knowledge-based view to the dynamic capabilities in an organization. The author integrates two existing views on gaining competitive advantage: the Knowledge View which suggests that the capability of organizations to learn faster than competitors is the only source of competitiveness; and the Dynamic Capability View which speculates that a fi rm's competitive advantage rests on it's ability to adapt to changes in the business environment. Using the IT sector in India as a case study, this book provides and tests a new framework-Knowledge-Based Dynamic Capabilities-in the prediction of competitive advantage in organizations.

This book details sorghum breeding technologies, grain compounds, nutrition and digestibility, biotechnology methods, broad renewable applications and an economic study. Chapters are divided into five review chapters, five case study chapters, and nine protocol chapters providing comprehensive reviews, new study results or state-of-the-art protocols. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and cutting-edge, Sorghum: Methods and Protocols aims to provide useful information and tools to an array of readers looking to research and utilize sorghum.

This book highlights the results from over a year of ethnobotanical research in a rural and an urban community in Jamaica, where we interviewed more than 100 people who use medicinal plants for healthcare. The goal of this research was to better understand patterns of medicinal plant knowledge, and to find out which plants are used in consensus by local people for a variety of illnesses. For this book, we selected 25 popular medicinal plant species mentioned during fieldwork. Through individual interviews, we were able to rank plants according to their frequency of mention, and categorized the medicinal uses for each species as "major" (mentioned by more than 20% of people in a community) or "minor" (mentioned by more than 5%, but less than 20% of people). Botanical identification of plant specimens collected in the wild allowed for cross-linking of common and scientific plant names. To supplement field research, we undertook a comprehensive search and review of the ethnobotanical and biomedical literature. Our book summarizes all this information in detail under specific sub-headings.

This book covers studies on the systematics of plant taxa and will include general vegetational aspects and ecological characteristics of plant life at altitudes above 1000 m. from different parts of the world. This volume also addresses how upcoming climate change scenarios will impact high altitude plant life. It presents case studies from the most important mountainous areas like the Himalayas, Caucasus and South America covering the countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Kirghizia, Georgia, Russia,Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Americas. The book will serve as an invaluable resource source undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers.

The interactions between the plant, soil and microbes are complex in nature. Events may be antagonistic, mutualistic or synergistic, depending upon the types of microorganisms and their association with the plant and soil in question. Multi-trophic tactics can therefore be employed to nourish plants in various habitats and growth conditions. Understanding the mechanisms of these interactions is thus highly desired in order to utilize the knowledge in an ecofriendly and sustainable way. This holistic approach to crop improvement may not only resolve the upcoming food security issues, but also make the environment greener by reducing the chemical inputs. Plant, soil and microbe, Volume 1: Implications in Crop Science, along with the forthcoming Volume 2: Mechanisms and Molecular Interactions, provide detailed accounts of the exquisite and delicate balance between the three critical components of agronomy. Specifically, these two titles focus on the basis of nutrient exchange between the microorganisms and the host plants, the mechanism of disease protection and the recent molecular details emerged from studying this multi-tropic interaction. Together they aim to provide a solid foundation for the students, teachers, and researchers interested in soil microbiology, plant pathology, ecology and agronomy.

This book provides exhaustive information on several recent technologies that are employed for sugarcane improvement through biotechnology and will be of great interest to plant scientists, biotechnologists, molecular biologists and breeders who work on sugarcane crop. Topics discussed in this volume include genomics and transcriptomics, transgenic sugarcane for trait improvement, potential candidate promoters, new strategies for transformation, molecular farming, sugarcane as biofuel, chloroplast transformation, and genome editing.

This volume describes different up-to-date methodological approaches, ranging from physiological assays to imaging and molecular techniques, to study a wide variety of plant responses to environmental cues. Environmental Responses in Plants: Methods and Protocols is divided into four sections: Tropisms, Photoperiodism and Circadian Rhythms, Abiotic Stress Responses, and Plant-Pathogen Interactions. The chapters in these sections include detailed protocols to investigate some of the many key biological processes underlying plant environmental responses, mostly in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, but also in Physcomitrella patens and in different crop species such as rice, potato, barley, or tomato. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and practical, Environmental Responses in Plants: Methods and Protocols, is a great resource for plant physiologists, biochemists, and cell and molecular scientists interested in this exciting and fast-growing research topic.

"Use of Microbes for the Alleviation of Soil Stresses, Volume 1" describes the most important details and advances related to the alleviation of soil stresses by soil microbes. Comprised of seven chapters, the book reviews the mechanisms by which plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) alleviate plant growth under stress; the role of mycorrhizal fungi on the alleviation of drought stress in host plants; how PGPR may alleviate salinity stress on the growth of host plants; and the role of PGPR on the growth of the host plant under the stress of sub optimal root zone temperature.

Written by experts in their respective fields, "Use of Microbes for the Alleviation of Soil Stresses, Volume 1 "is a comprehensive and valuable resource for researchers and students interested in the field of microbiology and soil stresses.

In spite of international agreements at the political level not much has changed since the late 1980s in terms of reducing the speed of destruction of original tropical environments.

However, since the publication of the first edition ten years ago, international research efforts in physiological ecology of plants in the tropics has increased enormously in quantity and quality. In some fields advances were more substantial than in others. New approaches came up in remote sensing and at the other end of the scope in some areas molecular biology was particularly developed regarding ecological performance of tropical plants, e.g. in understanding the adaptation of resurrection plants to the extreme habitat of inselbergs.

The wealth of new information made it necessary to break large chapters down into smaller ones. Tropical forests which occupy about half of the entire volume of the book were now arranged in 5 chapters covering structure and function under the influence of environmental cues and including epiphytes and mangroves as part of the tropical forest complex. Savannas were now treated in two chapters. Coastal salinas have been combined with a new section on the Brazilian restingas in a chapter on coastal sand plains.

Volume 2 covers nitrogen fertilizer efficiency, acid tolerance of the legume symbiosis, fruit tree nutrition, rhizosphere pH change, iron deficiency in crop production, the effects of nutrient deficiences on seed production, the elemental composition of plants, and the role of potassium. The articles in this volume join together both the fundamental and the applied parts of this discipline. The editors' aim to make the reviews comprehensible to scientists in relevant disciplines, rather than purely to the specialist. The format of each volume is a small number of full-length reviews of important topics, plus an editorial which briefly mentions other rapidly developing topics that may therefore be reviewed in future volumes.

Playing a critical role in both influencing climate change and mitigating its impacts, the world's diverse wetlands have become one of the world's most threatened ecosystems as unsustainable land-use practices coupled with irrational use of water have already resulted in large-scale wetlands loss and degradation. To develop sound management and conservation schemes to assure wetlands sustainability in the long term requires long-term understanding of wetlands ecology. Yet until now, long-term interdisciplinary research into these systems has been limited to only a few systems from tropical or temperate climates (such as the Florida Everglades, and Czech biosphere reserve). This new book adds to the existing wetlands literature, providing a unique reference in basic and applied Mediterranean wetland ecology, based on results from long-term interdisciplinary research at the RAMSAR and UNESCO Biosphere site, of Las Tablas de Daimiel, Spain. Dating back to the early 1990s the research highlights changes in the biotic and abiotic environment in response to cumulative anthropogenic stressors, and provide guidance on applying this understand to sound management and conservation. With particular relevance to researchers dealing with semi-arid wetlands in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, as well as to resource managers, the book discusses the complexity of the interacting abiotic and biotic environment across different spatial and temporal scales and across various levels of biological hierarchy is highlighted, and reveals how management based on poor knowledge causes more damage than repair. The book will be of interest to researchers interested in freshwater ecology, hydrobotany, hydrology, geology, biogeochemistry, landscape ecology and environmental management.

Recherches Chimiques sur la Vegetation was a seminal work in the development of the understanding of photosythesis and plant chemistry. The original publication, which was the first concise summation of the basics of plant nutrition, was a landmark in plant science. It was twice translated into German during the nineteenth century, but no English translation has been published. This translation will interest those in the plant, chemical, agricultural, and soil sciences, and the history of science, who find English more accessible than French or German and who wish to learn more about the early research on photosynthesis and plant science. A further note about the translation: This project is more than just a translation because it includes an extensive introduction as well as notes that provide explanations for archaic terminology and other background material. In the twentieth century, eminent photosynthesis researcher Eugene Rabinowitch described Recherches Chimiques sur la Vegetation as the first modern book on plant nutrition. Historian of chemistry Henry Leicester called the book a classic, noting that the first important generalization about biochemistry in the nineteenth century came from it. Plant physiologist P. E. Pilet stated that the book laid the foundations of a new science, phytochemistry. Soil scientist E. Walter Russell attributed to de Saussure the quantitative experimental method, which more than anything else made modern agricultural chemistry possible. Chemist Leonard K. Nash stated that de Saussure brought the studies of plant nutrition begun by Priestley, Ingen-Housz, and Senebier close to completion, finishing the basic experimental work and providing a convincing theoretical interpretation of the field, and also opened up new vistas of experiment and thought. In the two centuries since Recherches Chimiques sur la Vegetation was published, luminaries in various branches of science, including plant biology, chemistry, and soil science, have consistently praised it highly. In the nineteenth century, noted botanist Alphonse de Candolle and equally noted plant physiologist Julius von Sachs expressed great admiration for it. Although de Saussure's ideas were forgotten for a time, famed chemist Justus von Liebig, who invented artificial fertilizer, rediscovered them in the 1840s and brought them to the attention of the agricultural community, stressing their importance for increasing crop yields.

The perception that civilization is crossing a period of Global Climatic Changes that can seriously threaten our lifestyle, along with energy security and the search for prosperity, are the main drivers that are pushing men to use more biomass as a source of energy. It will be crucial that such intent will include a large parcel of sustainability so that more renewable energy becomes available for populations. Because large amounts of energy are "hidden" in carbon polymers made by plants, notably carbohydrates, it is obvious that if technologies are developed to produce liquid fuels such as ethanol from carbohydrate polymers such as cellulose, men could significantly increase energy sustainability . This book reviews general aspects of biomass utilization for bioenergy production as well as strategies using biochemistry, molecular biology, chemistry and physics to disassemble plant cell walls. Recent discoveries of basic science under development in several laboratories in the world are reviewed by experts that have been intensively working with many aspects that will impact the development of the technology of production of cellulosic ethanol.

The diversity and specialization in orchid floral morphology have fascinated botanists and collectors for centuries. In the past 10 years, the orchid industry has been growing substantially worldwide. This interesting book focuses on the recent advances in orchid biotechnology research since the last 10 years in Taiwan. To advance the orchid industry, enhancement of basic research as well as advanced biotechnology will provide a good platform to improve the flower quality and breeding of new varieties. Important topics covered include the new knowledge of basic genome, through floral morphogenesis, floral ontology, embryogenesis, micropropagation, to functional genomics such as EST, virus-induced gene silencing, and genetic transformation.

This book discusses the role of salt in current agricultural approaches, including the low salt tolerance of agricultural crops and trees, impact of saline soils, and salt-resistant plants. Halophytes are extremely salt tolerant plants, which are able to grow and survive under salt at concentrations as high as 5 g/l by maintaining negative water potential. The salt-tolerant microbes inhabiting the rhizospheres of halophytes may contribute to their salt tolerance, and the rhizospheres of halophytic plants provide an ideal opportunity for isolating various groups of salt-tolerant microbes that could enhance the growth of different crops under salinity stress. The book offers an overview of salt-tolerant microbes' ability to increase plant tolerance to salt to facilitate plant growth, the potential of the halophytes' rhizospheres as a reservoir of beneficial salt-tolerant microbes, their future application as bio-inoculants in agriculture and a valuable resource for an alternative way of improving crop tolerance to salinity and promoting saline soil-based agriculture. This special collection of reviews highlights some of the recent advances in applied aspects of plant (halophytes)-microbe interactions and their contribution towards eco-friendly approaches saline soil-based agriculture.