Ground water resources are receiving global attention, as human population growth and development cause significant changes to the earth system. It plays a major role in ensuring livelihood security in many parts of South Asia and its contribution to poverty alleviation is substantial. The complex nature of ground water problems in the Indian Sub-continent requires a precise delineation of the ground water regimes in different hydro geological settings and socio-economic conditions and is a primary necessity for sustainable and equitable management. Strategies to respond to ground water over-exploitation and deteriorating water quality must be based on a new approach. Practical policies and various solution options urgently need to be formulated and implemented to prevent the development problems. There is pressing need to evolve workable methods and approaches based on modern scientific researches on ground water resources, as well as to build a social framework including community participation at all levels for a ground water development system. The community participation in water pumping policies, incentives of efficient use, affordability of low income users and other vulnerable groups, water awareness are prime factors for success of any ground water based water supply project.

This book presents an important discussion on soil and sustainable agriculture from a range of perspectives, addressing key topics such as sustainable intensification, the FAO Voluntary Guidelines, and the crucial role of appropriate tenure rights. This second volume of the International Yearbook of Soil Law and Policy is divided into four parts, the first of which deals with several aspects of the theme "soil and sustainable agriculture." In turn, the second part covers recent international developments, the third part presents regional and national reports, and the fourth discusses cross-cutting issues. Given the range of key topics covered, the book offers an indispensable tool for all academics, legislators and policymakers working in this field. The "International Yearbook of Soil Law and Policy" is a book series that discusses central questions in law and politics with regard to the protection and sustainable management of soil and land - at the international, national and regional level. The Chapter "The Use of Property Law Tools for Soil Protection" by Jessica Owley is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book, featuring a truly interdisciplinary approach, provides an overview of cutting-edge mathematical theories and techniques that promise to play a central role in climate science. It brings together some of the most interesting overview lectures given by the invited speakers at an important workshop held in Rome in 2013 as a part of MPE2013 ("Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013"). The aim of the workshop was to foster the interaction between climate scientists and mathematicians active in various fields linked to climate sciences, such as dynamical systems, partial differential equations, control theory, stochastic systems, and numerical analysis. Mathematics and statistics already play a central role in this area. Likewise, computer science must have a say in the efforts to simulate the Earth's environment on the unprecedented scale of petabytes. In the context of such complexity, new mathematical tools are needed to organize and simplify the approach. The growing importance of data assimilation techniques for climate modeling is amply illustrated in this volume, which also identifies important future challenges.

Based on the famed French explorer's film series, Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures , these are the definitive guides to America's 13 National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments. Each installment conducts a grand adventure through each of the four regions of the National Marine Sanctuary system, combining engaging descriptions, stunning photography, and behind-the-scenes stories from the Ocean Futures Society expedition team. Intelligent inquiries into the health of the world's oceans are provided along with an overview of several incredible underwater treasures. Conveying the beauty of the ocean and the specific measures being put into effect to preserve it, this inspirational collection also features detailed, practical information for planning visits to the sanctuaries. Included in this volume are the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Sanctuary.

Interdisciplinary Teaching about the Earth and Environment for a Sustainable Future presents the outcomes of the InTeGrate project, a community effort funded by the National Science Foundation to improve Earth literacy and build a workforce prepared to tackle environmental and resource issues. The InTeGrate community is built around the shared goal of supporting interdisciplinary learning about Earth across the undergraduate curriculum, focusing on the grand challenges facing society and the important role that the geosciences play in addressing these grand challenges. The chapters in this book explicitly illustrate the intimate relationship between geoscience and sustainability that is often opaque to students. The authors of these chapters are faculty members, administrators, program directors, and researchers from institutions across the country who have collectively envisioned, implemented, and evaluated effective change in their classrooms, programs, institutions, and beyond. This book provides guidance to anyone interested in implementing change-on scales ranging from a single course to an entire program-by infusing sustainability across the curriculum, broadening access to Earth and environmental sciences, and assessing the impacts of those changes.

Vertisols, one of the eleven established soil orders, are clay soils with unusual and interesting properties. They cover more than 350 million hectares of land in the world and in tropical Africa alone there are over 100 million hectares. Because of their very small particle size and high surface area, these soils have higher physical and chemical reactivity than other soils. Their interaction with agrochemicals/industrial wastes, has been, increasingly, the subject of research especially in the last two decades. Vertisols create special problems when used for engineering purposes.

This book is intended to provide comprehensive and state-of-the-art information about Vertisols worldwide. Special attention is given to the use and management of soils such as fertilizer use, crop selection, soil tillage, water restriction on land including irrigation, and soil erosion. A special chapter has been added to deal with geotechnical engineering of Vertisols.

Vertisols have great potential for agricultural production but many, especially in the developing world, are underutilized due to a lack of understanding regarding their behaviour and management.

This book is written by leading scientists worldwide. It is expected that this monograph will be of great use to soil scientists and agronomists, graduate and senior graduate students.

Improvement of their management may solve the current food deficiency in the world.

This book presents a selection of the best papers from the HEaRT 2015 conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, which provided a valuable forum for engineers and architects, researchers and educators to exchange views and findings concerning the technological history, construction features and seismic behavior of historical timber-framed walls in the Mediterranean countries. The topics covered are wide ranging and include historical aspects and examples of the use of timber-framed construction systems in response to earthquakes, such as the gaiola system in Portugal and the Bourbon system in southern Italy; interpretation of the response of timber-framed walls to seismic actions based on calculations and experimental tests; assessment of the effectiveness of repair and strengthening techniques, e.g., using aramid fiber wires or sheets; and modelling analyses. In addition, on the basis of case studies, a methodology is presented that is applicable to diagnosis, strengthening and improvement of seismic performance and is compatible with modern theoretical principles and conservation criteria. It is hoped that, by contributing to the knowledge of this construction technique, the book will help to promote conservation of this important component of Europe's architectural heritage.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of advanced research in the field of efficient, clean and renewable energy production, conversion and storage. The ten chapters, written by internationally respected experts, address the following topics: (1) solar and wind energy; (2) energy storage in batteries; (3) biomass; and (4) socio-economic aspects of energy. Given its multidisciplinary approach, which combines environmental analysis and an engineering perspective, the book offers a valuable resource for all researchers and students interested in environmentally sustainable energy production, conversion, storage and its engineering.

Fish die. Seagulls starve. Economies wither. And that's just in the coastal villages. El Nino--The Christ Child--and its climatological opposite, La Nina, are global events so powerful and strange they virtually have personalities. Many remember the El Nino seasons of 1982-83 and 1997-98, which brought floods, tornadoes, droughts, and snow to unusual locales. Increased study of these Tropical Pacific phenomena, also known as ENSO (the El Nino and Southern Oscillation), has now enabled scientists to predict the ENSO state as much as 12 to 18 months in advance and has helped to shape weather prediction in general. Here, the basic causes and effects of El Nino and La Nina are carefully chronicled for anyone in search of accurate and current information on these natural phenomena.

Chapters are devoted to the history of ENSO; its influence on global weather and on the United States, including the ecosystem; and how governments and industries worldwide are utilizing new weather data to harness ENSO's economic impact, rather than be saddled by it. A chronology tours key events, from the 15th century diary observations of colonists in Ecuador and Peru to recent events like the devastating El Nino of 1997-98, which was responsible for 23,000 deaths and $33 billion in damages. Biographies of important researchers, illustrations and maps, and an extensive bibliography help make this a total guide to these magnificent natural cycles.

This book aims at providing a brief but broad overview of biosignatures. The topics addressed range from prebiotic signatures in extraterrestrial materials to the signatures characterising extant life as well as fossilised life, biosignatures related to space, and space flight instrumentation to detect biosignatures either in situ or from orbit. The book ends with philosophical reflections on the implications of life elsewhere. In the 15 chapters written by an interdisciplinary team of experts, it provides both detailed explanations on the nature of biosignatures as well as useful case studies showing how they are used and identified in ancient rocks, for example. One case study addresses the controversial finding of traces of fossil life in a meteorite from Mars. The book will be of interest not only to astrobiologists but also to terrestrial paleontologists as well as any reader interested in the prospects of finding a second example of life on another planet.

This book reviews the geochemical and petrological characteristics of potassic igneous rock complexes, and investigates the various tectonic settings in which these rocks occur. The authors provide an overview and classification of these rocks and elucidate the geochemical differences between barren and mineralized potassic igneous complexes. High-K rocks are genetically associated with a number of epithermal gold and porphyry copper-gold deposits. In recent years, there has also been growing recognition of an association of such rocks with iron-oxide copper-gold (IOCG) deposits, intrusion-related gold deposits (IRGDs) and Carlin-type gold deposits. This fifth updated and expanded edition incorporates new data and references from world-class copper and gold deposits worldwide. It also includes the latest publications on the petrogenesis of high-K magmatism and related mineral deposits. Numerous new representative ore photographs of the mineral deposits described are also included in the new edition. As such, the book offers a valuable guide not only for academic petrologists working on alkaline rocks, but also for exploration geologists prospecting for epithermal gold and/or porphyry copper-gold deposits in modern and ancient terrains.

Weather Analysis and Forecasting: Applying Satellite Water Vapor Imagery and Potential Vorticity Analysis, Second Edition, is a step-by-step essential training manual for forecasters in meteorological services worldwide, and a valuable text for graduate students in atmospheric physics and satellite meteorology. In this practical guide, P. Santurette, C.G. Georgiev, and K. Maynard show how to interpret water vapor patterns in terms of dynamical processes in the atmosphere and their relation to diagnostics available from numerical weather prediction models. In particular, they concentrate on the close relationship between satellite imagery and the potential vorticity fields in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. These applications are illustrated with color images based on real meteorological situations over mid-latitudes, subtropical and tropical areas.

This book provides recent developments and improvements in the modeling as well as application examples and is a complementary work to the previous Lecture Notes Vols. 77 and 80. It summarizes the fundamental work from scientists dealing with the development of constitutive models for soils, especially cyclic loading with special attention to the numerical implementation. In this volume the neo-hypoplasticity and the ISA (intergranular strain anisotropy) model in their extended version are presented. Furthermore, new contact elements with non-linear constitutive material laws and examples for their applications are given.Comparisons between the experimental and the numerical results show the effectiveness and the drawbacks and provide a useful and comprehensive pool for all the constitutive model developers and scientists in geotechnical engineering, who like to prove the soundness of new approaches.

This book gathers technical and scientific contributions from leading researchers, academics, and lecturers, focusing on water management, water pollution and water structures in the Czech Republic. It discusses a variety of water resources management issues, from stormwater management in urban areas, water quantity, hydraulics structures and hydrodynamic modeling, to flood protection, presenting state-of-the-art developments for addressing a range of problems. Edited and authored by pioneers in the field who have been at the cutting edge of water management development in the Czech Republic, this book is of interest to environmental professionals, including scientists and policymakers both in the Czech Republic and around the globe.

This book gathers the main research findings on monotonic, cyclic and postcyclic shear behavior of low-plasticity. Drawing on the low-plasticity silt from the Mississippi River Valley, it determines that the silt's critical state line can be changed due to liquefaction, and thus offers valuable insights and reference data for further investigations on soil mechanics and engineering applications to verify the above research findings. Low-plasticity silt with a plasticity index of less than 10, though commonly found around the world, nonetheless differs greatly from sand and clay in terms of its shear behavior. Failure to take into account the differences in shear characteristics between silt, clay and sand will lead to overconservative designs of offshore structures. In particular, dynamic loading from earthquakes, trains and ocean waves can set off the liquefaction of low-plasticity silt, and with it, major disasters and losses of properties. Additionally, some civil infrastructures have failed not only due to cyclic loading during an earthquake, but also due to reduction of shear strength or stiffness after that.

The paddy field is a unique agro-ecosystem and provides services such as food, nutrient recycling and diverse habitats. However, chemical contamination of paddy soils has degraded the quality of this important ecosystem. This book provides an overview of our current understanding of paddy soil pollution, addressing topics such as the major types of pollutants in contaminated paddy soil ecosystems; factors affecting the fate of pollutants in paddy soil; biomonitoring approaches to assess the contaminated paddy soil; the impact of chemicals on soil microbial diversity; and climate change. It also covers arsenic and heavy metal pollution of paddy soils and their impact on rice quality. Further, new emerging contaminants such as antibiotics and antibiotics resistance genes (ARGs) in paddy soil and their impact on environmental health are also discussed. The last chapters focus on the bioremediation approaches for the management of paddy soils.

Bioremediation refers to the clean-up of pollution in soil, groundwater, surface water, and air using typically microbiological processes. It uses naturally occurring bacteria and fungi or plants to degrade, transform or detoxify hazardous substances to human health or the environment. For bioremediation to be effective, microorganisms must enzymatically attack the pollutants and convert them to harmless products. As bioremediation can be effective only where environmental conditions permit microbial growth and action, its application often involves the management of ecological factors to allow microbial growth and degradation to continue at a faster rate. Like other technologies, bioremediation has its limitations. Some contaminants, such as chlorinated organic or high aromatic hydrocarbons, are resistant to microbial attack. They are degraded either gradually or not at all, hence, it is not easy to envisage the rates of clean-up for bioremediation implementation. Bioremediation represents a field of great expansion due to the important development of new technologies. Among them, several decades on metagenomics expansion has led to the detection of autochthonous microbiota that plays a key role during transformation. Transcriptomic guides us to know the expression of key genes and proteomics allow the characterization of proteins that conduct specific reactions. In this book we show specific technologies applied in bioremediation of main interest for research in the field, with special attention on fungi, which have been poorly studied microorganisms. Finally, new approaches in the field, such as CRISPR-CAS9, are also discussed. Lastly, it introduces management strategies, such as bioremediation application for managing affected environment and bioremediation approaches. Examples of successful bioremediation applications are illustrated in radionuclide entrapment and retardation, soil stabilization and remediation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenols, plastics or fluorinated compounds. Other emerging bioremediation methods include electro bioremediation, microbe-availed phytoremediation, genetic recombinant technologies in enhancing plants in accumulation of inorganic metals, and metalloids as well as degradation of organic pollutants, protein-metabolic engineering to increase bioremediation efficiency, including nanotechnology applications are also discussed.

This book presents the first overview of the composition and structure of the Earth's lower mantle. The first part focuses on the study of lower-mantle minerals, identified as inclusions in diamonds from different regions of the world. Three associations are established among the lower-mantle minerals: ultramafic, mafic, and carbonatic. The carbonatic association is of particular interest because it characterizes the media of natural diamond formation. In turn, the second part analyzes the structure of the lower mantle, revealing its heterogeneous composition. It is based on the results of experiments demonstrating phase transitions in lower-mantle minerals, and on seismological data. Deep-seated earthquakes point to the presence within the lower mantle of numerous seismic boundaries caused by mineral structure transitions. In closing, the last part of the book compares observed data with experimental data, highlighting several discrepancies that indicate Earth may have a more complex planetary history than previously assumed, and examining its primarily non-chondritic composition.

This study, based on a literature review and simulations, shows the efficiency of cover crops at catching nitrate in most agriculture situations. It also analyzes both the negative impacts they can have and the ecosystem services they can provide. The introduction of a cover crop between two main crops helps catch the soil mineral nitrogen before the period of drainage and consequently reduces nitrate leaching and nitrate concentration in the drainage water. This study allows quantifying the efficiency of cover crops at catching nitrate and optimizing their implantation conditions over a large range of French pedoclimatic conditions. The presence of high nitrate levels in surface and ground waters, due to excessive nitrogen fertilization and natural production of nitrate by soil organic matter mineralization, is a double challenge for public health and environment protection.

The natural disasters are the killer agents which can/can't be predicted even though we have modern technology. Every year, in one place or another, disasters striking which is devastating the area and surroundings, leading to ecological disruption besides huge loss of life and property. India is vulnerable to cyclones, landslides/avalanches, earthquakes, floods, droughts, forest fires, epidemics, etc. The 5700-km long coast of India, with its dense population is vulnerable to cyclones/low depressions, tsunamis, etc. The 2400-km long rugged Himalayan terrain is vulnerable to landslides, avalanches and earthquakes. India is not only vulnerable to natural disasters, it is also experiencing industrial accidents. The Bhopal Gas tragedy is one of the major man-made disasters in the world. The state of Andhra Pradesh has 970-km long coastline with two major rivers, etc. The conference is conducted in Visakhapatnam, is famous for industries and tourism. Recently, several industrial accidents took place, besides major natural disasters like Hud-Hud, etc. Disaster management shall be implemented from the grass root level in vulnerable areas to improve the capacity building, so as to minimize the losses. The capacity building coupled with technology results in reduction of loss of life and property.

Handbook of Flotation Reagents: Chemistry, Theory and Practice: Flotation of Gold, PGM and Oxide Minerals, Volume 2 focuses on the theory, practice, and chemistry of flotation of gold, platinum group minerals (PGMs), and the major oxide minerals, along with rare earths. It examines separation methods whose effectiveness is limited when using conventional treatment processes and considers commercial plant practices for most oxide minerals, such as pyrochlore-containing ores, copper cobalt ores, zinc ores, tin ores, and tantalum/niobium ores. It discusses the geology and mineralogy of gold, PGMs, and oxide minerals, as well as reagent and flotation practices in beneficiation. The book also looks at the factors affecting the floatability of gold minerals and describes PGM-dominated deposits such as Morensky-type deposits, hydrothermal deposits, and placer deposits. In addition, case studies of flotation and beneficiation in countries such as Canada, Africa, Russia, Chile, and Saudi Arabia are presented. This book will be useful to researchers, university students, and professors, as well as mineral processors faced with the problem of beneficiation of difficult-to-treat ores.