Mathematical modelling is an essential tool in present-day ecological research. Yet for many ecologists it is still problematic to apply modelling in their research. In our experience, the major problem is at the conceptual level: proper understanding of what a model is, how ecological relations can be translated consistently into mathematical equations, how models are solved, steady states calculated and interpreted. Many textbooks jump over these conceptual hurdles to dive into detailed formulations or the mathematics of solution. This book attempts to fill that gap. It introduces essential concepts for mathematical modelling, explains the mathematics behind the methods, and helps readers to implement models and obtain hands-on experience. Throughout the book, emphasis is laid on how to translate ecological questions into interpretable models in a practical way.

The book aims to be an introductory textbook at the undergraduate-graduate level, but will also be useful to seduce experienced ecologists into the world of modelling. The range of ecological models treated is wide, from Lotka-Volterra type of principle-seeking models to environmental or ecosystem models, and including matrix models, lattice models and sequential decision models. All chapters contain a concise introduction into the theory, worked-out examples and exercises. All examples are implemented in the open-source package R, thus taking away problems of software availability for use of the book. All code used in the book is available on a dedicated website.

This book offers an environmental-economic analysis of exploited ecosystems with a clear policy orientation. The study moves beyond traditional economic fishery analysis in two respects. First, several theoretical and numerical models are offered that combine economic and ecological descriptions of fisheries. Second, valuation and stakeholder concerns are addressed in empirical analyses employing both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The approaches, models and policy insights are sufficiently general and innovative to interest a broad audience.

Large lakes are important because of their size and ecological distinctiveness as well as their economic and cultural value. Optimal management of them requires a proper understanding of anthropogenic impacts both on the lake ecosystems as such and on the services they provide for society. The specific structural and functional properties of large lakes, e.g. morphology, hydrography, biogeochemical cycles and food-web structure, are all directly related to their size. Although large lakes are among the best-studied ecosystems in the world, the application to them of environmental regulations such as the European Water Framework Directive is a challenging task and requires that several natural and management aspects specific to these water bodies are adequately considered. These vulnerable ecosystems often suffer from accelerated eutrophication, over-fishing, toxic contamination and invasive species. Large lakes offer socio-economic benefits and can be used in many ways, and are often areas in which economic, cultural and political interests overlap. In this book the problems regarding the present status of European large lakes and the directions of change are discussed. Threats caused by direct human impact and by climate change, protection needs and restoration measures are considered.

The chapters in the book cover a broad range of aspects regarding the relationship between natural resource use and long-term economic development. The book surveys existing literature as well as adds to frontier research. In particular, the following topics are studied: incentives for adoption and diffusion of clean technology, resource scarcity and limits to growth, international convergence of energy intensity, and the social norms shaping resource depletion.

Nowadays, environmental issues including air and water pollution, climate change, overexploitation of marine ecosystems, exhaustion of fossil resources, conservation of biodiversity are receiving major attention from the public, stakeholders and scholars from the local to the planetary scales. It is now clearly recognized that human activities yield major ecological and envir- mental stresses with irreversible loss of species, destruction of habitat or c- matecatastrophesasthemostdramaticexamplesoftheire?ects.Infact, these anthropogenic activities impact not only the states and dynamics of natural resources and ecosystems but also alter human health, well-being, welfare and economic wealth since these resources are support features for human life. The numerous outputs furnished by nature include direct goods such as food, drugs, energy along with indirect services such as the carbon cycle, the water cycle and pollination, to cite but a few. Hence, the various ecological changes our world is undergoing draw into question our ability to sustain economic production, wealth and the evolution of technology by taking natural systems into account. The concept of "sustainable development" covers such concerns, although no universal consensus exists about this notion. Sustainable development - phasizes the need to organize and control the dynamics and the complex - teractions between man, production activities, and natural resources in order to promote their coexistence and their common evolution. It points out the importance of studying the interfaces between society and nature, and es- ciallythecouplingbetweeneconomicsandecology.Itinducesinterdisciplinary scienti?c research for the assessment, the conservation and the management of natural resources.

This book provides a broad introduction to the subject of environmental space-time processes, addressing the role of uncertainty. It covers a spectrum of technical matters from measurement to environmental epidemiology to risk assessment. It showcases non-stationary vector-valued processes, while treating stationarity as a special case. In particular, with members of their research group the authors developed within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, the new statistical approaches presented in the book for analyzing, modeling, and monitoring environmental spatio-temporal processes. Furthermore they indicate new directions for development.

Since the late 1960s, various groups have investigated the influence of marine surface films on mechanisms dominating energy and mass transfer across the ocean/atmosphere interface. However, a compendium summarizing the state-of-the-art research in this field is still missing. The book fills this gap and transfers the accumulated knowledge to the scientific community. After a brief historical chapter basic chemical insights are presented, followed by theoretical and experimental approaches carried out in laboratory facilities. Air-sea interaction experiments are then described and finally, remote sensing applications with sea slicks and crude oil spills are presented.

Pedagogical insights gained through 30 years of teaching applied mathematics led the author to write this set of student oriented books. Topics such as complex analysis, matrix theory, vector and tensor analysis, Fourier analysis, integral transforms, ordinary and partial differential equations are presented in a discursive style that is readable and easy to follow. Numerous examples, completely worked out, together with carefully selected problem sets with answers are used to enhance students' understanding and manipulative skill. The goal is to make students comfortable in using advanced mathematical tools in junior, senior, and beginning graduate courses.

Hormones and Pharmaceuticals Generated by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: Transport in Water and Soil examines how hormones, antibiotics and pharmaceuticals generated from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) of cattle, poultry, swine and aquaculture are transported in water and soil. Little is known of the environmental fate of the tons of physiologically active steroid hormones released each year. In their own regard, in the last 20 years considerable attention has been given to a wide variety of natural and anthropomorphic agents known as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs). Until the contribution of steroid hormones to the environment are better defined, it will be difficult to quantify the exact impact of EDCs. While some advances in the understanding of the fate of these compounds in water has been made, little is known about the processes that govern their transport in soil or how they eventually reach groundwater. As this book discusses extensively, it is somewhat of a mystery how steroids, with their lipophilic nature, strong binding to humic acids and extensive metabolism by soil bacteria, can be transported through even a few centimeters of soil, let alone 20 to 40 meters to the groundwater. With respect to antibiotics, the emphasis is on their fate and transport in the environment and on the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Impacts on soil ecology, including the impact of antibiotics on the metabolism of other active agents, is also discussed. Similarly, the acaricides and insecticides used in animal husbandry are widely used and their environmental pathways have been studied and have significant impacts on soil and dung ecology. Active compounds with potential environmental impacts, such as growth promoters generated from CAFOs, are described. However, because little is known of their environmental fate, emphasis is placed on defining the gaps in our knowledge and defining their possible effects.

Increasing environmental concerns demand interdisciplinary approaches enabling engineers, natural scientists, economists and computer scientists to work together. Information technology is vital to all scientists involved in environmental engineering, covering modeling and simulation, information systems, formal methods and data processing techniques, tools and measurement techniques. This book presents the proceedings of the ITEE 07 conference, where new concepts as well as practical applications and experiences in environmental engineering were presented and discussed.

Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology attempts to provide concise, critical reviews of timely advances, philosophy and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics, in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.

The Global Water Partnership notes that the crisis in the water sector is a one of governance. Water management is an integral part of ecosystem governance and is closely linked to the sustainable development discourse. This book unpacks the core elements of governance, with a specific focus on water. It analyzes the linkages between key variables in an effort to increase our understanding of what makes governance good.

This valuable edition brings together 25 peer reviewed articles on technical, socio-economic, environmental and policy aspects of flood risk management. Some emerging technologies are presented and several future challenges are identified. Thus the book forms an excellent reference for the engineers, scientists, planners, policy-makers, researchers, insurance industry and all the practitioners involved in flood risk management.

Information technologies have evolved to an enabling science for natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Computing plays a significant role in every day practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists, and social scientists. The complexity of natural phenomena requires interdisciplinary approaches, where computing science offers the infrastructure for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support documentation and reporting.

Ecology, environmental engineering and natural resource management comprise an excellent real-world testbed for IT system demonstration, while raising new challenges for computer science. Complexity, uncertainty and scaling issues of natural systems form a demanding application domain for sensor networks and earth observation systems; modelling, simulation and scientific workflows, data management and reporting, decision support and intelligent systems, distributed computing environments, geographical information systems, heterogeneous systems integration, software engineering, accounting systems and control systems.

This books offers a collection of papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in May 2009, in Thessaloniki, Greece. Recent success stories in ecoinformatics, promising ideas and new challenges are discussed among computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem solving and decision making.

This is the story of tropical agricultural science and agricultural development in the 20th century, focusing on the African farmer and African farming methods. It describes successes as well as fads and failures, many based on the author 's first-hand observations during more than 40 years in tropical agronomy-related fields. Moving into the 21st century, the book explores the rise of computer modeling of crops and crop production.

Numerical simulation models have become indispensable in hydro- and environmental sciences and engineering. This monograph presents a general introduction to numerical simulation in environment water, based on the solution of the equations for groundwater flow and transport processes, for multiphase and multicomponent flow and transport processes in the subsurface as well as for flow and transport processes in surface waters. It displays in detail the state of the art of discretization and stabilization methods (e.g. finite-difference, finite-element, and finite-volume methods), parallel methods, and adaptive methods as well as fast solvers, with particular focus on explaining the interactions of the different methods. The book gives a brief overview of various information-processing techniques and demonstrates the interactions of the numerical methods with the information-processing techniques, in order to achieve efficient numerical simulations for a wide range of applications in environment water.

It is a truism among biologists that an organism's phenotype is the product of both its genotype and its environment. An organism's genotype contains the total informational potential of the individual, while its environment shapes the expression of the ge- type, influences the rate of mutation and occurrence of modifications, and ultimately determines the likelihood that the genotype (or fractions thereof) will survive into the next generation. In the relationship between host and pathogen, therefore, each forms a part of the environment of the other, mutually influencing the biology of both partners on scales ranging from the life history of individuals to the fate of populations or entire species. Molecular biologists working on problems in pathogenesis generally think of the host organism as the pathogen's environment and perhaps occasionally consider the pathogen as part of the host's environment. However, because "environment" can be defined at many scales, so, too, can phenotypes: if a pathogen, as a species, is c- sidered to exist in a host, as a species, then among its phenotypes is the nature of the pandemic disease it can cause within the host community. The contributors to the proceedings of this NATO Advanced Research Workshop have treated the interplay of environment and genotype in the host-pathogen relationship and its relationship to the problem of emerging infectious disease at both the macroscopic and microscopic/ molecular levels along this continuum of scale (with some human history thrown in at times for good measure).

Data assimilation (DA) has been recognized as one of the core techniques for modern forecasting in various earth science disciplines including meteorology, oceanography, and hydrology. Since early 1990s DA has been an important s- sion topic in many academic meetings organized by leading societies such as the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, European G- physical Union, World Meteorological Organization, etc. nd Recently, the 2 Annual Meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS), held in Singapore in June 2005, conducted a session on DA under the - tle of "Data Assimilation for Atmospheric, Oceanic and Hydrologic Applications." nd This rst DA session in the 2 AOGS was a great success with more than 30 papers presented and many great ideas exchanged among scientists from the three different disciplines. The scientists who participated in the meeting suggested making the DA session a biennial event. th Two years later, at the 4 AOGS Annual Meeting, Bangkok, Thailand, the DA session was of cially named "Sasaki Symposium on Data Assimilation for At- spheric, Oceanic and Hydrologic Applications," to honor Prof. Yoshi K. Sasaki of the University of Oklahoma for his life-long contributions to DA in geosciences.

At last a second edition of this hugely important text that reflects the progress and experience gained in the last decade and aims at providing background and training material for a new generation of risk assessors. The authors offer an introduction to risk assessment of chemicals as well as basic background information on sources, emissions, distribution and fate processes for the estimation of exposure of plant and animal species in the environment and humans exposed via the environment, consumer products, and at the workplace. The coverage describes the basic principles and methods of risk assessment within their legislative frameworks (EU, USA, Japan and Canada).

Structural change in basic industries is usually interpreted as an autonomous economic process. Some authors claim that there is a tendency to use the "end of the era of materials," thus resulting in a decline of the basic industries. Such a process would obviously benefit the environment. Classic economic theories, which deal with structural change in a rather holistic way, correspond to this trend, predicting either a shift towards manufacturing and services or a relocation of old basic industries to developing countries. On the basis of this dematerialization hypothesis, comparative case studies analyze in detail the driving forces behind industrial restructuring with regard to different industries and countries in Europe, where such a decline has been observed in recent years.

This book is the first edited compilation of selected, refereed papers submitted to ERTEP 2007. The selected papers either dealt with technologies or scientific work and policy findings that address specific environmental problems affecting humanity in general, but more specifically, people and ecosystems in developing countries. It was not necessary for the work to have been done in a developing country, but the findings and results must be appropriate or applicable to a developing country setting. It is acknowledged that environmental research, technology applications and policy implementation have been demonstrated to improve environmental sustainability and protection in several developed economies. The main argument of the book is that similar gains can be achieved in developing economies and economies in transition. The book is organized into six chapters along some of the key themes discussed at the conference: Environmental Health Management, Sustainable Energy and Fuel, Water Treatment, Purification and Protection, Mining and Environment, Soil Stabilization, and Environmental Monitoring. It is hoped that the contents of the book will provide an insight into some of the environmental and health mana- ment challenges confronting the developing world and the steps being taken to address them.

This book discusses advanced statistical methods that can be used to analyse ecological data. Most environmental collected data are measured repeatedly over time, or space and this requires the use of GLMM or GAMM methods. The book starts by revising regression, additive modelling, GAM and GLM, and then discusses dealing with spatial or temporal dependencies and nested data.

Recent developments in air pollution modelling are explored as a series of contributions from researchers at the forefront of their field. This book on air pollution modelling and its application is focused on local, urban, regional and intercontinental modelling; data assimilation and air quality forecasting; model assessment and evaluation; aerosol transformation; the relationship between air quality and human health and the effects of climate change on air quality. It consists of a series of papers that were presented at the 30th NATO/SPS International Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modelling and its Application held in San Francisco, U.S.A., May 18-22, 2009. It is intended as reference material for students and professors interested in air pollution modelling at the graduate level as well as researchers and professionals involved in developing and utilizing air pollution models.

This book is aimed at generalizing the modern ideas of both biogeochemical and environmental risk assessment that have been developed in recent years. Only a few books are available for readers in this interdisciplinary area, since most books deal mainly with various technical aspects of ERA description and calculations. This text aims at supplementing the existing books by providing a modern understanding of mechanisms that are responsible for ecological risks for human beings and ecosystems. The book is to a certain extent a summary of both scientific results of various authors and of classes in biogeochemistry and ERA, taught by the author in recent years to students in the USA, in particular at Cornell, and in different universities in Moscow, Pushchino, Seoul, and Bangkok.

At present, quantitative ecological risk assessment is widely used in different contexts, however very often without an understanding of the natural mechanisms that drive the processes of environmental and human risk. Its application is often accompanied by high uncertainty about risk values. On the other hand, the sustainability of modern technoecosystems is known because of their natural biogeochemical cycling that has been transformed to various extents by anthropogenic studies. Accordingly our understanding of the principal mechanisms that drive the biogeochemical food webs allows us to present a quantitative ecological risk assessment and to propose technological solutions for management of various ERA enterprises. It also enables us to devise a powerful mechanism for ecological insurance, to assign responsibilities and protect rights while managing the control of damage from natural and anthropogenic accidents and catastrophes.

Observations of uncertainty in measured data with time improves forecasting capability in a wide range of fields in engineering. This book provides an introduction to uncertainty forecasting based on fuzzy time series. It details descriptive, modeling, and forecasting methods for fuzzy time series. Coverage places emphasis on forecasting based on fuzzy random processes as well as forecasting involving fuzzy neuronal networks.