In the policy arena, as well as in the academic world, a new challenge is having to deal with the global community. We are increasingly aware that the world is linked through economy-energy-environment interactions. We are increasingly aware, at the same time, that the emergence of the global community does not imply an integrated harmonious world; rather, it is a community where co- tries/regions of different interests and values face each other directly. Global governance has to be achieved through actions of national governments under different motives and constraints. We need to have an analytical tool that is capable of producing a global picture, yet with detailed country resolution. If the world is a better place now compared to 100 years ago in terms of p- capita income, this is due to the industrialization that continued throughout the 20th century. We entered the 21st century knowing that the human aspiration that translates into ever-increasing production may not be tenable in the long run. Sustainability of the global community is at stake. In contrast to inc- mental decision making through the market mechanism that should lead to some optimal state under some assumptions such as perfect knowledge, smooth movement of resources, no externalities, and so forth, we need to have an a- lytical tool to provide us with details of the future state of the world.

Environmental information systems (EIS) are concerned with the management of data about the soil, the water, the air, and the species in the world around us. This first textbook on the topic gives a conceptual framework for EIS by structuring the data flow into 4 phases: data capture, storage, analysis, and metadata management. This flow corresponds to a complex aggregation process gradually transforming the incoming raw data into concise documents suitable for high-level decision support. All relevant concepts are covered, including statistical classification, data fusion, uncertainty management, knowledge based systems, GIS, spatial databases, multidimensional access methods, object-oriented databases, simulation models, and Internet-based information management. Several case studies present EIS in practice.

The topics covered include soil mechanics and porous media, glacier and ice dynamics, climatology and lake physics, climate change as well as numerical algorithms. The book, written by well-known experts, addresses researchers and students interested in physical aspects of our environment.

Agriculture has experienced a dramatic change during the past decades. The change has been structural and technological. Structural changes can be seen in the size of current farms; not long ago, agricultural production was organized around small farms, whereas nowadays the agricultural landscape is dominated by large farms. Large farms have better means of applying new technologies, and therefore technological advances have been a driving force in changing the farming structure. New technologies continue to emerge, and their mastery and use in requires that farmers gather more information and make more complex technological choices. In particular, the advent of the Internet has opened vast opportunities for communication and business opportunities within the agricultural com- nity. But at the same time, it has created another class of complex issues that need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Farmers and agricultural researchers are faced with an overwhelming amount of information they need to analyze and synthesize to successfully manage all the facets of agricultural production. This daunting challenge requires new and complex approaches to farm management. A new type of agricultural management system requires active cooperation among multidisciplinary and multi-institutional teams and ref- ing of existing and creation of new analytical theories with potential use in agriculture. Therefore, new management agricultural systems must combine the newest achievements in many scientific domains such as agronomy, economics, mathematics, and computer science, to name a few.

Space weather has an enormous influence on modern telecommunication systems even though we may not always appreciate it. We shall endeavor throughout this monograph to expose the relationships between space weather factors and the performance (or lack thereof) of telecommunication, navigation, and surveillance systems. Space weather is a rather new term, having found an oMicial expression as the result of several government initiatives that use the term in the title of programs. But it is the logical consequence of the realization that space also has weather, just as the lower atmosphere has weather. While the weather in space will influence space systems that operate in that special environment, it is also true that space weather will influence systems that we understand and use here on terra firma. This brings space weather home as it were. It is not some abstract topic of interest to scientists alone; it is a topic of concern to all of us. I hope to make this clear as the book unfolds. Why have I written this book? First of all, I love the topic. While at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), I had the opportunity to do research on many topics including: Thomson scatter radar and satellite beacon studies of the ionosphere, utilization of the NASA Gemini platform for ionospheric investigations, microwave radar propagation studies, I-IF signal intercept and direction-finding experiments, and multi-disciplinary studies of certain physical phenomena relevant to weapon systems development.

Based on a wealth of primary data collected by expeditions as well as archive data from Russia, this fascinating book features a systematic description of the knowledge accumulated on the physical oceanography, marine chemistry and pollution, marine biology and geology, meteorology and hydrology of the Black Sea. It presents the principal characteristic features of the environmental conditions of the sea and their changes in the second half of the 20th century.

The growing number of published works dedicated to global environmental change leads to the realization that protection of the natural environment has become an urgent problem. The question of working out principles of co evolution of man and nature is being posed with ever-increasing persistence. Scientists in many countries are attempting to find ways of formulating laws governing human processes acting on the environment. Numerous national and international programs regarding biosphere and climate studies contribute to the quest for means of resolving the conflict between human society and nature. However, attempts to find efficient methods of regulating human activity on a global scale encounter principal difficulties. The major difficulty is the lack of an adequate knowledge base pertaining to climatic and biospheric processes as wen as the largely incomplete state of the databases concerning global processes occurring in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and on land. Another difficulty is the inability of modern science to formulate the requirements which must be met by the global databases necessary for reliable evaluation of the state of the environ ment and fore casting its development for sufficiently long time intervals."

The simulation of technological and environmental flows is very important for many industrial developments. A major challenge related to their modeling is to involve the characteristic turbulence that appears in most of these flows. The traditional way to tackle this question is to use deterministic equations where the effects of turbulence are directly parametrized, i. e. , assumed as functions of the variables considered. However, this approach often becomes problematic, in particular if reacting flows have to be simulated. In many cases, it turns out that appropriate approximations for the closure of deterministic equations are simply unavailable. The alternative to the traditional way of modeling turbulence is to construct stochastic models which explain the random nature of turbulence. The application of such models is very attractive: one can overcome the closure problems that are inherent to deterministic methods on the basis of relatively simple and physically consistent models. Thus, from a general point of view, the use of stochastic methods for turbulence simulations seems to be the optimal way to solve most of the problems related to industrial flow simulations. However, it turns out that this is not as simple as it looks at first glance. The first question concerns the numerical solution of stochastic equations for flows of environmental and technological interest. To calculate industrial flows, 3 one often has to consider a number of grid cells that is of the order of 100 .

These Proceedings of the Third International Workshop introduce research results in the areas of information integration, development of GIS and GIS-applications for a wide spectrum of information systems varying considerably in purpose and scale. The new class of GIS - intelligent GIS - is considered, including principles of their building and programming technologies. Special attention is drawn to the development of ontologies and their use in GIS and GIS-applications.

This volume is the result of an invited symposium titled "Integrated Land-Use and Environmental Models: A Survey of Current Applications and Research" that was held in October 2000 at Arizona State University. The idea for the symposium arose from a belief held by many academics that we are at the watershed of a new generation of models that are more dynamic, more pragmatic, more interdiscipli nary, and more amenable to collaborative decision making. Several academics and professionals engaged in urban research had long realized that domain-specific knowledge was inadequate for understanding and managing urban growth. While interdisciplinary approaches have become critical in most social research, one general area of knowledge that stands out as having the most wide-ranging impact on current urban modeling efforts is the field comprised of environmental sciences and ecology. The symposium offered a forum for academics and professionals engaged in urban and ecological modeling to exchange ideas and experiences, specifically in areas that overlapped urban and environmental issues. The contri butions to this volume highlight the progress made in the various efforts to build integrated urban and environmental models. More importantly, each chapter shows how ideas have diffused across disciplinary boundaries to create better policy-relevant models. In addition, this book outlines some promising areas of research that could make important contributions to the field of urban and envi ronmental modeling. Integrated thinking about urban and environmental issues has been fundamental to the concept of sustainability."

Here is the first systematic handbook treatment of quantitative modeling natural resource problems, their allocated efficient use, and societal and economic impact. Andres Weintraub is the very top person in Natural Resource research. He has selected co-editors who are at the top of the sub-fields in natural resources: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining. The book covers these areas with contributions from researchers on, among others, modeling natural research problems, quantifying data, and developing algorithms."

More than 30-year operational satellite data have already been used for monitoring land, ocean and atmosphere. These applications have contributed to improve sustainable economy, produce healthy environment and enhance human life. The Advanced Research Workshop sponsored by NATO and organized by the USA's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Ukrainian's Space Agency bring the scientists with the most mature research designed for practical use. The goals were to select those which is used for services today and identify the areas to expand research and services. Scientific and application results of the Workshop presented in this book can be used today in agriculture, forestry, water resources, healthy coastal life and fisheries, climate and land cover change, anthropogenic activities and others. The presented papers provide information on how to use operational satellites and in situ measurements for early detection of large-scale droughts, floods and fires, diagnose crop and pasture annual losses, predict periods with health/unhealthy vegetation based on such climate forcing events as ENSO, monitor air quality and geomagnetic activities, assess land cover trends in responce to global warming etc. The available satellite/ground information and method is currently warn with a lead time sufficient to respond, recover and protect.

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).

This volume represents the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Sustainability in Energy and Buildings, SEB'10, held in the City of Brighton and Hove in the United Kingdom, and organised by KES International. Organised by the KES International organisation, SEB'10 formed a welcome opportunity for researchers in subjects related to sustainability, renewable energy technology, and applications in the built environment to mix with other scientists, industrialists and stakeholders in the field. SEB'10 attracted papers on a range of renewable energy and sustainability related topics and in addition the conference explored two innovative themes:- * The application of intelligent sensing, control, optimisation and modelling techniques to sustainability and * The technology of sustainable buildings. These techniques could ultimately be applied to the intelligent building SEB'10 attracted about 100 submissions from around the world. These were subjected to a two-stage blind peer-review process. With the objective of producing a high quality conference, the best 30% of these were selected for presentation at the conference and publication in this volume of proceedings. The papers in this volume are grouped into the five themes under which they were presented: Building Sustainability, Sustainable Power Generation, Sustainable Energy Policy and Strategy, Energy Monitoring and Management and Solar Energy Technology. These proceedings form an interesting and informative collection of papers, useful as a resource for further research, and a valuable source of information for those interested in the subject.

This exceptional work provides readers with an introduction to the state-of-the-art research on data warehouse design, with many references to more detailed sources. It offers a clear and a concise presentation of the major concepts and results in the subject area. Malinowski and Zim nyi explain conventional data warehouse design in detail, and additionally address two innovative domains recently introduced to extend the capabilities of data warehouse systems: namely, the management of spatial and temporal information.

The papers in this volume integrate results from current research efforts in earthquake engineering with research from the larger risk assessment community. The authors include risk and hazard researchers from the major U.S. hazard and earthquake centers. The volume lays out a road map for future developments in risk modeling and decision support, and positions earthquake engineering research within the family of risk analysis tools and techniques.

Large-scale natural catastrophes are environmental phenomena. Numerous studies in recent years have concluded that the frequency of occurrence of such natural disasters have been incereasing. leading to an enhanced risk of very considerable human and economic losses and the widespread destruction and pollution of habitats, settlements and infrastructure. In 2001 over 650 natural disasters happened around the globe with economic losses exceeding $35 billion. 2004 ended with the South East Asian tsunami on 26th December with its huge toll on life and local economics and this demonstrated that the efffects of such disasters are most keenly felt in poorer or developing regions.

The problem of natural disaster prediction and the implementation of environmental monitoring systems to receive, store and process the information necessary for solutions of specific problems in this area, have been analysed by the three authors of this book, all of whom are internationally respected experts in this field.

This is an introductory textbook on global spectral modeling designed for senior-level undergraduates and possibly for first-year graduate students. This text starts with an introduction to elementary finite-difference methods and moves on towards the gradual description of sophisticated dynamical and physical models in spherical coordinates. Computational aspects of the spectral transform method, the planetary boundary layer physics, the physics of precipitation processes in large-scale models, the radiative transfer including effects of diagnostic clouds and diurnal cycle, the surface energy balance over land and ocean, and the treatment of mountains are some issues that are addressed. The topic of model initialization includes the treatment of normal modes and physical processes. A concluding chapter covers the spectral energetics as a diagnostic tool for model evaluation. This revised second edition of the text also includes three additional chapters. Chapter 11 deals with the formulation of a regional spectral model for mesoscale modeling which uses a double Fourier expansion of data and model equations for its transform. Chapter 12 deals with ensemble modeling. This is a new and important area for numerical weather and climate prediction. Finally, yet another new area that has to do with adaptive observational strategies is included as Chapter 13. It foretells where data deficiencies may reside in model from an exploratory ensemble run of experiments and the spread of such forecasts.

This volume contains 40 selected full-text contributions from the Sixth European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications, geoENV IV, held in Rhodes, Greece, October 25-26, 2006. The objective of the editors was to compile a set of papers from which the reader could perceive how geostatistics is applied within the environmental sciences. A few selected theoretical contributions are also included.

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.

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.

This book is about the legal, economical, and practical assessment and management of risky activities arising from routine, catastrophic environmental and occupational exposures to hazardous agents. It includes a discussion of aspects of US and European Union law concerning risky activities, and then develops the economic analyses that are relevant to implementing choices within a supply and demand framework. The book also discusses exposure-response and time-series models used in assessing air and water pollution, as well as probabilistic cancer models, including toxicological compartmental, pharmaco-kinetic models and epidemiological relative risks and odds ratios-based models. Statistical methods to measure agreement, correlation and discordance are also developed. The methods and criteria of decision-analysis, including several measures of value of information (VOI) conclude the expositions. This book is an excellent text for students studying risk assessment and management.

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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.

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.