The over-enrichment of surface water bodies with phosphorus compounds can lead to eutrophication resulting in reduced photosynthetic activity, oxygen depletion, production of toxic compounds and, ultimately, loss of plant and animal species. Due to relatively high removal efficiency, economy and environmentally-friendly operation, enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) in activated sludge wastewater treatment systems is a popular technology to control and prevent eutrophication in surface water bodies. EBPR can be implemented by promoting the enrichment of the system with polyphosphate-accumulating organisms (PAO). However, EBPR process may suffer of instability and unreliability experiencing process upsets, deterioration and even failure. Among other factors, the appearance of glycogen-accumulating organisms (GAO), which compete with PAO, has been hypothesized to be the main cause of deterioration of the EBPR process performance. In this research, the effects of key environmental and operating conditions influencing the PAO-GAO competition were addressed through undertaking different studies at both lab- and full-scale and by applying mathematical modelling. It contributes to get a better understanding about the factors affecting the PAO-GAO competition and, thus, the stability and reliability of the EBPR process in activated sludge systems. The findings obtained in this research may prove useful towards optimization of full-scale EBPR plants.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

A broad and comprehensive exploration of the role of the ecological sciences in sustainability for undergraduates.The urgent quest for more sustainable patterns of development has placed new and difficult demands on both scientists and policy makers as they seek to establish more informed and effective policy processes and management regimes in the the face of pervasive uncertainty. Written by an international group of authors from a range of disciplines - ecology, geography, law, policy analysis and others - the chapters explore issues of scientific legitimacy, public participation, non-governmental organisations, inter-sectoral communication and pragmatic public policy across a wide range of ecosystem management contexts.

Terrestrial Biosphere tries to pose the questions which underlie the many-sided debate of how to respond to and influence change: How should we view nature? What do we do for the best - how should we act - what are we trying to achieve and what should we be guided by?In doing so the book introduces and attempts to analyse not only scientific aspects of the debate but also cultural attitudes and values: the notions of ecosystem stability are now challenged and it is also clear that ecosystems are renewable but not repeatable. It finds that prescriptive 'solutions' based on current constructs may not be adequate. Feeling that analysis should lead to advocacy, the author believes that if we can't improve predictability, we have to increase adaptability which means that ecological and social capacity building should be advocated. This is seen in terms of concepts, institutions, attitudes and values which allow for a plurality of meanings and which can cope with surprise and unforeseen change - and which also facilitates responses to change.

This book deals with a class of basic deformations in Asymmetric Continuum Theory. It describes molecular deformations and transport velocities in fluids, strain deformations in solids as well as the molecular transport, important in fracture processes. In solids, a separate problem relates to the displacements; their recording, e.g., by means of the seismometers, proves only the existence of the displacement derivatives and not a real displacement. However, the molecular displacements and new fracture criterion including the defect distributions and induced strains are defined in the book too. In fluids, the transport velocities and molecular strains describe the motion processes. The vortex motions are defined by means of the rotational transport; this approach leads to more complicated problems, like the turbulence phenomena. The interaction processes, including the electric and magnetic fields, and some thermodynamical problems and quantum theory analogies help to understand the extreme processes

This textbook presents a comprehensive examination of environmental science and ecotoxicology for undergraduate students. The material provides sufficient related background information leading to a competency to clearly understand ecotoxicology concepts and topics.

Proceedings of a symposium at the 1987 INQUA Congress, Ottawa, Aug. 1987. Contributions present the application of quaternary studies to land use planning and development. No index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Twenty-six papers form a summary of research on glacial history, paleoclimatology, biogeography, ecosystem disequilibrium. Focus is on detailed chrono-stratigraphic, glacial geologic, and vertebrate paleontologic problems. No index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Antarctica is no longer a 'pole apart'. From a scientific perspective, the Antarctic ice sheet, ocean and climate systems are intimately linked with the global climate and are now seen to be of international significance for understanding climate change. From an economic perspective, the Antarctic is perceived to have great potential as a source of marine resources although the extent of speculated mineral and hydrocarbon resources is unknown. From a conservation perspective, the continent of Antarctica represents the ideal image of unspoiled wilderness. Antarctic Environments and Resources is an accessible and timely new geography of the Antarctic which examines the differing and sometimes conflicting interests in the great southern continent, the Southern Ocean and the subantarctic islands against a background of the physical and natural systems of the region and their interactions. It charts the development of human involvement in the area, focusing on the exploitation of resources from early sealing to modern fisheries, tourism and science, and it assesses the consequent impacts on the natural environment. The text also reviews the emerging framework for future environmental management developed under the Antarctic Treaty System. This is an ideal text for undergraduates studying glacial geomorphology, environmental management, polar regions and the Antarctic.

Abiotic stress drastically limits agricultural crop productivity worldwide. Climate change threatens the sustainable agriculture with its rapid and unpredictable effects, making it difficult for agriculturists and farmers to respond to the challenges cropping up from environmental stresses.In light of population growth and climate changes, investment in agriculture is the only way to avert wide scale food shortages. This challenge comes at a time when plant sciences are witnessing remarkable progress in understanding the fundamental processes of plant growth and development. Plant researchershave identifiedgenes controlling different aspects of plant growth and development, but many challenges still exist in creating an apt infrastructure, access to bioinformatics and good crop results. "Improvement of Crops in the Era of Climatic Changes, Volume2"focuses on many existing opportunities that can be applied methodically through conventional breeding, without touching upon the latest discoveries such as the power of genomics to applied breeding in plant biology.

Written by a diversefaction of internationally famedscholars, this volume adds new horizons in the field of crop improvement, genetic engineering and abiotic stress tolerance. Comprehensive and lavishly illustrated, "Improvement of Crops in the Era of Climatic Changes, Volume2"is a state-of-the-art guide to recent developmentsvis-a-visvarious aspects of plant responses in molecular and biochemical ways to create strong yields and overall crop improvement."

Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity burst upon the world in 1915 some of the most brilliant minds of our century have sought to decipher the mysteries bequeathed by that theory, a legacy so unthinkable in some respects that even Einstein himself rejected them. Which of these bizarre phenomena, if any, can really exist in our universe?

Black holes, down which anything can fall but from which nothing can return; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to exist and space becomes a kind of foam; gravitational waves, which carry symphonic accounts of collisions of black holes billions of years ago; and time machines, for traveling backward and forward in time.

Kip Thorne, along with fellow theorists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, a cadre of Russians, and earlier scientists such as Oppenheimer, Wheeler and Chandrasekhar, has been in the thick of the quest to secure answers.

n this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work of scientific history and explanation, Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads his readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, coming finally to a uniquely informed answer to the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know the things they think they know?

Viewed from the perspective of environmental management, this study describes the implications and applications of the precautionary principle - a theory of avoiding risk even when its likelihood seems remote. This principle has been employed in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the North Atlantic Convention, yet it is not widely understood. This study examines the history and context of the principle, and its applications to law, governmental policies, business and investment, scientific research and international relations.

This text challenges the belief that cities will eventually disappear as territorial forms of social organization as new information technologies permit the articulation of social processes without regard for distance, arguing that the specific role of cities will become more important, and proposing that a dynamic and creative relationship be built up between the local and the global. In this way, cities will remain the focus of social organization, political management and cultural expression, equipped to deal with the enormous social and environmental problems of urbanization.

The benefits of modern technology often involve health, safety and environmental risks that produce public suspicion of technologies and aversion to certain products and substances. Amplified by the pervasive power of the media, public concern about health and ecological risks can have enormous economic and social impacts, such as the 'stigmatization' experienced in recent years with nuclear power, British beef and genetically modified plants. This volume presents the most current and comprehensive examination of how and why stigma occurs and what the appropriate responses to it should be to inform the public and reduce undesirable impacts. Each form of stigma is thoroughly explored through a range of case studies. Theoretical contributions look at the roles played by government and business, and the crucial impact of the media in forming public attitudes. Stigma is not always misplaced, and the authors discuss the challenges involved in managing risk and reducing the vulnerability of important products, industries and institutions while providing the public with the relevant information they need about risks.

To comply with legal and other standards, businesses and regulators are increasingly required to make decisions based on risk assessments of the potential effects of their activities on the environment. Atmospheric dispersion modelling is a cost-effective method, allowing various scenarios to be explored before expensive investment takes place. This guide offers advice on this environmental management tool. Unlike much of the previous literature, it doesn't focus excessively on the mathematical theory behind the modelling or on modelling for specific regulatory purposes. Instead, it offers an understanding of the background to the methodologies, providing exercises to develop the skills to carry these out and including examples of the use of commercially available models to enable the reader to assess the results of modelling for risk assessment.

Mathematical models have become a crucial way for the Earth scientist to understand and predict how our planet functions and evolves through time and space. The finite element method (FEM) is a remarkably flexible and powerful tool with enormous potential in the Earth Sciences. This pragmatic guide explores how a variety of different Earth science problems can be translated and solved with FEM, assuming only basic programming experience. This book begins with a general introduction to numerical modeling and includes multiple sample Matlab codes to illustrate how FEM is implemented in practice. Textboxes have been included to provide additional detail, such as specialized Matlab usage or advanced topics. Covering all the key aspects, this is essential reading for those looking to master the technique, as well as those simply seeking to increase their basic level of understanding and appreciation of FEM.

This work provides a short "getting started" guide to Fortran 90/95. The main target audience consists of newcomers to the field of numerical computation within Earth system sciences (students, researchers or scientific programmers). Furthermore, readers accustomed to other programming languages may also benefit from this work, by discovering how some programming techniques they are familiar with map to Fortran 95. The main goal is to enable readers to quickly start using Fortran 95 for writing useful programs. It also introduces a gradual discussion of Input/Output facilities relevant for Earth system sciences, from the simplest ones to the more advanced netCDF library (which has become a de facto standard for handling the massive datasets used within Earth system sciences). While related works already treat these disciplines separately (each often providing much more information than needed by the beginning practitioner), the reader finds in this book a shorter guide which links them. Compared to other books, this work provides a much more compact view of the language, while also placing the language-elements in a more applied setting, by providing examples related to numerical computing and more advanced Input/Output facilities for Earth system sciences. Naturally, the coverage of the programming language is relatively shallow, since many details are skipped. However, many of these details can be learned gradually by the practitioner, after getting an overview and some practice with the language through this book.

Developed for use as a reference work in graduate and undergraduate courses as well as for researchers, policymakers, and interested laypersons, the book is a unique collection of authoritative yet accessible journal articles about risk. Drawn from a variety of disciplines including the physical and social sciences, engineering, and law, the articles deal with a wide range of public policy, regulatory, management, energy, and environmental issues. The selections are accompanied by introductory notes, questions for thought and discussion, and suggestions for further reading.

The second edition of this introductory GIS textbook is thoroughly rewritten and updated to respond to the demand for critical engagement with technologies that address relevant issues across several disciplines preparing students for higher-level work in geotechnologies. Chapters are arranged to (1) build competence in fundamental skills, (2) explore applications of higher-level managerial and analytical functions that are typically called upon in public, nonprofit, and private sector milieu, and (3) propose and detail a template for organizing, executing, and completing a GIS project successfully. This interests all users from beginners to experienced professionals.

Features:

Uses the latest version of ArcGIS Pro (3.0) to present a fully rewritten and updated text with diverse perspectives.

Includes many real-world examples with urban planning, environmental, and social justice foci.

Presents new discussions, examples, and lab materials on open-source GIS projects.

Includes lab activities and data available for download from Support Materials.

Junior and senior level undergraduate students taking courses in remote sensing and GIS applications, studying in the fields of Geography, Environmental Sciences, Computer Science, Urban Studies, Public Health, and Social Disciplines, as well as researchers and academics in the same fields, will all benefit from the information provided in the updated version of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Making Sense of Geotechnology 2. Georeferencing 3. Getting the World into Your GIS 4. Geospatial Analysis: Introduction 5.Thematic Mapping 6. Data Models 7.Web GIS 8. Open-Source GIS 9. Introduction to Remote Sensing and GIS 10. Introduction to Health GIS Applications 11. GIS and Digital Humanities 12. Organizational GIS

Spatio-Temporal Databases explores recent trends in flexible querying and reasoning about time- and space-related information in databases. It shows how flexible querying enhances standard querying expressiveness in many different ways, with the aim of facilitating extraction of relevant data and information. Flexible spatial and temporal reasoning denotes qualitative reasoning about dynamic changes in the spatial domain, characterized by imprecision or uncertainty (or both). Many of the contributions focus on GIS, while some others are more general, or focus on related application fields, presenting theoretical viewpoints and techniques that are inspiring or can be adapted for GIS. The first part bundles the contributions on advances at the theoretical level, also discussing examples and opening further perspectives. The second part presents contributions on well-developed applications. The authors explain how to handle imprecision and uncertainty, demonstrating how advanced techniques can help to solve diverse problems related to GIS.

People have been visiting and living in the Victorian Grampians, also known as Gariwerd, for thousands of generations. They have both witnessed and caused vast environmental transformations in and around the ranges. Gariwerd: A History of the Grampians explores the geological and ecological significance of the mountains and combines research from across disciplines to tell the story of how humans and the environment have interacted, and how the ways people have thought about the environments of the ranges have changed through time.In this new account, historian Benjamin Wilkie examines how Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people and their ancestors lived in and around the mountains, how they managed the land and natural resources, and what kinds of archaeological evidence they have left behind over the past 20 000 years. He explores the history of European colonisation in the area from the middle of the 19th century and considers the effects of this on both the first people of Gariwerd and the environments of the ranges and their surrounding plains in western Victoria. The book covers the rise of science, industry and tourism in the mountains, and traces the eventual declaration of the Grampians National Park in 1984. Finally, it examines more recent debates about the past, present and future of the park, including over its significant Indigenous history and heritage.

This book bridges the gap between theory and practice, showing how a detailed definition of the shear-wave velocity (VS) profile can be efficiently obtained using limited field equipment and following simple acquisition procedures. It demonstrates how surface waves (used to define the VS profile) and vibration data (used to describe the dynamic behaviour of a building) can be recorded using the same equipment, and also highlights common problems, ambiguities and pitfalls that can occur when adopting popular methodologies, which are often based on a series of simplistic assumptions. Today, most national and international building codes take into account a series of parameters aimed at defining the local seismic hazard. Sites are characterised based on the local VS profile, and the dynamic behaviour of existing buildings is defined through the analysis of their eigenmodes. The book includes a series of case studies to help readers gain a deeper understanding of seismic and vibration data and the meaning (pros and cons) of a series of techniques often referred to as MASW, ESAC, SPAC, ReMi, HVSR, MAAM and HS. It also provides access to some of the datasets so that readers can gain a deeper and more concrete understanding of both the theoretical and practical aspects.

The new revised fifth edition of Natural Hazards remains the go-to introductory-level survey intended for university and college courses that are concerned with earth processes that have direct, and often sudden and violent, impacts on human society. The text integrates principles of geology, hydrology, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, soil science, ecology, and solar system astronomy. The textbook explains the earth processes that drive hazardous events in an understandable way, illustrate how these processes interact with our civilization, and describe how we can better adjust to their effects. Written by leading scholars in the area, the new edition of this book takes advantage of the greatly expanding amount of information regarding natural hazards, disasters, and catastrophes. The text is designed for learning with each chapter broken into small consumable chunks of content for students. Each chapter opens with a list of learning objectives and ends with revision as well as with high-level critical thinking questions. Concepts in Review section provides an innovative end of chapter section that breaks down the chapter content by section: reviewing the learning objectives, summary points, important visuals, and key terms. New case studies of hazardous events have been integrated into the text, and students are invited to actively apply their understanding of the five fundamental concepts that serve as a conceptual framework for the text. Figures, illustrations, and photos have been updated throughout. The book is designed for a course in natural hazards for non-science majors, and a primary goal of the text is to assist instructors in guiding students who may have little background in science to understand physical earth processes as natural hazards and their consequences to society.

Here, the authors present modern mathematical methods to solve problems of differential-operator inclusions and evolution variation inequalities which may occur in fields such as geophysics, aerohydrodynamics, or fluid dynamics. For the first time, they describe the detailed generalization of various approaches to the analysis of fundamentally nonlinear models and provide a toolbox of mathematical equations. These new mathematical methods can be applied to a broad spectrum of problems. Examples of these are phase changes, diffusion of electromagnetic, acoustic, vibro-, hydro- and seismoacoustic waves, or quantum mechanical effects. This is the first of two volumes dealing with the subject.

The aim of this book is to introduce scientific ballooning to the many people who are interested in the use of balloons for scientific applications. The book offers a basic understanding of the engineering details and the scientific research giving rise to balloon activities going on today. Above all, the book will serve as a guidebook for young scientists and researchers seeking to become involved in space science and technology by participating in balloon projects. The book deals with three types of balloons: large stratospheric balloons used for scientific purposes, rubber balloons used for aerological observations, and planetary balloons to be used in the atmospheres of other planets. The book provides many figures and photographs, and offers a systematic description of balloon technologies and related matters from historical background to current research topics. The contents include a theoretical discussion of ballon shape design, analysis and synthesis of flight dynamics, actual launching procedure, flight operations, and typical applications of ballooning in various scientific fields. Detailed meteorological descriptions, especially of the Earth's stratosphere and the atmosphere of other planets, are provided for investigating actual flight behavior.