The Carpatho-Balkan Geomorphological Commission and the International Association of Geomorphologists (IAG) Carpatho-Balkan-Dinaric Regional Working Group, promote networking between researchers and the exchange of research experience. Following a brief introduction into the geology, climate, hydrology and land cover of the Carpatho-Balkan-Dinaric region, the book provides detailed information on research applying both traditional and innovative techniques and summarizes contemporary knowledge on recent geomorphic processes. It also presents studies of exogenic geomorphic processes from each country. The chapters on Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia examine the geomorphic processes in shaping the topography of each country. This volume also examines key geomorphic processes influencing land use and economic activities as well as contributions discussing processes under climate change.

Recent landslide events demonstrate the need to improve landslide forecasting and early warning capabilities in order to reduce related risks and protect human lives. In this thesis, local and regional investigations were carried out to analyse landslide characteristics in the Swabian Alb region, and to develop prototypic landslide early warning systems.
In the local study area, an extensive hydrological and slope movement monitoring system was installed on a seasonally reactivated landslide body located in Lichtenstein-
Unterhausen. Monitoring data was analysed to assess the influence of rainfall and snow-melt on groundwater conditions, and the initiation of slope movements.
The coupled hydrology-slope stability model CHASM was applied to detect areas most prone to slope failures, and to simulate slope stability using a variety of input data. Subsequently, CHASM was refined and two web-based applications were developed: a technical early warning system to constantly simulate slope stability integrating rainfall measurements, hydrological monitoring data and weather forecasts; and a decision-support system allowing for quick calculation of stability for freely selectable slope profiles. On the regional scale, available landslide inventory data were analysed for their use in evaluation of rainfall thresholds proposed in other studies. Adequate landslide events were selected and their triggering rainfall and snow-melting conditions were compared to intensity-duration and cumulative thresholds. Based on the results, a regional landslide early warning system was developed and implemented as a webbased application.
Both, the local and the regional landslide early warning systems are part of a holistic and integrative early warning chain developed by the ILEWS project, and could easily be transferred to other landslide prone areas.

This highly practical handbook is an exhaustive treatment of eddy covariance measurement that will be of keen interest to scientists who are not necessarily specialists in micrometeorology. The chapters cover measuring fluxes using eddy covariance technique, from the tower installation and system dimensioning to data collection, correction and analysis.
With a state-of-the-art perspective, the authorsexamine the latest techniques and address the most up-to-date methods for data processing and quality control. The chapters provide answers to data treatment problems including data filtering, footprint analysis, data gap filling, uncertainty evaluation, and flux separation, among others.The authors cover the application of measurement techniques in different ecosystems such as forest, crops, grassland, wetland, lakes and rivers, and urban areas, highlighting peculiarities, specific practices and methods to be considered. The book also covers what to do when you have all your data, summarizing the objectives of a database as well as using case studies of the CarboEurope and FLUXNET databases to demonstrate the way they should be maintained and managed. Policies for data use, exchange and publication are also discussed and proposed.
This one compendiumisa valuable source of information on eddy covariance measurement that allows readers to make rational and relevant choices in positioning, dimensioning, installing and maintaining an eddy covariance site; collecting, treating, correcting and analyzing eddy covariance data; and scaling up eddy flux measurements to annual scale and evaluating their uncertainty.
"

Islands represent unique opportunities to examine human interaction with the natural environment. They capture the human imagination as remote, vulnerable and exotic, yet there is comparatively little understanding of their basic geology, geography, or the impact of island colonization by plants, animals and humans. This detailed study of island environments focuses on nine island groups, including Hawaii, New Zealand and the British Isles, exploring their differing geology, geography, climate and soils, as well as the varying effects of human actions. It illustrates the natural and anthropogenic disturbances common to island groups, all of which face an uncertain future clouded by extinctions of endemic flora and fauna, growing populations of invasive species, and burgeoning resident and tourist populations. Examining the natural and human history of each island group from early settlement onwards, the book provides a critique of the concept of sustainable growth and offers realistic guidelines for future island management.

Wildfires, changing glaciers, deforestation, open-pit mining, increasing demands for food and bio-fuel production and the growth of megacities change our landscape. The book comprehensively reviews the current knowledge on how natural and anthropogenic land-use/cover changes affect weather, air quality and climate worldwide and explains how these changes may trigger further land-use/cover changes. It discusses how anthropogenic land-use/cover changes have affected local and regional climate and air quality since the settlement of America and the industrialisation. It addresses the topichow long-range transport of pollutants and dust of devasted areas as well as teleconnections may cause changes far away from the areas where the land-use/cover changes occurred, for which land-use/cover change may become an international issue similar to CO2. It also discusses relations to global change and future societal and scientific challenges related to land-use/cover changes."

The Holocene is unique when compared to earlier geological time in that humans begin to alter and manipulate the natural environment to their own needs. Domestication of crops and animals and the resultant intensification of agriculture lead to profound changes in the impact humans have on the environment. Conversely, as human populations began to increase geologic and climatic factors begin to have a greater impact on civilizations. To understand and reconstruct the complex interplay between humans and the environment over the past ten thousand years requires examination of multiple differing but interconnected aspects of the environment and involves geomorphology, paleoecology, geoarchaeology and paleoclimatology. These Springer Briefs volumes examine the dynamic interplay between humans and the natural environment as reconstructed by the many and varied sub-fields of the Earth Sciences.

The author of the standard early twentieth-century textbook on fossil plants, A. C. Seward (1863 1941) was Professor of Botany at Cambridge, Master of Downing College and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. This account of his first research trip to Greenland is an evocative portrait of the country, its immense and sublime landscape, its people, and life on the Danish scientific station. This little book, written in an engaging conversational tone, conveys Seward's enthusiasm for Greenland. It includes an explanation for non-specialists of some of Seward's findings relating to fossil plants found there, which provide evidence that the country had a much milder climate in previous geological periods. Seward's own photographs are a fascinating record of the traditional life of the Inuit population as it then survived, as well as the rugged scenery of icebergs and glaciers.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Robert Hues (1553 1632) was an English mathematician and geographer who published this work in 1594 to explain the use of the new terrestrial and celestial globes devised by Emery Molyneux in 1592. These were the first English manufactured globes and were popular with both navigators and students. The five parts of this book describe these globes and explain their use in calculating fundamental navigational points, providing valuable insights into their appearance and practical application in early sixteenth-century navigation.

This book describes the algorithms, validation and preliminary analysis of the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) products, a long-term, high-quality dataset that is now freely available worldwide to government organizations and agencies, scientific research institutions, students and members of the general public.

The GLASS products include leaf area index, broadband albedo, broadband emissivity, downward shortwave radiation and photosynthetically active radiation. The first three GLASS products cover 1981 to 2012 with 1km and 5km spatial resolutions and 8-day temporal resolution, and the last two GLASS products span 2008 to 2010 with 3-hour temporal resolution and 5km spatial resolution. These GLASS products are unique. The first three are spatially continuous and cover the longest period of time among all current similar satellite products. The other two products are the highest spatial-resolution global radiation products from satellite observations that are currently available.

These products can be downloaded from Beijing Normal University at http: //glass-product.bnu.edu.cn/and the University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility at http: //www.glcf.umd.edu/

The GLASS productsare the outcome of a key research project entitled Generation & Applications of Global Products of Essential Land Variables, supported by funding from the High-Tech Research and Development Program of China and involving dozens of institutions and nearly one hundred scientists and researchers.Following an introduction, the book contains five chapters corresponding to these five GLASS products: background, algorithm, quality control and validation, preliminary analysis and applications. It discusses the long-term environmental changes detected from the GLASS products and other data sources at both global and local scales and also provides detailed analysis of regional hotspots where environmental changes are mainly associated with climate change, drought, land-atmosphere interactions, and human activities.

The book is based primarily on a set of published journal papers about these five GLASS products and includes updated information. Since these products have now begun to be widely used, this bookis an essential reference document. It is also a very helpful resource to anyone interested in satellite remote sensing and its applications."

Intense uplift of the Tibetan Plateau in Late Cenozoic Era is one of the most important events in geological history of the Earth. The plateau offers an ideal region for studying of lithospheric formation and evolution, probing into the mechanism of crustal movement, and understanding of changes in environments and geo-ecosystems in Asia. Intense uplift ofthe plateau resulted in drastic changes of natural environment and apparent regional differentiation on the plateau proper and neighboring regions. The plateau therefore becomes a sensitive area of climate change in Asian monsoon region, which is closely related to the global change. As a special physical unit, its ecosystems occupy a prominent position in the world. Due to its extremely high elevation and great extent, natural types and characteristics of physical landscapes on the plateau are quite different from those in lowlands at comparable latitudes, and environments are also different from those in high latitudinal zones. Consequently, the Tibetan Plateau has been classified as one of three giant physical regions in China and considered as a unique unit on Earth. Scientific surveys and expeditions to the Tibetan Plateau on large scale began from 1950's. Amongst them, a number of comprehensive scientific expeditions to the Xizang (Tibet) Autonomous Region, Hengduan Mts. areas, Karakorum and Kunlun Mts. regions, as well as the Hoh Xii Mts. areas, have been successively carried out by the Integrated Scientific Expedition to Tibetan Plateau, sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1973.

Africa, the cradle of many old civilizations, is the second largest world continent, and the homeland of nearly one-eighth of the world population. Despite Africa's richness in natural resources, the average income per person, after excluding a few countries, is the lowest all over the world, and the percentage of inhabitants infected with contagious diseases is the highest. Development of Africa to help accommodate the ever-increasing population and secure a reasonable living standard to all inhabitants, though an enormous challenge is extremely necessary. Water is the artery of life, without it all living creatures on earth cannot survive. As such, a thorough knowledge of the meteorological and hydrological processes influencing the yield and quality of the water resources, surface and subsurface, and their distribution and variability in time and space is unavoidable for the overall development of any part of the world. It is highly probable that the said knowledge is at present a top priority to Africa, a continent that has been for so long-and probably still-devastated by the endless ambitions of colonial powers not to forget the corruption and destruction practiced by the internal powers, at least in some countries. The present book "Hydrology and Water Resources of Africa" is written with the aim of bringing together in one volume a fair amount of knowledge any professional involved in hydrology and water resources of Africa needs to know.

This book is the result of ten years of scientific research carried out by the authors on Isla de los Estados. The research includes their doctoral thesis and many published scientific papers related to the island.

The book is divided into two principal parts. The first part covers different social and natural aspects of this remote island and includes chapters on the scientific and historical background, physiography with topographical and hydrographical descriptions, climate and oceanographic circulation, vegetation and geology (including stratigraphy, structural geology and geological history).

The second part comprises a reconstruction of the paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic and paleogeographic history of the island from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present, correlating with other paleoecological records from the southern part of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. This second part also includes a geomorphological chapter with a characterization of the principal erosive glacial landforms on Isla de los Estados constructed by means of morphometric analysis, inventories, maps, paleogeographic and glacial models, and a paleoecological chapter evaluating the palaeoenvironment and palaeoclimatic conditions that prevailed during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene times based on pollen and diatom analysis from three 14C-dated peat bogs and lakes. Finally, the book concludes with a review of the island s archaeology and the relationship between the palaeoenvironmental history and human occupation of this island.

Hotspots are enigmatic surface features that are not easily explained in the framework of plate tectonics. Investigating their origin is the goal of this thesis, using field evidence collected in the Cape Verde Islands, a prominent hotspot archipelago in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The approach taken is to document uplift of the islands relative to sea level and use the uplift features to test various models of hotspot development. Island uplift is thought to arise from the growth of the anomalously shallow seafloor on which the islands rest, known as the bathymetric swell, which is characteristic of hotspots. The work comprises a geological summary and detailed mapping of paleo sea level markers on Cape Verde. Isotopic dating of the markers shows that uplift on the islands over the last 6 Myr is up to 400 m, and that the uplift chronology varies among islands. Two processes act to raise the Cape Verde Islands. The dominant process is one that is local to individual islands. The regional, swell-related component is smaller, and possibly episodic. The observations provide strong constraints on swell development and on hotspot models.

Accretionary prisms in convergent margins are natural laboratories for exploring initial orogenic processes and mountain building episodes. They are also an important component of continental growth both vertically and laterally. Accretionary prisms are seismically highly active and their internal deformation via megathrusting and out-of-sequence faulting are a big concern for earthquake and tsunami damage in many coastal cities around the Pacific Rim. The geometries and structures of modern accretionary prisms have been well imaged seismically and through deep drilling projects of the Ocean Drilling Program (and recently IODP) during the last 15 years. Better understanding of the spatial distribution and temporal progression of accretionary prism deformation, structural and hydrologic evolution of the decollement zone (tectonic interface between the subducting slab and the upper plate), chemical gradients and fluid flow paths within accretionary prisms, contrasting stratigraphic and deformational framework along-strike in accretionary prisms, and the distribution and ecosystems of biological communities in accretionary prism settings is most important in interpreting the evolution of ancient complex sedimentary terrains and orogenic belts in terms of subduction-related processes. This book is a collection of interdisciplinary papers documenting the geological, geophysical, geochemical, and paleontological features of modern accretionay prisms and trenches in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, based on many submersible dive cruises, ODP drilling projects, and geophysical surveys during the last 10 years. It also includes several papers presenting the results of systematic integrated studies of recent to ancient on-land accretionary prisms in comparison to modern analogues. The individual chapters are data and image rich, providing a major resource of information and knowledge from these critical components of convergent margins for researchers, faculty members, and graduate and undergraduate students. As such, the book will be a major and unique contribution in the broad fields of global tectonics, geodynamics, marine geology and geophysics, and structural geology and sedimentology.

The fragile Antarctic environment consists of a closely linked system of the lithosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Changes in this system have influenced global climate, oceanography and sea level for most of Cenozoic time. The geological history of this region therefore provides a special record of important interactions among the various components of the Earth System. Antarctic Marine Geology is the first comprehensive single-authored book to introduce students and researchers to the geological history of the region and the unique processes that occur there. Research literature on the region is widely disseminated, and until now no single reference has existed that provides such a summary. The book is intended as a reference for all scientists working in Antarctica, and will also serve as a textbook for graduate courses in Antarctic marine geology.

Researchers and practitioners explore the effect of evolving global economic and political powers on energy security within the UK and puts forward practical options for moving towards a more energy secure system over both the short and long terms.

In the advent of important crises of both climate change and energy supply (in)security, questions are being asked about changes in energy governance. Caroline Kuzemko explains how and why change takes place and discusses the convoluted UK energy governance system that has emerged between 2000 and the present day. She applies a complex theoretical approach based on new institutional concepts of policy paradigm change, but which also utilises concepts of (de)politicisation and securitization. UK energy governance, like energy policy elsewhere, is moving from one heavily influenced by neoliberal economic ideas to one where state intervention is more commonplace. Moreover, the new governance system is informed not by one but by multiple perspectives on energy and governance geopolitical, climate change and pro-market.

Beth Edmondson and Stuart Levy examine why it is so difficult for the international community to respond to global climate change. In doing so, they analyse and explain some of the strategies that might ultimately provide the foundations for appropriate responses.

From climate change over shale gas to the race for the Arctic, energy makes headlines in international politics almost daily. Thijs Van de Graaf argues that energy is in dire need of global governance. He traces the history of international energy cooperation from the notorious 'Seven Sisters' oil-companies cartel to the recent creation of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). He analyses how international institutions have been created for securing oil rents, coordinating consumer-countries' energy security policies, promoting producer-consumer dialogue, managing regional gas markets, and dealing with energy-related environmental externalities. Drawing on the emerging regime complexity literature, he constructs a novel analytical framework to explain the fragmented architecture of global energy governance, and studies prospects for institutional reform at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the G8/G20.

The Middle East region holds the world's largest oil and natural gas proven reserves. Several Middle Eastern States are major oil producers and consumers. Given price fluctuations and environmental concerns many countries have sought to diversify their energy mix. The Middle East is no exception. Gawdat Bahgat analyzes the geopolitical, economic and strategic forces behind this diversification in the Middle East. He highlights the main advantages and disadvantages of each source of energy.

Academics and practitioners from across Asia and beyond revisit the issues and impact of climate change in Asia. They examine the preconditions for good governance regarding climate change, and the role of state and non-state actors in climate change governance, and explore different political-legal frameworks.

It is an honor and pleasure for me to write the foreword of this book comprising the of Forest Resources for proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on the Improvement Recyclable Forest Products. The symposium was organized by Dr. Toshihiro Ona, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Bioresource and Bioenvironmental Sciences, Kyushu University, Japan, as part of the "Development of Forest Resources with High Performance for Paper Recycling" research project. This was supported by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) team at the Japan Science and Technology Agency Foundation (lST) and by Kyushu University. As a colleague of Dr. Ona, I commend his efforts in organizing the symposium and editing this book. In the forest, there is a multitude of resources, including trees, herbal plants, fruits, fungi, mammals, birds, insects, fishes, reptiles, water, landscapes, and tourist attractions. Nowadays, even the environment is regarded as a kind of forest resource. These resources can provide a diversity of forest products, such as timber for buildings, pulp and paper, charcoal, herbal medicines, wild vegetables, animal protein, edible mushrooms, and nonwoody fibers. From these resources, major forest products are produced using various species of trees. For example, softwood is suitable as building material, while hardwood is suitable for furniture production; pulp and paper are produced from both softwood and hardwood. Therefore, forest locations and forest management methods should vary according to the tree species used for production of different forest products.

Experts from business, academia, governmental agencies and non-profit think tanks to form a transnational and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the combined challenges of environmental sustainability and energy security in the United States and Germany.

How and why do business organisations contribute to climate change governance? The contributors' findings on South Africa, Kenya and Germany demonstrate that business contributions to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change vary significantly.

This volume describes important sites in the Pleistocene deposits of the Thames terrace system laid down by the Thames and its tributaries. It correlates the Thames sequence with deposits found elsewhere in Britain, on the European continent and on the ocean floor.