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Books > Earth & environment > Geography
An annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of the world, and include famous names as well as those less well known: explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses their influence and spread of academic ideas. Each study includes a select bibliography and brief chronology. The work includes a general index and a cumulative index of geographers listed in volumes published to date.
David Livingstone (1813-1873) was one of the supreme
representatives of the British Empire. Yet his career suffered many
set-backs during his own life-time, and since his death his
reputation has swung between extremes of adulation and dismissal.
Were his epic journeys through Africa purely to save souls and
counter the slave trade? Or were they the first steps towards
bringing the peoples of Central Africa under the control of
Europeans who would destroy their values and exploit them
economically? Beyond these questions, there lies the puzzle of
Livingstone's own character and its contradictions.
Bird migration is a charismatic topic that has fascinated naturalists for centuries. This book, the only concise and accessible synthesis of the area, describes not only the migrations, the incredible stamina and navigational skills of the birds, the effects on their distributions, survival, and evolution, but also the scientific skills and studies that underlie the information that has been gleaned about migration.
This book discusses in detail the science and morphology of powerful hurricane detection systems. It broadly addresses new approaches to monitoring hazards using freely available images from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Sentinel-1 SAR satellite and benchmarks a new interdisciplinary field at the interface between oceanography, meteorology and remote sensing. Following the launch of the first European Space Agency (ESA) operational synthetic aperture radar satellite, Sentinel-1, in 2014, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data has been freely available on the Internet hub in real-time. This advance allows weather forecasters to view hurricanes in fine detail for the first time. As a result, the number of synthetic aperture radar research scientists working in this field is set to grow exponentially in the next decade; the book is a valuable resource for this large and budding audience.
This book is specifically designed to serve the community of postgraduates and researchers in the fields of epidemiology, health GIS, medical geography, and health management. It starts with the basic concepts and role of remote sensing, GIS in Kala-azar diseases. The book gives an exhaustive coverage of Satellite data, GPS, GIS, spatial and attribute data modeling, and geospatial analysis of Kala-azar diseases. It also presents the modern trends of remote sensing and GIS in health risk assessment with an illustrated discussion on its numerous applications.
The book investigates the relationship between ecosystem services (ES) and spatial planning, and explores potential means of integrating the two concepts to support the decision-making process. In addition, it presents case studies demonstrating the outcomes, limitations, opportunities and further new developments in ES assessment/mapping for planning support. Then it describes the "Restart from Ecosystem Services" (RES) methodology, which is aimed at integrating ES into the planning process using an ecological balance, and at promoting new planning parameters for the transformation areas. RES ensures the inclusion of ES in planning processes using the incremental measures of limiting, mitigating and compensating soil sealing and land take process promoting operational strategies in applying it. The implementation of RES is associated with strategic environmental assessment and provides valuable support in the definition of strategies across the entire planning process, especially for the evaluation of alternative scenarios.
Using the lens of environmental history, William D. Bryan provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-Civil War South by framing the New South as a struggle over environmental stewardship. For more than six decades, scholars have caricatured southerners as so desperate for economic growth that they rapaciously consumed the region's abundant natural resources. Yet business leaders and public officials did not see profit and environmental quality as mutually exclusive goals, and they promoted methods of conserving resources that they thought would ensure long-term economic growth. Southerners called this idea "permanence." But permanence was a contested concept, and these business people clashed with other stakeholders as they struggled to find new ways of using valuable resources. The Price of Permanence shows how these struggles indelibly shaped the modern South. Bryan writes the region into the national conservation movement for the first time and shows that business leaders played a key role shaping the ideals of American conservationists. This book also dismantles one of the most persistent caricatures of southerners: that they had little interest in environmental quality. Conservation provided white elites with a tool for social control, and this is the first work to show how struggles over resource policy fueled Jim Crow. The ideology of "permanence" protected some resources but did not prevent degradation of the environment overall, and The Price of Permanence ultimately uses lessons from the New South to reflect on sustainability today.
This book offers a theoretical intervention into the normative ideals of public space that are deeply rooted in Western urbanism. It disrupts the binaries of presence/absence, inclusion/exclusion by presenting a series of case studies that vividly convey the complexity and vicissitude of grassroots spatial practices. It engages powerfully with the question of what constitutes the "urban public" in our everyday cities. Moreover, it provides a fresh perspective on the proliferating scholarship on Chinese urbanism in the reform era by seriously considering the ways in which ordinary urban inhabitants respond to and negotiate the impacts of rapid social change and the reshuffling of the systems of values and ideologies. The urban public, therefore, is analyzed as an important field in which identities and cultural differences are formed and performed. This book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in theories of urban public space in general or urban transformation of post-reform China in particular.
This volume is a comprehensive guide to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for the spatial analysis of supply and demand for energy in the global and local scale. It gathers the latest research and techniques in GIS for spatial and temporal analysis of energy systems, mapping of energy from fossil fuels, optimization of renewable energy sources, optimized deployment of existing power sources, and assessment of environmental impact of all of the above. Author Lubos Matejicek covers GIS for assessment a wide variety of energy sources, including fossil fuels, hydropower, wind power, solar energy, biomass energy, and nuclear power as well as the use of batteries and accumulators. The author also utilizes case studies to illustrate advanced techniques such as multicriteria analysis, environmental modeling for prediction of energy consumption, and the use of mobile computing and multimedia tools.
This book offers a dynamic perspective on regional entrepreneurship, knowledge, innovation and economic growth, with a particular focus on the role that history and culture play. The authors provide comprehensive empirical analyses offering unique insights into the spatial patterns of long-term differences of regional self-employment, new business formation, cultures of entrepreneurship, innovation activities, and development. Policy implications from the analyses and a discussion of important avenues for future research complete this unique book combining history, culture, and entrepreneurship. This is a superb book with an original, historical take on entrepreneurship and regional development. It is a landmark study on Germany showing that regional levels of entrepreneurship are persistent and resilient, despite many disruptive shocks. Ron Boschma, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Stavanger University, Norway This book presents the distilled wisdom of two leading authorities on the link between entrepreneurship and economic prosperity at a regional level. Although its prime empirical focus is on Germany there are clear lessons for scholars and policy-makers in all high-income countries. David J Storey, University of Sussex, UK
Recent controversies over the political and environmental management of the Antarctic ensure that it will remain an important global issue. Drawing on recent developments in critical geopolitics and cultural geography, Klaus Dodds examines the six major nations of the Southern hemisphere currently involved in the Antarctic. Each of these nations - Argentina, Australia, Chile, India, New Zealand and South Africa - claims a ‘natural’ interest in the future of the polar continent. Geopolitics in Antarctica presents a detailed exploration of the rhetoric and politics behind each of these claims, arguing that they are often based on uncritical understandings of territory, geographical proximity and national identity. The book concludes with an examination of how geographical understandings of the Antarctic continue to influence the management of the frozen continent and Southern Ocean.
Human Beings is an entertaining glance at intersecting lives. This wild set of true, short stories knits a view of humanity through the eyes of an observer who believes that human beings have small purposes -and a big purpose-in their ordinary, day-to-day living.
This book presents an alternative theory of globalization that derives not from the dominant perspective of the West, from which this process emerged, but from the critical vantage point of the Third World, which has borne the heaviest burdens of globalization. It offers a critical and uniquely first-hand perspective that is lacking not only from the apologists of Western hegemony, but from most scholars writing against this hegemony from within the globalizing world. Renowned throughout Latin America and parts of Europe, the author, Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, has long been for the most part inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Only one of his books, The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries, published in 1975, has been translated into English; nevertheless, the works of Santos's most important phase, from the 1980s until his death in 2001, have remained unavailable to English readers. With the translation of Toward an Other Globalization, one of the last works published in Santos's lifetime, this situation has finally been rectified. In this book, Santos argues that we must consider globalization in three different senses: globalization as a fable (the world as globalizing agents make us believe), as perversity (the world as it is presently, in the throes of globalization), and as possibility (the world as it could be). What emerges from the analysis of these three senses is an alternative theory of globalization rooted in the perspective of the so-called Global South. Santos concludes his text with a message that is optimistic, but in no way nai ve. What he offers instead is a revolutionary optimism and, indeed, an other globalization.
This book focuses on the generalization of map features, providing descriptions and classifying groups of map objects into six categories: point clusters, groups of contours, road networks, river networks, continuous areal features and discrete areal features. Discussing the methods and algorithms in map generalization in equal measure, it also describes the approaches for describing map features. The book is a valuable reference for graduates and researchers who are interested in cartography and geographic information science/systems, especially those in automated map generalization and spatial databases construction.
An annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of the world, and include famous names as well as those less well known: explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses their influence and spread of academic ideas. Each study includes a select bibliography and brief chronology. The work includes a general index and a cumulative index of geographers listed in volumes published to date.
Exam Board: Pearson Edexcel Level: AS/A Level Subject: Geography Our study resources are the smart choice for those studying Pearson Edexcel AS/A Level Geography. This book will help students to: Organise their study with the one-topic-per-page format Speed up revision with summary notes in short, memorable chunks Track revision progress with at-a-glance check boxes Check their understanding and exam skills with worked examples Develop exam techniques with exam-style practice questions and full answers.
Active researchers in the areas of geography and psychology have contributed to this book. Both fields are capable of increasing our scientific knowledge of how human behavior is interfaced with the molar physical environment. Such knowledge is essential for the solution of many of today's most urgent environmental problems. Failure to constrain use of scarce resources, pollution due to human activities, creation of technological hazards and deteriorating urban quality due to vandalism and crime are all well known examples. The influence of psychology in geographical research has long been appreciated but it is only recently that psychologists have recognized they have something to learn from geography. In identifying the importance of two-way interdisciplinary communication, a psychologist and a geographer have been invited to each write a chapter in this book on a designated topic so that close comparisons can be drawn as to how the two disciplines approach the same difficulties. Since the disciplines are to some extent complementary, it is hoped that this close collaboration will have synergistic effects on the attempts of both to find solutions to environmental problems through an increased understanding of the many behavior-environment interfaces.
This book presents the main drivers of benthic structure and processes in estuaries from the 8,000 km-Brazilian coast, assesses the influence of natural and human disturbance, and discusses their ecological importance and management needs. Estuaries are unique coastal ecosystems often with low biodiversity that sustain and provide essential ecological services to mankind. These ecosystems include a variety of habitats with their own sediment and fauna dynamics, all of them globally altered or threatened by human activities. Mangroves, saltmarshes, tidal flats and other confined estuarine systems are under increasing stress by overfishing and other human activities leading to habitat and species loss. Combined changes in estuarine hydromorphology and in climate pose severe threats to estuarine ecosystems at a global scale.
This book presents a summary of terrestrial microbial processes, which are a key factor in supporting healthy life on our planet. The authors explain how microorganisms maintain the soil ecosystem through recycling carbon and nitrogen and then provide insights into how soil microbiology processes integrate into ecosystem science, helping to achieve successful bioremediation as well as safe and effective operation of landfills, and enabling the design of composting processes that reduce the amount of waste that is placed in landfills. The book also explores the effect of human land use, including restoration on soil microbial communities and the response of wetland microbial communities to anthropogenic pollutants. Lastly it discusses the role of fungi in causing damaging, and often lethal, infectious diseases in plants and animals.
Interdisciplinary Teaching about the Earth and Environment for a Sustainable Future presents the outcomes of the InTeGrate project, a community effort funded by the National Science Foundation to improve Earth literacy and build a workforce prepared to tackle environmental and resource issues. The InTeGrate community is built around the shared goal of supporting interdisciplinary learning about Earth across the undergraduate curriculum, focusing on the grand challenges facing society and the important role that the geosciences play in addressing these grand challenges. The chapters in this book explicitly illustrate the intimate relationship between geoscience and sustainability that is often opaque to students. The authors of these chapters are faculty members, administrators, program directors, and researchers from institutions across the country who have collectively envisioned, implemented, and evaluated effective change in their classrooms, programs, institutions, and beyond. This book provides guidance to anyone interested in implementing change-on scales ranging from a single course to an entire program-by infusing sustainability across the curriculum, broadening access to Earth and environmental sciences, and assessing the impacts of those changes.
Emerging Spatial Big Data (SBD) has transformative potential in solving many grand societal challenges such as water resource management, food security, disaster response, and transportation. However, significant computational challenges exist in analyzing SBD due to the unique spatial characteristics including spatial autocorrelation, anisotropy, heterogeneity, multiple scales and resolutions which is illustrated in this book. This book also discusses current techniques for, spatial big data science with a particular focus on classification techniques for earth observation imagery big data. Specifically, the authors introduce several recent spatial classification techniques, such as spatial decision trees and spatial ensemble learning. Several potential future research directions are also discussed. This book targets an interdisciplinary audience including computer scientists, practitioners and researchers working in the field of data mining, big data, as well as domain scientists working in earth science (e.g., hydrology, disaster), public safety and public health. Advanced level students in computer science will also find this book useful as a reference.
This thesis reports on sparsity-based multipath exploitation methods for through-the-wall radar imaging. Multipath creates ambiguities in the measurements provoking unwanted ghost targets in the image. This book describes sparse reconstruction methods that are not only suppressing the ghost targets, but using multipath to one's advantage. With adopting the compressive sensing principle, fewer measurements are required for image reconstruction as compared to conventional techniques. The book describes the development of a comprehensive signal model and some associated reconstruction methods that can deal with many relevant scenarios, such as clutter from building structures, secondary reflections from interior walls, as well as stationary and moving targets, in urban radar imaging. The described methods are evaluated here using simulated as well as measured data from semi-controlled laboratory experiments.
What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts. |
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