Advances in Agronomy, Volume 170, the latest release in this leading reference on agronomy, contains a variety of updates and highlights new advances in the field. Each chapter is written by an international board of authors.

Lean thinking involves more than just eliminating waste; through its five guiding principles-value, value chain, continuous flow, pull production, and perfection-its successful applications are commonly found in the manufacturing sector. Although its application and benefits to companies is no longer contested, it is rare to find works that consolidate applications of lean thinking in sectors that are unconventional, such as healthcare and government. Cases on Lean Thinking Applications in Unconventional Systems allows readers to broaden their view on lean thinking applications and visualize insights for research. It presents case studies and applications of lean thinking within several different industries. Covering topics such as emergency care units, standardized work, and national humanization policy, this case book is an essential resource for engineers, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals, IT managers, government officials, students and faculty of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Environmental Systems Science: Theory and Practical Applications looks at pollution and environmental quality from a systems perspective. Credible human and ecological risk estimation and prediction methods are described, including life cycle assessment, feasibility studies, pollution control decision tools, and approaches to determine adverse outcome pathways, fate and transport, sampling and analysis, and cost-effectiveness. The book brings translational science to environmental quality, applying groundbreaking methodologies like informatics, data mining, and applications of secondary data systems. Multiple human and ecological variables are introduced and integrated to support calculations that aid environmental and public health decision making. The book bridges the perspectives of scientists, engineers, and other professionals working in numerous environmental and public health fields addressing problems like toxic substances, deforestation, climate change, and loss of biological diversity, recommending sustainable solutions to these and other seemingly intractable environmental problems. The causal agents discussed include physical, chemical, and biological agents, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus), and other emerging contaminants.

Assisted Phytoremediaion covers a wide range of uses of plants for remediation of environmental pollutants. It includes coverage of such techniques as root engineering, transgenic plants, increasing the biomass, use of genetic engineering and genome editing technology for rapid phytoremediation of pollutants. In order to improve the efficiency of plant remediation, genetic engineering plays a vital role in the overexpression of genes or gene clusters, which are responsible for degradation and uptake of pollutants. The book presents state-of-the-art techniques of assisted phytoremediation to better manage soil and water pollution in large amounts. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and engineers in environmental science and bioengineering, with case studies and state-of-the-art research from eminent global scientists. This book serves as an excellent basis from which scientific knowledge can grow and widen in the field of environmental remediation.

Plants provide the food, shelter, medicines, and biomass that underlie sustainable life. One of the earliest and often overlooked uses of plants is the production of smoke, dating to the time of early hominid species. Plant-derived smoke has had an enormous socio-economic impact throughout human history, being burned for medicinal and recreational purposes, magico-religious ceremonies, pest control, food preservation, and flavoring, perfumes, and incense. In ten illustrated chapters, this global compendium documents and describes approximately 2,000 global uses for over 1,400 plant species. The Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke is accessibly written and provides a wealth of information not only on human uses, but also on conservation issues and the role of smoke, fire, and heat in promoting seed germination in biodiversity hot spots. Divided into nine main categories of use, the compendium lists plant-derived smoke's the medicinal, historical, ceremonial, ritual and recreational uses. Plant use in the production of incense and to preserve and flavor foods and beverages is also included. Each entry includes full binomial names and family, an identification of the person who named the plant, as well as numerous references to and other scholarly texts. Of particular interest will be plants such as Tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum), Boswellia spp (frankincense), and Datura stramonium (smoked as a treatment for asthma all over the world), all of which are described in great detail. In addition, this is one of the first ethnobotanical books to include a section on plant conservation. It addresses issues of over-harvest and invasiveness, the two primary conservation concerns with human-exploited species.

Water containing significant amounts of inorganic and organic contaminants can have serious environmental consequences and serious health implications when ingested. Contamination of Water: Health Risk Assessment and Treatment Strategies takes an interconnected look at the various pollutants, the source of contamination, the effects of contamination on aquatic ecosystems and human health, and what the potential mitigation strategies are. This book is organized into three sections. The first section examines the sources of potential contamination. This includes considering the current scenario of heavy metal and pesticide contamination in water as well as the regions impacted due to industrialization, mining, or urbanization. The second section goes on to discuss water contamination and health risks caused by toxic elements, radiological contaminants, microplastics and nanoparticles, and pharmaceutical and personal care products. This book concludes with a section exploring efficient low-cost treatment technologies and remediation strategies that remove toxic pollutants from water. Contamination of Water incorporates both theoretical and practical information that will be useful for researchers, professors, graduate students, and professionals working on water contamination, environmental and health impacts, and the management and treatment of water resources.

The evolution of deep learning models, combined with with advances in the Internet of Things and sensor technology, has gained more importance for weather forecasting, plant disease detection, underground water detection, soil quality, crop condition monitoring, and many other issues in the field of agriculture. agriculture. Deep Learning for Sustainable Agriculture discusses topics such as the impactful role of deep learning during the analysis of sustainable agriculture data and how deep learning can help farmers make better decisions. It also considers the latest deep learning techniques for effective agriculture data management, as well as the standards established by international organizations in related fields. The book provides advanced students and professionals in agricultural science and engineering, geography, and geospatial technology science with an in-depth explanation of the relationship between agricultural inference and the decision-support amenities offered by an advanced mathematical evolutionary algorithm.

Advanced Organic Waste Management: Sustainable Practices and Approaches provides an integrated holistic approach to the challenges associated with organic waste management, particularly related to sustainability, lifecycle assessment, emerging regulations, and novel approaches for resource and energy recovery. In addition to traditional techniques, such as anaerobic digestion, composting, innovative and emerging techniques of waste recycling like hydrothermal carbonization and vermicomposting are included. The book combines the fundamentals and practices of sustainable organic waste management with successful case studies from developed and developing countries, highlighting practical applications and challenges. Sections cover global organic waste generation, encompassing sources and types, composition and characteristics, focus on technical aspects related to various resource recovery techniques like composting and vermicomposting, cover various waste-to-energy technologies, illustrate various environmental management tools for organic waste, present innovative organic waste management practices and strategies complemented by detailed case studies, introduce the circular bioeconomy approach, and more.

Containing papers from the 3rd International Conference on Energy Production and Management: The Quest for Sustainable Energy, this book discusses the future creation and use of energy resources. It also examines the issue of converting new sustainable sources of energy into useful forms, while finding efficient methods of storage and distribution. An important objective of the book is discussing ways in which more efficient use can be made of conventional as well as new energy sources. This relates to savings in energy consumption, reduction of energy losses, as well as the implementation of smart devices and the design of intelligent distribution networks. This volume provides a comparison of conventional energy sources, particularly hydrocarbons, with a number of other ways of producing energy, emphasising new technological developments, based on renewable resources such as solar, hydro, wind and geothermal. In many cases the challenges lie as much with production of such renewable energy at an acceptable cost, including damage to the environment, as with integration of those resources into the existing infrastructure. The changes required to progress from an economy based mainly on hydrocarbons to one taking advantage of sustainable energy resources are massive and require considerable scientific research as well as the development of advanced engineering systems. Such progress demands close collaboration between different disciplines in order to arrive at optimum solutions.

Nature-Based Solutions and Water Security: An Action Agenda for the 21st Century presents an action agenda for natural infrastructure on topics of standards and principles, technical evaluation and design tools, capacity building and innovative finance. Chapters introduce the topic and concepts of natural infrastructure, or nature-based solutions (NBS) and water security, with important background on the urgency of the global water crisis and the role that NBS can, and should play, in addressing this crisis. Sections also present the community of practice's collective thinking on a prioritized action agenda to guide more rapid progress in mainstreaming NBS. With contributions from global authors, including key individuals and organizations active in developing NBS solutions, users will also find important conclusions and recommendations, thus presenting a collaboratively developed, consensus roadmap to scaling NBS.

Emerging Contaminants in Soil and Groundwater Systems: Occurrence, Impact, Fate and Transport addresses the current need for comprehensive and detailed information on emerging contaminants in the environment. Due to increasing industrial expansion and evolving technologies, novel contaminants are being found in the environment with little information on their analysis, fate and transport. This book covers pharmaceuticals and personal care products, perfluorinated compounds, engineered nanoparticles and microplastics, providing the information environmental scientists require to study their occurrence and interactions, including case studies for each contaminant. This book is a valuable read for postgraduate students, academics, researchers, engineers and other professionals in the fields of Environmental Science, Soil Science, and Hydrology who need the most up-to-date information and analytical methods for analyzing newly emerging contaminants in soil and groundwater.

Carbon Mineralization in Coastal Wetlands: From Litter Decomposition to Greenhouse Gas Dynamics fills the current knowledge gap in carbon mineralization, providing a balanced view of the carbon dynamics of coastal wetlands. This book provides a holistic treatment of carbon mineralization, from the contributions of litter/root decomposition pathways to carbon mineralization and the processes and sources of greenhouse gas production. This book compares carbon mineralization in coastal wetlands and highlights differences in carbon dynamics. As studies on blue carbon have strongly emphasized the storage potential of coastal wetlands, this book serves as an ideal resource on the topics discussed.

The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an astonishing range of mysterious structures - stone circles, beehive dwellings, holy wells and 'temples' from the Celtic era. Over a twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis. The book is a walk through space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.

Natural Resources Conservation and Advances for Sustainability addresses the latest challenges associated with the management and conservation of natural resources. It presents interdisciplinary approaches to promote advances in solving these challenges. By examining what has already been done and analyzing it in the context of what still needs to be done, particularly in the context of latest technologies and sustainability, the book helps to identify ideal methods for natural resource management and conservation. Each chapter begins with a graphical abstract and presents complicated or detailed content in the form of figures or tables. In addition, the book compares the latest techniques with conventional techniques and troubleshoots conventional methods with modifications, making it a practical resource for researchers in environmental science and natural resource management.

Perspectives from worldwide experts on how major cities across the globe are responding to the major environmental threats of our time, including global climate change Over half of the world's population now lives in cities, and this share is expected to increase in the coming decades. With growing urbanization, cities and their residents face substantial environmental challenges such as higher temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and increased flooding. In response to these pressing challenges, some cities have begun to develop local environmental regulations that supplement national and environmental laws. In so doing, cities have stepped into a role that has been historically dominated by higher levels of government. Global Sustainable Cities takes stock of the policies that have been implemented by cities around the world in recent years in several key areas: water, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate adaptation. It examines the advantages-and potential drawbacks-of allowing cities to assume a significant role in environmental regulation, given the legal and political constraints in which cities operate. The contributors present a series of case studies of the actions that seven leading cities-Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Berlin, Delhi, London, New York, and Shanghai-are taking to improve their environments and adapt to climate change. The first volume of its kind, Global Sustainable Cities is a critical comparative assessment of the actions that major cities in the global North and South are taking to advance sustainability.

Sustainability Metrics and Indicators of Environmental Impact: Industrial and Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment covers trending topics on the environmental impact of systems of production, putting emphasis on lifecycle assessment (LCA). This methodology is one of the most important tools of analysis, as mathematical models are applied that will quantify the systematic inputs and outputs of the processes in order to evaluate the sustainability of industrial processes and products. In this sense, LCA is mainly a tool to support environmental decision-making that analyzes the environmental impacts of products and technologies from a lifecycle perspective. The emergence of ever-larger global issues, such as the energy dilemma, the changing climate and the scarcity of natural resources, such as water, has boosted the search for tools capable of ensuring the reliability of the results published by the industries, and has become an important tool in order to achieve sustainability and environmental preservation. Thus, lifecycle assessment (LCA), including carbon footprint valuation is necessary to ensure better internal management.

Microbiome Stimulants for Crops: Mechanisms and Applications provides the latest developments in the real-world development and application of these crop management alternatives in a cost-effective, yield protective way. Sections address questions of research, development and application, with insights into recent legislative efforts in Europe and the United States. The book includes valuable information regarding mechanisms and the practical information needed to support the growing microbial inoculant and biostimulant industry, thus helping focus scientific research in new directions.

Ecological Significance of Riparian Ecosystems: Challenges and Management Strategies examines the current issues related to river ecosystems, their environmental importance, pollution issues and potential management strategies. The book is divided into 4 key themes: Basics of river ecosystem, Natural phenomenon of river ecosystem, Human-induced problems of river ecosystem, and Management measures for the river ecosystem. Through these four themes, the contributors present both practical and theoretical aspects of river ecosystem in changing climate. An emphasis has been made on the recent research of climate change and its impact on the river ecosystem. River ecosystems have tremendous potential to store CO2, however, with changing climatic and anthropogenic activities, these habitats are under threat, and river ecosystems are losing the very vital service of storing carbon. Unlike well documented terrestrial biodiversity, the biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems is still unrecognized to some extent.

To achieve desired territorial sustainability, it is necessary to fully understand all three spheres of sustainable development from different perspectives. The territories, ecosystems, and environments involved in Mediterranean landscapes environments are not an exception. In this regard, specific fields within this main subject should be studied in more detail such as management and conservation strategies, methods for environmental planning, environmental rights and legislation, provided ecosystems services, natural-based solutions, among many other areas Management and Conservation of Mediterranean Environments is a powerful scientific contribution to the issue of territorial sustainability and dynamics, challenges, and opportunities ongoing in Mediterranean landscapes. Chapters cover research in the fields of territorial governance and management, ecosystems, economic growth, sustainability, environmental pollution, and more. This book is a valuable reference tool for academicians, researchers, technicians, decision makers, policymakers, students, and any readers interested in sustainable development and the management of Mediterranean environments.