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The importance of the Arctic in many fields of human activity
strongly increased over the past decades. The academic scientific
research demonstrates a 3-fold increase in the number of journal
articles dealing with "Arctic": from 1,400 in 2000 to 4,200 in
2018. This increase is not fortuitous but certainly stems from
double importance of Arctic regions for humanity. The first
importance is the role that the Arctic plays in the on-going
environmental changes, mostly linked to climate warming and
environmental pollution. Here, the first key issues are the Arctic
Ocean, ice melt, permafrost thaw, greenhouse gases emission, and
organic carbon mobilization from soils to rivers. From the other
hand, highly fragile Arctic ecosystems and biota are strongly
affected by environmental pollution, be it organic compounds or
toxic metals and radionuclides. The rising concern of humanity to
the key role of the Arctic in climate regulation on the planetary
scale and the extreme fragility of its ecosystem, biota and native
population to on-going environmental change can certainly explain
an explosive interest of scientific researchers to the Arctic in
connection with aclimate change'. The second big issue of the
Arctic is its eminent role in problems of natural resources. The
Artic shelf contains vast amount of hydrocarbons (gas and oil),
whereas the terrestrial polar regions, now liberating from ice, may
turn out to be highly important sites of future ore industry. The
importance of possibly ice-free Arctic Ocean as future maritime
shipping routes will further enhance the accessibility of natural
resources in this region. Taken together, this can be the main
driving factors of almost exponential increase in the interest to
natural resources in the Arctic over past few years. The present
book addresses a wide variety of environmental, social and economic
issues of the Arctic, in response to rising interest to this region
in academic science, sociology and business. The 14 chapters
represent state-of-the art reviews written by the experts on
problems of native communities, climate change, political issues,
implementation of large-scale projects, natural resources and
conservation, environmental monitoring and assessment of pollution
issues.
Riparian ecosystems occur in semi-terrestrial areas adjacent to
water bodies and are influenced by freshwater. Riparian wetlands
are defined as land areas adjacent to perennial, intermittent, and
ephemeral streams, lakes or rivers. As a result, these areas have
high water tables and periodic flooding. They support a wide range
of wetland vegetation including emergent macrophytes, grasses and
trees. Riparian zones and wetlands are among the most vulnerable
natural ecosystems to both climate change and human impact, and
they are likely to represent important hot spots for climate change
adaptation. The riparian ecosystems, located at the interface
between water and land, are extremely dynamic environments in terms
of structure, function, diversity and strength of abiotic-biotic
feedbacks. Nowadays, the riparian wetlands are strongly affected by
both global climate change and human activity. For these reasons,
there is a steady and even abrupt increase of scientific
publications linked to riparian problems. A web search of
"riparian" as a topic yielded more than 16,000 papers published
between 1950 and 2015, with 7,000 of them have been published over
the past five years and 10,500 produced over the preceding sixty
years. This rise of scientific interest is, however, strongly
biased geographically. A search of "riparian" in the titles of
4,773 scientific publications (1950-2015) yields high geographical
bias with papers studying all aspects of riparian zones in the
United States, Brazil, China, Canada, Africa and Europe,
respectively, and only one in Russia. This book is intended to
partially fill this gap by presenting nine chapters describing the
studies of riparian and flood plain zones of Russia. The fourteen
chapters of the book, written by the experts in the field of
landscape geography, biogeochemistry, GIS techniques and biology
cover two of the most important riparian zones of the world: the
Amazon varzea and the Ob/Irtysh floodplains. A multidisciplinary
approach across wide geographical scales and various techniques
presented in this book will be interesting for a large community of
scholars, students, and researchers from academic and private
organisations.
This book is in response to the growing demand from academics and
the general public for state-of-the-art research in permafrost
science and, in particular, information about its impacts on
infrastructure and ecosystems. It brings together research from
diverse but highly complementary scientific disciplines to
illuminate the main physical, chemical and biological processes
occurring in permafrost systems and identifies the possible
mechanisms controlling fluxes of energy and matter at various
scales. Taken together, the 8 chapters of this book provide a
comprehensive, up-to-date description and analysis of the basic
geomorphological, physical, hydrological, chemical and biological
aspects of permafrost-affected ecosystems, their interaction with
other components of the landscape and their impact on human life
and infrastructure.
Dissolved Organic Matter (DOM) is a major factor controlling global
biogeochemical cycles of carbon, macro- and micronutrients and
toxic metals. It plays a pivotal role both in mobilisation
(chemical weathering), transport (organic complexes and colloids),
biological uptake and deposition (microbial and photo-degradation)
of a number of essential macro- (C, N, P) and micro- (Fe, Zn, Mn,
Ni, Cu Co) nutrients. The interest of scientists to DOM is rapidly
increasing. Between 1950 and 2017, more than 30,000 scientific
papers on DOM were published (Web of Science (R) All Database
Search); however, more than half of them were produced over the
past nine years and over the last two and a half years, more than
5,400 papers were published. Such attention to DOM is clearly
motivated by a combination of global climate change issues and the
main role of DOM in CO2 exchange between the atmosphere and the
surface waters. Despite such a large range of scientific problems
concerning DOM properties, origins, and applications, there is a
very strong geographical bias in terms of the amount of research
devoted to various geographical regions of the world. The majority
of information concerns temperate zones and boreal regions of
Scandinavia and Northern America, with very little information
available on Siberia and Russia. Thus, among the less than 30,000
scientific articles devoted to various aspects of DOM since 1950,
only 150-200 of them are devoted to DOM in Russia or Siberia. This
book is essentially oriented towards filling these gaps of our
knowledge. Among thirteen chapters, eleven of them are devoted to
various aspects of DOM in Russia and Siberia. Another important and
still poorly characterised aspect of natural DOM is its colloidal
status: four chapters of this book deal with the colloidal
speciation of DOM in rivers and lakes. Given the breadth of
physico-chemical, geochemical, biological, and geographical aspects
of DOM covered in this book, it will be useful for a large audience
of environmental scientists, limnologists, physico-chemists, soil
and landscape scientists and biogeochemists.
There is currently a growing interest in mosses inspired by: 1)
Their use as atmospheric air quality biomonitors, 2) their
importance as ecological status markers of global changes in
hostile environments, and 3) their use in various bioengineering
and biotechnological applications. Moreover, additional attention
to mosses stems from their importance as the dominant terrestrial
plants in high latitudes -- most notably arctic and subarctic
regions -- that are subjected to climate warming. This book aims to
characterize poorly studied aspects of the chemical composition of
inventoried mosses across not only the subarctic, but also the
Antarctic regions. This book focuses strongly on mosses inhabiting
western and northern Siberia and European Russia, with nine total
chapters devoted to these regions. Out of more than 25,000 studies
dealing with mosses (from 1950 to 2018), only 300 were devoted to
mosses from Siberia (WoS, all databases). This book also focuses on
the use of mosses as bioindicators; physio-chemical principles and
case studies of applications for tracing industrial pollution are
discussed. Additionally, the process of moss biomineralization in a
petrifying spring is also considered. Taken together, the twelve
chapters presented provide a comprehensive overview of mosses in
ecology, biodiversity, biogeochemistry, and mineralogy.
Over the past few decades, tremendous progress in analytical
facilities allowed for the decreasing detection limits of trace
element (TE) analysis in a large number of organic and inorganic
matrices. This was especially true for freshwater aquatic systems,
where direct measurements of more than forty trace elements have
become possible provided that necessary precautions against
pollution are made and required sample preparation protocol is
maintained. Therefore, analyses of both liquid (water) and solid
(biomass, sediments, soils, and aerosol particles) compartments of
the landscape continuum allowed for a new perspective on
biogeochemical factors of trace elements in a large panel of
terrestrial environments. However, among all Earth biomes, the
Arctic and subarctic regions are certainly less studied from a
trace element biogeochemical view point.This book adresses a
variety of geochemical and biogeochemical issues of trace element
behavior in soils, waters, and plants across the world, from
Eastern Europe to Siberian subarctic and Arctic islands. It
presents a synthesis of state-of-the-art studiesusing precise
analytical techniqueson trace element concentrations,
fractionation, and migration in the main biogeochemical reservoirs
of the Northern Hemisphere. This book combines chapters on trace
elements in soils, plants, soil waters, lakes, rivers and their
estuarine zones, and atmopsheric aerosols. As such, it provides a
comprehensive view of current TE biogeochemistry and can serve as a
reference compilation of available information for judging future
changes in trace element biogeochemistry for terrestrial
environments influenced by climate warming or increasing
anthropogenic pollution.
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