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Advances in Molecular Breeding Toward Drought and Salt Tolerant Crops
Advances in Molecular Breeding toward Drought and Salt Tolerant Crops seeks to integrate the most recent findings about key biological determinants of plant stress tolerance with modern crop improvement strategies. This volume is unique because is provides exceptionally wide coverage of current knowledge and expertise being applied in drought and salt tolerance research, spanning the scientific hierarchy from physiology, biochemistry, development, and genetics, to the newest technologies being used to manipulate drought and salinity associated traits for germplasm improvement. This book will be an invaluable reference for educators and researchers in agronomy and horticulture, crop breeding, molecular genetics, and biotechnology.
Advances in Integrated Soil Fertility Research in sub-Saharan Africa : Challenges and Opportunities
Food insecurity is a central concern and a fundamental challenge for human welfare and economic growth in Africa. Low agricultural production, results in low incomes, poor nutrition, vulnerability to risks and lack of empowerment. Land degradation and soil fertility depletion are considered the major threats to food security and natural resource conservation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Investments in technology, policy and institutional reforms are needed to increase agricultural productivity to ensure food security and sustained national economies. Past research has generated numerous soil fertility management technologies which if adopted could propel the African continent out of the poverty trap. However, these technologies have had little, if any, impact due to low adoption by the smallholder farmers.
Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants : Toward the Improvement of Global Environment and Food
Stresses in plants caused by salt, drought, temperature, oxygen, and toxic compounds are the principal reason for reduction in crop yield. For example, high salinity in soils accounts for large decline in the yield of a wide variety of crops world over; ~1000 million ha of land is affected by soil salinity. Increased sunlight leads to the generation of reactive oxygen species, which damage the plant cells. The threat of global environment change makes it increasingly demanding to generate crop plants that could withstand such harsh conditions. Much progress has been made in the identification and characterization of the mechanisms that allow plants to tolerate abiotic stresses.
A Sea Change: The Exclusive Economic Zone and Governance Institutions for Living Marine Resources
A Sea Change in a Changing Sea The oceans, seas and coastal areas encompass over 70% of the earth’s surface. They are a critical driver of the earth’s hydrologic cycle and climate system, important for c- merce, transport, and tourism, a source of economically important living marine resources, minerals such as hydrocarbons, as well as new pharmaceutical compounds. The marine environment provides essential habitats for thousands of marine living 1 2 resources, which in turn contribute significantly to global food security, employment, 3 and trade. Overall, the sea’s contribution to human welfare, in terms of market and non-market resources and environmental services, has been estimated at US$21 trillion/year (Costanza, 2000). However, despite the importance of the ocean realm to humans, there is a growing sense that human impacts are destabilizing this system. Some experts believe that current fishing levels are approaching or exceeding the total 4 productivity of the ocean ecosystem (National Research Council, 1999).
Artificial intelligence techniques in hydrology and water resources management
The sustainable management of water cycles is crucial in the context of climate change and global warming. It involves managing global, regional, and local water cycles, as well as urban, agricultural, and industrial water cycles, to conserve water resources and their relationships with energy, food, microclimates, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and anthropogenic activities. Hydrological modeling is indispensable for achieving this goal, as it is essential for water resources management and the mitigation of natural disasters. In recent decades, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in hydrology and water resources management has led to notable advances. In the face of hydro-geo-meteorological uncertainty, AI approaches have proven to be powerful tools for accurately modeling complex, nonlinear hydrological processes and effectively utilizing various digital and imaging data sources, such as ground gauges, remote sensing tools, and in situ Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Management of Regulatory Influences on Corporate Strategy and Structure
In many industries, e.g. telecommunications, transportation, energy, chemicals, food and beverages, firm performance is heavily influenced by regulation. Despite this fact, strategic management research has traditionally focused on market strategies and related issues. Questions of how to manage regulatory involvement have been left to separate research streams on corporate political activity and a broader understanding of the complex inter-dependencies and mutual influences between corporate and external actors remains lacking.
Company Tax Reform in the European Union : Guidance from the United States and Canada on Implementing Formulary Apportionment in the EU
This book is important reading for both tax policymakers and business leaders. It breaks the mold of conventional thinking by demonstrating that formulary apportionment is a practical way to solve the income-allocation problems confronting the European Union. Equally important, the book gives the advocates of arm’s-length allocation methods some challenging food for thought.
Climate Smart Agriculture : Building Resilience to Climate Change
"The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. This book offers tools and insights for a range of stakeholders to help meet these challenges in the many forms they are manifested."
Characteristic based planning with mySAP SCM™ : Scenarios, processes, and functions
Characteristics are used in SAP as attributes, e.g. to specify the configuration of products or the properties of batches. In many industries – engineering, automotive, mill, pharmaceutical and foods to name the most typical – supply chain planning has to consider these characteristics. APO offers many different functionalities for planning with characteristics, where each of the functionalities has some prerequisites and incompatibilities. This book offers help and advice for the basic design of the implementation by explaining the processes and scenarios (process chains) for planning with characteristics, the functionalities for planning with characteristics in APO including their prerequisites and incompatibilities and the entities, dependencies and system configuration determinants for planning with characteristics in R/3 and APO. This book is based on the releases R/3 4.7 and mySAP SCM 4.1.
Bioeconomy : Shaping the transition to a sustainable, biobased economy
This book defines the new field of "Bioeconomy" as the sustainable and innovative use of biomass and biological knowledge to provide food, feed, industrial products, bioenergy and ecological services. The chapters highlight the importance of bioeconomy-related concepts in public, scientific, and political discourse. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors outline the dimensions of the bioeconomy as a means of achieving sustainability.
Approaching consumer culture : Global flows and local contexts
This collection analyzes the impact of Western consumer culture on local cultures and consumption in Southeast Europe and East Asia. Cultural, historical, economic and sociopolitical contexts are examined regarding buying behaviors, usage and customization practices and consumer activism, specifically in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania as cultures continue to evolve in the post-socialist era, and in China and Japan as a continuation of movements toward modernity and progress. Surprising and thought-provoking contrasts stand out as consumers balance the global with the local in terms of clothing, technology, luxury items, and food.
Agricultural biodiversity and biotechnology in economic development
The topics addressed in this book are of vital importance to the survival of humankind. Agricultural biodiversity, encompassing genetic diversity as well as human knowledge, is the base upon which agricultural production has been built, and protecting this resource is critical to ensuring the capacity of current and future generations to adapt to unforeseen challenges. Agricultural biodiversity underpins the productivity of all agricultural systems and is particularly important for poor and food-insecure farmers, who maintain highly diverse production systems in response to the marginal and risky production conditions they operate under. Understanding the importance of agricultural biodiversity in the livelihoods of the food insecure and enhancing its performance through the use of a variety of tools, including biotechnology, is a critically important issue in the world today
Advanced Planning in Fresh Food Industries: Integrating Shelf Life into Production Planning
Production planning in fresh food industries is a challenging task. Although modern Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems could provide significant support, APS implementation numbers in these industries remain low. Therefore, based on an in-depth analysis of three sample fresh food industries (dairy, fresh and processed meat), the author evaluates what APS systems should offer in order to effectively support production planning and how the leading systems currently handle the most distinguishing characteristic of fresh food industries, the short product shelf life. Starting from the identified weaknesses, customized software solutions for each of the sample industries are proposed that allow to optimize the production of fresh foods with respect to shelf life.
Martens and Fishers (Martes) in human-altered environments : An international perspective
Examines the conditions where humans and martens are compatible and incompatible, and promotes land use practices that allow Martes to be representatively distributed and viable. All Martes have been documented to use forested habitats and 6 species (excluding the stone marten) are generally considered to require complex mid- to late-successional forests throughout much of their geographic ranges. All species in the genus require complex horizontal and vertical structure to provide escape cover protection from predators, habitat for their prey, access to food resources, and protection from the elements. Martens and the fisher have high metabolic rates, have large spatial requirements, have high surface area to volume ratios for animals that often inhabit high latitudes, and often require among the largest home range areas per unit body weight of any group of mammals. Resulting from these unique life history characteristics, this genus is particularly sensitive to human influences on their habitats, including habitat loss, stand-scale simplification of forest structure via some forms of logging, and landscape-scale effects of habitat fragmentation. Given their strong associations with structural complexity in forests, martens and the fisher are often considered as useful barometers of forest health and have been used as ecological indicators, flagship, and umbrella species in different parts of the world. Thus, efforts to successfully conserve and manage martens and fishers are associated with the ecological fates of other forest dependent species and can greatly influence ecosystem integrity within forests that are increasingly shared among wildlife and humans.We have made great strides in our fundamental understanding of how animals with these unique life history traits perceive and utilize habitats, respond to habitat change, and how their populations function and perform under different forms of human management and mismanagement.
Macro-Engineering : A Challenge for the Future
Macro-engineering involves the large-scale modification and manipulation of natural systems for the benefit of mankind. The primary goals of some Earth-based macroprojects described in this book are power production, land reclamation, food production, climate change, environment, water, transport and coastal protection. Other Earth or space projects considered here have a more futuristic ring, but our present-day technical skill makes their realization possible. Earth-based macroprojects usually combine different aspects and aims. They have a major impact on the ecology of a region and the inhabitants' means of living (like tourism, fishing, shipping). Its effects may be felt worldwide, like the rise in global sea level after the damming and evaporation of large ocean gulfs for power production, or the change in climate following the regional reduction of solar insolation.
Lead-Free Electronic Solders : A Special Issue of the Journal of Materials Science : Materials in Electronics
In the last few decades the effect of lead contamination on human health has received significant attention. Based on such concerns, elimination of lead from ceramic glaze, paint, plumbing etc. has been legislated and implemented. However, until recently, solders used in electronics, based on suitability and knowledge-base developed over a long period of time, remained lead-based. Successive rapid advances in microelectronic devices in recent decades make them obsolete within a very short period after their introduction resulting in significant quantities of electronic wastes in landfills. Leaching of toxic lead from such electronic wastes can result in contamination of the human food chain causing serious health hazards. As a consequence, several European and Pacific Rim countries have passed legislations warranting elimination of lead from electronic solders by fast approaching deadlines. Global economic pressures brought on by such legislations have resulted in a flurry of research activities to find suitable lead-free substitutes for the traditional leaded electronic solders.
Land Use and Soil Resources
Land-use change is one of the main drivers of many environmental change processes. It influences the basic resources of land use, including the soil. Its impact on soil often occurs so creepingly that land managers hardly contemplate initiating ameliorative or counterbalance measures. Poor land management has degraded vast amounts of land, reduced our ability to produce enough food, and is a major threat to rural livelihoods in many developing countries. To date, there has been no single unifying volume that addresses the multifaceted impacts of land use on soils. This book has responded to this challenge by bringing together renowned academics and policy experts to analyze the patterns, driving factors and proximate causes, and the socioeconomic impacts of soil degradation. Policy measures to prevent irreversible degradation and rehabilitate degraded soils are also identified.
Kinetics of Water-Rock Interaction
Systems at the surface of the Earth are continually responding to energy inputs derived from solar radiation or from the radiogenic heat in the interior. These energy inputs drive plate movements and erosion, exposing metastable mineral phases at the Earth’s surface. In addition, these energy fluxes are harvested and transformed by living organisms. As long as these processes persist, chemical disequilibrium at the Earth’s surface will be perpetuated. Chemical disequilibrium is also driven by human activities related to production of food, extraction of water and energy resources, and burial of wastes. To understand how the surface of the Earth will change over time, we must understand the rates at which reactions occur and the chemical feedbacks that relate these reactions across extreme temporal and spatial scales. This book addresses fundamental and applied questions concerning the rates of water-rock interactions driven by tectonic, climatic, and anthropogenic forcings.
Communicating Science : A Practical Guide
Each of the main parts is subdivided into two sections, Guidelines and Genres, with entries arranged in alphabetical order. The guidelines are devoted to entries such as acronyms, active or passive voice, body language, figures and captions, introduction, irony, and taking the floor. Within genres, all possible media of communicating science are treated, e.g. the after-dinner speech, conference presentation, keynote lecture, magazine article, research proposal, and teleconference.
Climate-Smart Food
This book asks just how climate-smart our food really is. It follows an average day's worth of food and drink to see where it comes from, how far it travels, and the carbon price we all pay for it. From our breakfast tea and toast, through breaktime chocolate bar, to take-away supper, Dave Reay explores the weather extremes the world’s farmers are already dealing with, and what new threats climate change will bring. Readers will encounter heat waves and hurricanes, wildfires and deadly toxins, as well as some truly climate-smart solutions. In every case there are responses that could cut emissions while boosting resilience and livelihoods. Ultimately we are all in this together, our decisions on what food we buy and how we consume it send life-changing ripples right through the global web that is our food supply.
