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Assessing Recent Soil Erosion Rates through the Use of Beryllium-7 (Be-7)
This book is the first comprehensive guideline for the beryllium-7 (Be-7) technique that can be applied to evaluate short-term patterns and budgets of soil redistribution in agricultural landscapes. While covering the fundamental and basic concepts of the approach, this book distinguishes itself from other publications by offering step-by-step instructions on how to use this isotopic technique effectively. It covers experimental design considerations and clear instruction is given on data processing. As accurate laboratory measurement is crucial to ensure successful use of Be-7 to investigate soil erosion, a full chapter is devoted to its specific determination by gamma spectrometry.
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.
Climate change : Environment and history of the Near East
When the ?rst edition of this book was published in 2004, the following year 2005 has happened to have been the warmest year since 1880, when the ?rst reliable worldwide instrumental records came into existance. Claiming no li- age between the publication of our book and the temperature record, yet this record demonstrates the trend of increase in the global surface temperatures during thepast20years,reinforcedbyevidenceofriseofatmosphere’sand oceans’ temperatures, and increased melting of ice and snow in the arctic and antarctic regions as well as on mountain tops. All these observations are par- leled by the increase in the quantity of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, causing most probably, the global greenhouse effect. In order to try and predict, what might be the impact of this effect on the on the natural and human environments of the Near East, (Figs. 1–1d) the authors adopted the saying that the past is the key for the future. The practical conclusion of this principle says that the acquiring knowledge of the impact of past climate changes on the nature and human societies, may allow conclusions with regard to future possible impact of climate changes. By correlating proxy data of all types, paleo-sea and lake levels, paleo-hydrology, pollen pro?les, environmental isotopes as well as archaeological and historical documents, the authors tried to collect as much as possible of this knowledge.
Changing Forests : Collective Action, Common Property, and Coffee in Honduras
It merges political ecology, collective-action theories, and institutional analysis to study how the people and forests have changed through socioeconomic and political transitions. It studies the complex, often contradictory relationships between the people and their natural resources to understand why forest cover endures."Changing Forests" therefore encompasses three broad phases: (1) the premodern period, which considers historic perturbations in western Honduras from the period of colonialism into the middle of the twentieth century; (2) the period of state-led logging and intervention in La Campa, which caused major degradation in forest cover; and (3) the recent period in which export coffee production transformed property rights, and people’s perceptions of the forest gained new conservationist and economic dimensions. Each phase entails perspectives and experiences that influenced human use of forests, and shaped subsequent transformations.
Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction : Turbulent Ocean Boundary Layer Exchange Processes
At a time when the polar regions are undergoing rapid and unprecedented change, understanding exchanges of momentum, heat and salt at the ice-ocean interface is critical for realistically predicting the future state of sea ice. By offering a measurement platform largely unaffected by surface waves, drifting sea ice provides a unique laboratory for studying aspects of geophysical boundary layer flows that are extremely difficult to measure elsewhere. This book draws on both extensive observations and theoretical principles to develop a concise description of the impact of stress, rotation, and buoyancy on the turbulence scales that control exchanges between the atmosphere and underlying ocean when sea ice is present. Several interesting and unique observational data sets are used to illustrate different aspects of ice-ocean interaction ranging from the impact of salt on melting in the Greenland Sea marginal ice zone, to how nonlinearities in the equation of state for seawater affect mixing in the Weddell Sea.
Advances in Land Remote Sensing : System, Modeling, Inversion and Application
It systematically summarizes the past achievements and identifies the frontier issues as the research agenda for the near future. It covers all aspects of land remote sensing, from sensor systems, physical modeling, inversion algorithms, to various applications. The papers on remote sensing system evaluate the capabilities of different sensor systems for estimating key land surface variables and how they can best be improved and integrated effectively in the future.
