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Climate prediction and agriculture : Advances and challenges
Improved adaptation of food production, particularly in areas where climate variability is large, holds the key to improving food security for human populations. Increasing climate knowledge and improved prediction capabilities facilitate the development of relevant climate information and prediction products for applications in agriculture to reduce the negative impacts due to climate variations and to enhance planning activities based on the developing capacity of climate science. This book, based on an International Workshop held in Geneva in 2005, reviews the advances made so far in seasonal climate predictions and their applications for management and decision-making in agriculture and identifies the challenges to be addressed in the next 5 to 10 years to further enhance operational applications of climate predictions in agriculture, especially in the developing countries.
Climate and Land Degradation
In many parts of the world, climatic variations are recognized as one of the major factors contributing to land degradation impacting on agricultural systems performance and management. To accurately assess sustainable land management practices, the climate resources and the risk of climate-related or induced natural disasters in a region must be known. Only when climate resources are paired with management or development practices can the land degradation potential be assessed and appropriate mitigation technologies be developed. This book is based on an International Workshop held in Arusha, Tanzania and should be of interest to all organizations and agencies interested in sustainable land management to arrest land degradation.
Boundary Integral Equations
This book is devoted to the basic mathematical properties of solutions to boundary integral equations and presents a systematic approach to the variational methods for the boundary integral equations arising in elasticity, fluid mechanics, and acoustic scattering theory. It may also serve as the mathematical foundation of the boundary element methods. The latter have recently become extremely popular and efficient computational tools in applications. The authors are well known for their fundamental work on boundary integral equations and related topics. This book is a major scholarly contribution to the modern theory of boundary integral equations and should be accessible and useful to a large community of mathematical analysts, applied mathematicians, engineers and scientists.
Basic Coastal Engineering
Basic Coastal Engineering, 3rd Edition offers the basics on monochromatic and spectral surface wave mechanics, coastal water level variations, coastal structures and coastal sedimentary processes. It also provides the necessary background from which the reader can pursue a more advanced study of the various theoretical and applied aspects of coastal hydrodynamics and design.
Assessment and remediation of contaminated sediments
Contaminated sediments pose some of the most difficult site remediation issues. Contaminated sediments typically reside in spatially variable and dynamic systems subject to seasonal flow variations and episodic storm events. The volume of sediments that must be managed at particular sites often exceeds one million cubic meters, dwarfing many contaminated soil sites. These sediments are also associated with equally daunting volumes of water and efforts to remove the contamination typically entrains even more water. The environmental security of both NATO and partner countries is at risk due to the pervasive nature of sediment contamination of rivers, lakes and harbors. A NATO Advanced Research Workshop was convened in Bratislava in May 2005 to discuss current approaches to managing contaminated sediments and to identify research necessary to overcome outstanding problems.
Arctic Alpine ecosystems and people in a changing environment
This book addresses the significant environmental changes experienced by high latitude and high altitude ecosystems at the beginning of the 21st c- tury. Increased temperatures and precipitation, reduction in sea ice and glacier ice, the increased levels of UV-radiation and the long-range tra- ported contaminants in arctic and alpine regions are stress factors that challenge terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The large natural variation in the physical parameters of these extreme environments is a key factor in structuring the biodiversity and biotic productivity, and the effect of the new stress factors can be critical for the population structures and the - teraction between species. These changes may also have socio-economic effects if the changes affect the bio-production, which form the basis for the marine and terrestrial food chains. The book is uniquely multidisciplinary and provides examples of va- ous aspects of contemporary environmental change in arctic and alpine - gions. The 21 chapters of the book are organised under the fields of •Climate change and ecosystem response, •Long range transport of poll- ants and ecological impacts, and •UV radiation and biological effects, each also including aspects of the •Socio-economic effects of environmental change. The introductory chapter presents and explains the internal c- nection and integration of all chapters.
Applied Stochastic Control of Jump Diffusions
The main purpose of the book is to give a rigorous, yet mostly nontechnical, introduction to the most important and useful solution methods of various types of stochastic control problems for jump diffusionsThe types of control problems covered include classical stochastic control, optimal stopping, impulse control and singular control. Both the dynamic programming method and the maximum principle method are discussed, as well as the relation between them. Corresponding verification theorems involving the Hamilton-Jacobi Bellman equation and/or (quasi-)variational inequalities are formulated. There are also chapters on the viscosity solution formulation and numerical methods.The text emphasises applications, mostly to finance. All the main results are illustrated by examples and exercises appear at the end of each chapter with complete solutions. This will help the reader understand the theory and see how to apply it.The book assumes some basic knowledge of stochastic analysis, measure theory and partial differential equations.
An Introduction to Meshfree Methods and Their Programming
This book aims to present meshfree methods in a friendly and straightforward manner, so that beginners can very easily understand, comprehend, program, implement, apply and extend these methods. It provides first the fundamentals of numerical analysis that are particularly important to meshfree methods. Typical meshfree methods, such as EFG, RPIM, MLPG, LRPIM, MWS and collocation methods are then introduced systematically detailing the formulation, numerical implementation and programming. Many well-tested computer source codes developed by the authors are attached with useful descriptions. The application of the codes can be readily performed using the examples with input and output files given in table form. These codes consist of most of the basic meshfree techniques, and can be easily extended to other variations of more complex procedures of meshfree methods. Readers can easily practice with the codes provided to effective learn and comprehend the basics of meshfree methods.
Algorithms for Fuzzy Clustering : Methods in c-Means Clustering with Applications
The main subject of this book is the fuzzy c-means proposed by Dunn and Bezdek and their variations including recent studies. We emphasize in this book is a family of algorithms using entropy or entropy-regularized methods which are less known, but we consider the entropy-based method to be another useful method of fuzzy c-means.
Advances in Probabilistic Graphical Models
This carefully edited book brings together in one volume some of the most important topics of current research in probabilistic graphical modelling, learning from data and probabilistic inference. This includes topics such as the characterisation of conditional independence, the sensitivity of the underlying probability distribution of a Bayesian network to variation in its parameters, the learning of graphical models with latent variables and extensions to the influence diagram formalism. In addition, attention is given to important application fields of probabilistic graphical models, such as the control of vehicles, bioinformatics and medicine.
Advances in Meteoroid and Meteor Science
This volume is a compilation of articles that summarize the most recent results in meteor, meteoroid and related fields presented at the Meteoroids 2007 conference held at the impressive CosmoCaixa Science Museum in Barcelona, Spain. The conference took place between the 11th and the 15th of June and was organized by the Institute of Space Sciences (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) and the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC). Researchers in meteor science and supporting fields representing more than 20 countries participated at this international conference.
Adaptive Backstepping Control of Uncertain Systems : Nonsmooth Nonlinearities, Interactions or Time-Variations
This book employs the powerful and popular adaptive backstepping control technology to design controllers for dynamic uncertain systems with non-smooth nonlinearities.
A Posteriori Error Analysis Via Duality Theory : With Applications in Modeling and Numerical Approximations
This volume provides a posteriori error analysis for mathematical idealizations in modeling boundary value problems, especially those arising in mechanical applications, and for numerical approximations of numerous nonlinear variational problems. The author avoids giving the results in the most general, abstract form so that it is easier for the reader to understand more clearly the essential ideas involved. Many examples are included to show the usefulness of the derived error estimates.
A Concise Course on Stochastic Partial Differential Equations
Concentrate on (nonlinear) stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE) of evolutionary type. All kinds of dynamics with stochastic influence in nature or man-made complex systems can be modelled by such equations.
40 Puzzles and Problems in Probability and Mathematical Statistics
"40 Puzzles and Problems in Probability and Mathematical Statistics" is intended to teach the reader to think probabilistically by solving challenging, non-standard probability problems. The motivation for this clearly written collection lies in the belief that challenging problems help to develop, and to sharpen, our probabilistic intuition much better than plain-style deductions from abstract concepts. The selected problems fall into two broad categories. Problems related to probability theory come first, followed by problems related to the application of probability to the field of mathematical statistics. All problems seek to convey a non-standard aspect or an approach which is not immediately obvious.
