7 Books found
Springer-Verlag GmbH Books
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A Biomass Future for the North American Great Plains
The Great Plains of North America is a major global breadbasket but its agriculture is stressed by drought, heat spells, damaging winds, soil erosion and declining ground water resources. The great inter-annual variability in crop production and declining rural populations weaken an economy already highly dependent upon government support. The region’s ecological fragility and economic weakness is attributed by many to removal of its original ...
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Lost Sex
Sex is the queen of problems in evolutionary biology. Generations of researchers have investigated one of the last remaining evolutionary paradoxes: why sex exists at all. Given that sexual reproduction is costly from an evolutionary point of view, one could wonder why not all animals and plants reproduce asexually. Dozens of contemporary hypotheses attempt to explain the prevalence of sex and its advantages and predict the early extinction of ...
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The Aral Sea Encyclopedia
The situation of the Aral Sea is known as one of the worst man-made environmental crises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many have seen the satellite photos evidencing the startling shrinkage and deterioration of the sea, as it was a few decades ago and how it appears today. Whereas the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water in 1960, it has now shrunk to a small fraction of that within three increasingly saline ...
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Agriculture as a Mimic of Natural Ecosystems
This book critically examines the idea that the sustainability of agriculture could be improved by mimicking the structure and processes occurring in natural ecosystems. Researchers from around the world present comparative studies of multi-species farming systems, natural ecosystems and conventional agriculture. Case studies from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America examine the implications of increasing the ...
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Environment in the 21st Century and New Development Patterns
Economic growth after World War II was made possible through dramatic increases in the use of material resources and energy. It is apparent that current development patterns followed by industrialized countries are causing serious environmental problems and that they are neither ecologically nor socially sustainable. In recent years, many Asian developing countries, which have suffered from poverty for decades, are experiencing high rates ...
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Nitric Oxide in Plants
This book - the first published on this topic in plants - presents the reader with an overview of recent research on nitric oxide (NO) in plants, which, in view of its empirical interest and its growth regulatory potential, is in the forefront of scientific endeavor in plant science. Subject matter is divided into two parts: Part 1 deals with NO and peroxynitrite biochemistry and regulative mechanisms as presently known in the Plant ...
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Sustainability of Irrigated Agriculture
Irrigated agriculture and the use of water resources in agriculture face the challenges of sustainable development. Research has advanced our knowledge of water use by crops, soil-water-solutes interactions, and the engineering and managerial tools needed to mobilize, convey, distribute, control and apply water for agricultural production. However, the achievements booked in user practice have revealed the need for new developments in the ...