Soil Biology & Ecology: The Basics offers an accessible introduction to the diverse and dynamic world beneath our feet. This book explores soil as a thriving habitat detailing the rich biodiversity of microorganisms and macroorganisms that sustain essential ecological cycles. It covers the key biochemical cycles in soil including carbon nitrogen phosphorus and sulfur explaining how these processes contribute to soil fertility and ecosystem health. With a focus on ecological relationships like symbiosis and competition this guide illuminates the vital role of soil in supporting life and agricultural productivity.

Ideal for students researchers and nature enthusiasts the book is a foundational resource for understanding soil's impact on the biosphere and human food production.

Key Features:

- Comprehensive overview of soil as a living ecosystem

- Detailed coverage of soil microbiota macrobiota and biochemical cycles

- Insights into ecological relationships and their practical applications

A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global Warming couples engaging and creative storytelling with accurate details to explain global warming.

It covers both the technical and human issues of global warming by addressing what's causing global warming and why people don't believe it exists. The book tells readers how to convince others that global warming is not only real but life-threatening and offers a clearly laid out path to solve it. The book is accurate and carefully researched drawing on the author's thirty years of studying the science of global warming and the human psyche that surrounds it. The author breaks down the subject into four parts which can be thought of as four mini-books in one. The first part covers the psychology of global warming denial how to defend ourselves against its lies and fake news and how to convince others of global warming's grave harm. The second part describes exactly what global warming is. The third answers the question what makes us so sure? Finally the last part provides a road map showing us how to defeat global warming.

This book is comprehensive fast-paced and easily accessible to readers from all walks of life. It provides an overview of everything one needs to know about global warming and as such is an excellent survey of global warming topics. In addition to being an easy and enjoyable read for the general public A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global Warming serves as a handy primer on climate change for environmental science classes.

Anthropogenic changes in the environment caused by 250 years of economic growth and utilization of fuel and mineral resources have considerably impacted the natural environment. The resulting physical and chemical alterations to the Earth's sphere and our adaptive responses in the biosphere are detailed in this reference book. Readers will learn about concepts relevant to Earth’s history the evolution of life economy ecology environmental history biology and medicine and how these concepts can be linked to environmental change. The scope of this interdisciplinary work entails to convey the true degree of responsibility for the universal consequences of ecosystem degradation resulting from industrial processing human consumption and the transformation of natural sites due to industrialization and urbanization.

Topics covered in the book include:

-Ecosystem transformations by natural and anthropogenic forces

-The Anthropocene epoch

-A short history of industrialization

-Environmental sites and the impact of socio-economic influences

-The current environmental crisis

This textbook is intended for graduate students in economics civil engineering architecture agronomics forestry technical and mining sciences political sciences business studies and humanities. General readers who wish to understand the basic philosophy behind environmental studies and their relation to human activity can also benefit from this book.

Organic petrology is a discipline of geology which integrates multidisciplinary approaches for the exploration and evaluation of fossil fuel resources by conventional and unconventional procedures. Organic petrology has brought forth new powerful analytical tools for the characterization of geological hydrocarbon systems thus providing information where previous analytical techniques prove to be less effective.

The reference provides a broad comprehensive source of information about the application of organic petrology in the investigation of geological formations related with the production and accumulation of oil and gas. Eleven chapters cover a variety of topics (kerogens dispersed organic matter systems sedimentary organic matter systems oil and gas shales etc.). Additional information in chapters referring to examples in specific geographical locations provides a global perspective of hydrocarbon exploration. The book is an introductory reference for all scholars involved in applied organic petrology of hydrocarbon systems including graduate and undergraduate geology students engineers and lab technicians.

[Series intro]

Geology: Current and Future Developments is a book series that brings together the latest contributions to geological research. Each volume features chapters contributed by academic scholars / professional experts from around the world. The scope of the book series includes (but is not limited to) topics such as plate tectonics climate science hydrocarbon exploration mineral exploration and environmental science. This series is intended as a useful compendium of scholarly reference material for geology students and professionals.

Application of incident light microscopy techniques for organic petrology in high temperature thermogenic shale gas systems demonstrates that solid bitumen is the dominant organic matter. Solid bitumen is retained as a residual conversion product as oil-prone kerogen cracks to hydrocarbons or occurs from the cracking of once liquid oil. Oil-prone Type I/II kerogens are not present in shale gas reservoirs already having converted to hydrocarbons. Type III/IV kerogens (vitrinite and inertinite) are refractory and persist in shale gas reservoirs to high maturity with little morphological change apart from condensation and aromatization causing higher reflectance. Organic petrology applications are most useful for thermal maturity determination and delineation of hydrocarbon windows through measurement of vitrinite reflectance and vitrinite reflectance equivalents from other organic matter (zooclasts and/or solid bitumen). Depositional organo-facies determination generally is not possible in the gas window of thermal maturity; fluorescence microscopy is not useful as organic matter is no longer autofluorescent. Application of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) allows observation of an interconnected nano-scale organic porosity in shale gas systems but suffers from inability to identify organic matter types. SEM approaches to shale gas reservoir characterization therefore should not attempt differentiation of kerogen types or kerogen vs. solid bitumen identification unless correlative organic microscopy is performed. Herein are reviewed organic petrology results as used in the shale gas systems of North America Europe and China including SEM applications citing recent examples from the literature.

Famous Planet Earth Caves - The new series presents important caves or rock shelters in any kind of rock types all over the world. Each book focuses on a single cave presentation covering different and most important disciplines of a cave: Geology (e.g. cave genesis sedimentology speleothems) such as Hydrogeology (e.g. speleothems for climate reconstructions aquifer reconstructions) Paleontology (e.g. cave bear or carnivore dens) Archeology (e.g. Palaeolithic to Medieval camp or burial sites) and modern Biology (e.g. bat caves). The books are scientific chaptered monographs sometimes of show caves but often of non- or difficult to access caves. The well-illustrated books are written in a mixed scientific and popular scientific way for a better understanding and larger readership especially speleologists and natural scientists all over the world.                                        

With the application of the effective stress concept the strength and volumetric behavior of saturated materials was clearly understood. For the case of unsaturated materials a universally accepted effective stresses equation is still under debate. However the use of the effective stress concept to develop constitutive models for unsaturated soils is becoming increasingly popular not only because the hydro-mechanical coupling observed in these materials is implicit in the formulation but also because simpler and more precise models can be established. Towards A Unified Soil Mechanics Theory demonstrates that the same strength and volume change equations used in saturated soil mechanics can be used for the case of unsaturated soils. In other words the constitutive models developed for saturated soils can be used for unsaturated materials once the effective stress equation has been defined.

In this book an analytical equation for the effective stress for unsaturated soils is established. This equation requires the knowledge of the superficial area of solids affected by the capillary phenomenon. In other words we need to know how water distributes in the pores of the soil. This distribution can be modeled using a solid-porous model built on a regular network. However the size of the network required to correctly simulate the structure of a small soil sample cannot be managed with a common PC. For that reason a probabilistic porous-solid model is developed. This model uses the pore size distribution in the form of a probabilistic function which in addition to the Laplace equation and the principle of continuity can be expressed as the probability of a pore of certain size to be filled or dry at suction during a wetting or drying path respectively. In this way the soil-water retention curves can be simulated and the effective stress at any suction during wetting or drying processes can be determined. Based on this approach it is shown that unsaturated soils behave under the same principles for strength and volumetric behavior as saturated soils.

Towards A Unified Soil Mechanics Theory paves the way for a universal theory of soil mechanics. The volume will be a valuable reference to civil engineers earth scientists and hydrologists interested in soil mechanics at both academic and professional levels.