Scientific, Technical & Medical Books

The world's biodiversity is highly valued but is also highly threatened by various types of human activity. As a consequence, statutory measures are in place to protect habitats and wildlife. These measures range from global to local, and give protection to whole ecosystems or single species. Because there are now legal obligations in place for proposed developments to enhance the biodiversity of the site, and many species are protected by law, it is essential that project managers understand the importance of considering ecology early on in a project. Failure to address these issues can lead to expensive and lengthy project delays. The Thomson Ecology Handbook provides a general overview of current wildlife legislation, guidance and practical techniques, and is aimed at helping project managers understand and plan for ecology. The book describes in simple terms, essential advice about the law on ecology in relation to construction and development. The book also offers practical advice on protected species, helping the project manager to understand more about what ecological surveys and mitigation may be needed. The book can be referred to on site or in meetings and makes sense of what could be seen as a complicated and unknown area for many project managers and people working in construction and development. The book describes wildlife law (planning law, animal welfare law, and case law), planning policy and guidance, protected sites, species and habitats, surveys for each species, mitigation and biodiversity enhancement, and practical techniques for each species, including bats, badgers and great crested newts. You don't need to read it cover to cover, just go straight to the section which you need help with - when you need to.

This book provides an authoritative insight on the Loss and Damage discourse by highlighting state-of-the-art research and policy linked to this discourse and articulating its multiple concepts, principles and methods. Written by leading researchers and practitioners, it identifies practical and evidence-based policy options to inform the discourse and climate negotiations.With climate-related risks on the rise and impacts being felt around the globe has come the recognition that climate mitigation and adaptation may not be enough to manage the effects from anthropogenic climate change. This recognition led to the creation of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage in 2013, a climate policy mechanism dedicated to dealing with climate-related effects in highly vulnerable countries that face severe constraints and limits to adaptation. Endorsed in 2015 by the Paris Agreement and effectively considered a third pillar of international climate policy, debate and research on Loss and Damage continues to gain enormous traction. Yet, concepts, methods and tools as well as directions for policy and implementation have remained contested and vague.Suitable for researchers, policy-advisors, practitioners and the interested public, the book furthermore:• discusses the political, legal, economic and institutional dimensions of the issue• highlights normative questions central to the discourse• provides a focus on climate risks and climate risk management.• presents salient case studies from around the world.

This open access book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows comparisons between the different approaches but also seeks to close gaps which would remain if only one perspective would be at the center of the discussions.Specifically, the book shows the strong connections between human rights and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Already the preamble of this document explicitly states that “the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ... seek to realise the human rights of all”. Moreover, several goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda correspond to already existing individual human rights obligations. The contributions of this volume therefore also address how the implementation of human rights and SDGs can reinforce each other, but also point to critical shortcomings of the different approaches.

This open access textbook provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water management. By illustrating the interplay between the hydrological cycle and the rules and institutions that govern today’s water allocation policies, the authors develop a modern perspective on water management. Moreover, the book presents an in-depth assessment of the political and ethical dimensions of water management and its institutional embeddedness, by discussing distribution issues and issues of the enforceability of human rights in managing water resources. Given its scope, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and engineering, as well as practitioners in the water sector, seeking a deeper understanding of economic approaches to the study of water management.

"The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429458781, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license." This book examines the uncertainties underlying various strategies for a low-carbon future. Most prominently, such strategies relate to transitions in the energy sector, on both the supply and the demand side. At the same time they interact with other sectors, such as industrial production, transport, and building, and ultimately require new behaviour patterns at household and individual levels. Currently, much research is available on the effectiveness of these strategies but, in order to successfully implement comprehensive transition pathways, it is crucial not only to understand the benefits but also the risks.Filling this gap, this volume provides an interdisciplinary, conceptual framework to assess risks and uncertainties associated with low-carbon policies and applies this consistently across 11 country cases from around the world, illustrating alternative transition pathways in various contexts. The cases are presented as narratives, drawing on stakeholder-driven research efforts. They showcase diverse empirical evidence reflecting the complex challenges to and potential negative consequences of such pathways. Together, they enable the reader to draw valuable lessons on the risks and uncertainties associated with choosing the envisaged transition pathways, as well as ways to manage the implementation of these pathways and ultimately enable sustainable and lasting social and environmental effects.This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of environmental and energy policy, low-carbon transitions, renewable energy technologies, climate change action, and sustainability in general.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.The third edition of this indispensable book in radio interferometry provides extensive updates to the second edition, including results and technical advances from the past decade; discussion of arrays that now span the full range of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum observable from the ground, 10 MHz to 1 THz; an analysis of factors that affect array speed; and an expanded discussion of digital signal-processing techniques and of scintillation phenomena and the effects of atmospheric water vapor on image distortion, among many other topics.With its comprehensiveness and detailed exposition of all aspects of the theory and practice of radio interferometry and synthesis imaging, this book has established itself as a standard reference in the field. It begins with an overview of the basic principles of radio astronomy, a short history of the development of radio interferometry, and an elementary discussion of the operation of an interferometer. From this foundation, it delves into the underlying relationships of interferometry, sets forth the coordinate systems and parameters to describe synthesis imaging, and examines configurations of antennas for multielement synthesis arrays. Various aspects of the design and response of receiving systems are discussed, as well as the special requirements of very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), image reconstruction, and recent developments in image enhancement techniques and astrometric observations. Also discussed are propagation effects in the media between the source and the observer, and radio interference, factors that limit performance. Related techniques are introduced, including intensity interferometry, optical interferometry, lunar occultations, tracking of satellites in Earth orbit, interferometry for remote Earth sensing, and holographic measurements of antenna surfaces. This book will benefit anyone who is interested in radio interferometry techniques for astronomy, astrometry, geodesy, or electrical engineering.

This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) reminiscences covering related topics like mathematical geosciences, mathematical morphology, geostatistics, fractals and multifractals, spatial statistics, multipoint geostatistics, compositional data analysis, informatics, geocomputation, numerical methods, and chaos theory in the geosciences.

In the development of next-generation nanoscale devices, higher speed and lower power operation is the name of the game. Increasing reliance on mobile computers, mobile phone, and other electronic devices demands a greater degree of speed and power. As chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) progressively becomes perceived less as black art and more as a cutting-edge technology, it is emerging as the technology for achieving higher performance devices.Nanoparticle Engineering for Chemical-Mechanical Planarization explains the physicochemical properties of nanoparticles according to each step in the CMP process, including dielectric CMP, shallow trend isolation CMP, metal CMP, poly isolation CMP, and noble metal CMP. The authors provide a detailed guide to nanoparticle engineering of novel CMP slurry for next-generation nanoscale devices below the 60nm design rule. They present design techniques using polymeric additives to improve CMP performance. The final chapter focuses on novel CMP slurry for the application to memory devices beyond 50nm technology.Most books published on CMP focus on the polishing process, equipment, and cleaning. Even though some of these books may touch on CMP slurries, the methods they cover are confined to conventional slurries and none cover them with the detail required for the development of next-generation devices. With its coverage of fundamental concepts and novel technologies, this book delivers expert insight into CMP for all current and next-generation systems.

Masculinities in Forests: Representations of Diversity demonstrates the wide variability in ideas about, and practice of, masculinity in different forests, and how these relate to forest management. While forestry is widely considered a masculine domain, a significant portion of the literature on gender and development focuses on the role of women, not men. This book addresses this gap and also highlights how there are significant, demonstrable differences in masculinities from forest to forest. The book develops a simple conceptual framework for considering masculinities, one which both acknowledges the stability or enduring quality of masculinities, but also the significant masculinity-related options available to individual men within any given culture. The author draws on her own experiences, building on her long-term experience working globally in the conservation and development worlds, also observing masculinities among such professionals. The core of the book examines masculinities, based on long-term ethnographic research in the rural Pacific Northwest of the US; Long Segar, East Kalimantan; and Sitiung, West Sumatra, both in Indonesia. The author concludes by pulling together the various strands of masculine identities and discussing the implications of these various versions of masculinity for forest management. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of forestry, gender studies and conservation and development, as well as practitioners and NGOs working in these fields.The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367815776, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This open access book provides a comprehensive toolbox of analysis techniques for ionospheric multi-satellite missions. The immediate need for this volume was motivated by the ongoing ESA Swarm satellite mission, but the tools that are described are general and can be used for any future ionospheric multi-satellite mission with comparable instrumentation. In addition to researching the immediate plasma environment and its coupling to other regions, such a mission aims to study the Earth’s main magnetic field and its anomalies caused by core, mantle, or crustal sources. The parameters for carrying out this kind of work are examined in these chapters. Besides currents, electric fields, and plasma convection, these parameters include ionospheric conductance, Joule heating, neutral gas densities, and neutral winds.

The miniaturization of traditional sample preparation techniques (e.g., solid-phase extraction or solvent extraction) led to the development of environmentally benign analytical methods. This book aims to provide an overview of the challenges and achievements in the application of the miniaturized sample preparation methods in analytical laboratories.

This open access peer-reviewed volume was inspired by the UNESCO UNITWIN Network for Underwater Archaeology International Workshop held at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia in November 2016. Content is based on, but not limited to, the work presented at the workshop which was dedicated to 3D recording and interpretation for maritime archaeology. The volume consists of contributions from leading international experts as well as up-and-coming early career researchers from around the globe. The content of the book includes recording and analysis of maritime archaeology through emerging technologies, including both practical and theoretical contributions. Topics include photogrammetric recording, laser scanning, marine geophysical 3D survey techniques, virtual reality, 3D modelling and reconstruction, data integration and Geographic Information Systems.The principal incentive for this publication is the ongoing rapid shift in the methodologies of maritime archaeology within recent years and a marked increase in the use of 3D and digital approaches. This convergence of digital technologies such as underwater photography and photogrammetry, 3D sonar, 3D virtual reality, and 3D printing has highlighted a pressing need for these new methodologies to be considered together, both in terms of defining the state-of-the-art and for consideration of future directions. As a scholarly publication, the audience for the book includes students and researchers, as well as professionals working in various aspects of archaeology, heritage management, education, museums, and public policy. It will be of special interest to those working in the field of coastal cultural resource management and underwater archaeology but will also be of broader interest to anyone interested in archaeology and to those in other disciplines who are now engaging with 3D recording and visualization.