Biogeochemistry : An Analysis of Global Change

Book Description

For the past 4 billion years, the chemistry of the Earth's surface, where all life exists, has changed remarkably. Historically, these changes have occurred slowly enough to allow life to adapt and evolve. In more recent times, the chemistry of the Earth is being altered at a staggering rate, fueled by industrialization and an ever-growing human population. Human activities, from the rapid consumption of resources to the destruction of the rainforests and the expansion of smog-covered cities, are all leading to rapid changes in the basic chemistry of the Earth.
The Second Edition of Biogeochemistry considers the effects of life on the Earth's chemistry on a global level. This expansive text employs current technology to help students extrapolate small-scale examples to the global level, and also discusses the instrumentation being used by NASA and its role in studies of global change. With the Earth's changing chemistry as the focus, this text pulls together the many disparate fields that are encompassed by the broad reach of biogeochemistry. With extensive cross-referencing of chapters, figures, and tables, and an interdisciplinary coverage of the topic at hand, this text will provide an excellent framework for courses examining global change and environmental chemistry, and will also be a useful self-study guide.

* Emphasizes the effects of life on the basic chemistry of the atmosphere, the soils, and seawaters of the Earth
* Calculates and compares the effects of industrial emissions, land clearing, agriculture, and rising population on Earths chemistry
* Synthesizes the global cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur, and suggests the best current budgets for atmospheric gases such as ammonia, nitrous oxide, dimethyl sulfide, and carbonyl sulfide
* Includes an extensive review and up-to-date synthesis of the current literature on the Earths biogeochemistry

Customer Reviews:

Biogeochemistry .......2007-10-06

This book, while slightly dated now, as much science has been done since it was published is still very thorough on the subject.

Solid science.......2007-03-15

I bought this book to prepare for my comprehensive exam. Book consists of two parts: first part describes the generalities of physical/chemical/biological properties of atmosphere, soils, oceans; it also contains the description of the specifics of each cycle (main biogeochemical elements) in all those environment. The second part describes the cycles on the global scale, with up-to-date references to today`s situation on carbon dioxide concentration and prospects on global climate change. Very good material andvery good explanation.

Good Overview of the Subject.......2005-08-24

I actually took Biogeochemistry from Dr. Schlesinger last fall and I do feel that the book is a good survey of alot of geochemical cycles and is presented at an undergraduate level.
However, some of the information, particularly about methane, was severely broken up throughout the text to the point where it was difficult to put together complete chemical cycles of some elements..
Nevertheless, it gives the reader the broad brush strokes necessary to get up to speed, particularly if you do not have a strong science background. For those who are very familiar to the sciences, you can get much more complete information from review papers than is presented here.

Such a good textbook.......2005-07-12

I had to buy this for a Biogeochemical Cycles class. The book is great! It's actual readable, which I was never expecting. It's interesting and understandable. The first reviewer is right that it doesn't get too complex, but references out the more difficult parts. I appreciated not having to read the way-too-hard stuff on my first introduction to this subject.

An Overview of a Complex Subject.......2000-03-25

Biogeochemistry starts with a grand overview, including the formation of the elements, solar system & planets, and then progressively narrows the focus into specifics. As such by the time you get to a chapter on, say, the global carbon cycle, you already have a pretty good idea of where it fits in the big picture. Part I (Processes & Reactions) contains 9 chapters (Introduction, Origin, the Atmosphere, the Lithosphere, Biosphere: Terrstrial Carbon Cycle, Biosphere: Biogeochemical Cycling on Land, Biogeochemistry of Freshwater, Rivers & Estuaries, & the Oceans), which do a balanced job of covering the biological & geological aspects (too many books focus on one or the other). Part II (Global Cycles) has 5 chapters (Water, Carbon, Nitrogen & Phosphorous, Sulfur, & a final chapter on perspectives) that provide more of the details in these specalized catagories. Suitable for the advanced undergaduate or very interested bystandard, there's little detailed math (a weakness for me, but maybe not for you) but the chemistry is well summarized (and the biochemistry made simple & understandable), and the tables & graphs are clean and very useful. Perhaps more importantly for a "textbook", the style is readable - Schlesinger keeps the essentials, but does not bury the reader in them. While it might not provide all you need at a high level, the references scattered throughout as well as the recommended readings make this a great starting point for the subject, and a handy reference book for the subject as a whole.

Soil, Fertilizer, and Plant Silicon Research in Japan

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Soil, Fertilizer, and Plant Silicon Research in Japan
Jian Feng Ma , and Eiichi Takahashi
Manufacturer: Elsevier Science
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0444511660

Book Description

Silicon (Si) plays a significant role in the resistance of plants to multiple stresses including biotic and abiotic stresses. Silicon is also the only element that does not damage plants when accumulated in excess. However, the contribution of Si to plant growth has been largely ignored due to its universal existence in the earth's crust. From numerous intensive studies on Si, initiated in Japan about 80 years ago, Japanese scientists realized that Si was important for the healthy growth of rice and for stability of rice production. In a worldwide first, silicon was recognized as a valuable fertilizer in Japan. The beneficial effects of Si on rice growth in particular, are largely attributable to the characteristics of a silica gel that is accumulated on the epidermal tissues in rice. These effects are expressed most clearly under high-density cultivation systems with heavy applications of nitrogen. Si is therefore recognized now as an ''agronomically essential element'' in Japan.

Book Description

Nutrient Cycling in Terrestrial Ecosystems presents a comprehensive overview of nutrient cycling processes and their importance for plant growth and ecosystem sustainability. The first part of the book presents the fundamentals of nutrient cycling. Topics included are cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and micronutrients. Particular attention is paid to the role of root exudates and rhizosphere microorganisms in facilitating nutrient cycling. The second part discusses nutrient cycling at an ecosystem scale, covering cropping systems, pastures, natural grasslands, arid lands, tundras and forests. The final chapter reviews current models of nutrient cycling.

By comprehensively covering nutrient cycling at a range of scales and emphasising multidisciplinary approaches, this volume will support scientists and practitioners alike, providing links between those involved in improving sustainable economic output from managed ecosystems and those interested in conservation of natural ecosystems.

Soil Organic Matter in Sustainable Agriculture (Advances in Agroecology)

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Soil Organic Matter in Sustainable Agriculture (Advances in Agroecology)

Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0849312949

Book Description

Recognition of the importance of soil organic matter (SOM) in soil health and quality is a major part of fostering a holistic, preventive approach to agricultural management. Students in agronomy, horticulture, and soil science need a textbook that emphasizes strategies for using SOM management in the prevention of chemical, biological, and physical problems. Soil Organic Matter in Sustainable Agriculture gathers key scientific reviews concerning issues that are critical for successful SOM management. This textbook contains evaluations of the types of organic soil constituents-organisms, fresh residues, and well-decomposed substances. It explores the beneficial effects of organic matter on soil and the various practices that enhance SOM. Chapters include an examination of the results of crop management practices on soil organisms, organic matter gains and losses, the significance of various SOM fractions, and the contributions of fungi and earthworms to soil quality and crop growth. Emphasizing the prevention of imbalances that lead to soil and crop problems, the text also explores the development of soils suppressive to plant diseases and pests, and relates SOM management to the supply of nutrients to crops. This book provides the essential scientific background and poses the challenging questions that students need to better understand SOM and develop improved soil and crop management systems.

Environmental Chemistry of Arsenic (Books in Soils, Plants, and the Environment)

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Environmental Chemistry of Arsenic (Books in Soils, Plants, and the Environment)

Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0824706765

Book Description

With contributions from world-renowned experts in the field, this book explores developments in the transport kinetics, seasonal cycling, accumulation, geochemistry, transformation, and toxicology of arsenic. It details advances in the prevention and control of arsenic and arsenic compounds in the air, soil, and water and offers analytical methods for the detection and study of arsenic in the environment and human body. Providing bioremediation techniques for effective treatment of contaminated water supplies, the book discusses factors that influence the removal of arsenic from water as well as diurnal and seasonal variations in the arsenic concentration of surface water supplies.

Effects of Land-Use Change on Atmospheric Co2 Concentrations: South and Southeast Asia As a Case Study (Ecological Studies)

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Effects of Land-Use Change on Atmospheric Co2 Concentrations: South and Southeast Asia As a Case Study (Ecological Studies)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0387941177

Book Description

This book describes an extremely timely subject: the impact on the atmosphere of the changing use of land - notably deforestation - in the tropical forests of Asia. The authors have approached this problem from a variety of perspectives, including use of historical data, socioeconomic analyses, computer modeling, and ecological field research. While the research emphasizes atmospheric carbon dioxide and southeast Asia as a case study, the implications are global in their significance.

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure

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Great for the environment
I now have a composting toilet behind the house
WOW!!
Everyone should read this!
Insightful and well grounded book

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
Joseph C. Jenkins
Manufacturer: Jenkins Publishing (PA)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 096442584X

Book Description

There are almost seven billion defecating people on planet Earth, but few who have any clue about how to constructively handle the burgeoning mountain of human crap. The Humanure Handbook, third edition, will amuse you, educate you, and possibly offend you, but it will certainly pertain to you—unless, of course, your bowels never move.
This new edition of The Humanure Handbook is:

The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Richly illustrated with eye-candy artwork

Perfect for reading while sitting on the “throne”

Revised, improved, and updated

256 pages of crap

Customer Reviews:

Great for the environment.......2007-07-25

Due to a plumbing fault in the house, my family have been composting in the back garden on a daily basis for over a year. What a bonus to stumble upon this book and find out that our actions have been helping to preserve the future of our planet! A number of residents in our street have complainined that the local environment has been suffering from some kind of unpleasant air pollution of late, so we feel proud to be putting something back.

I now have a composting toilet behind the house.......2007-06-21

This was our primary source material for building and maintaining our composting toilet. Works great, saves on water, makes for good plant food, and only smells like sawdust inside.

WOW!!.......2007-05-12

This book combines humor, biology, humor, facts, humor, and specific instructions. Did I mention humor? ;-)

It is also incredibly thought-provoking. The author points out that we are one of the few countries that defecate in our drinking water.

We now have two composting toilets. The one we spent over a $1000 for before we bought the book and the $50 one we built after we bought the book. Guess which one is easier to deal with?!

Everyone should read this!.......2007-03-12

Wonderful book that I wish everyone would read. Great information.

Insightful and well grounded book.......2007-03-10

The author created a masterpiece with this book, combining his vast experience of producing humanure with scientific insight, and great humor which made the book fun to read. I'm convinced that composting manure is the safest way to safely deal with our own excrement. Our society has got to be crazy to be flushing this immensely valuable resource to be dealt with later as it ends up polluting our rivers, oceans, and drinking water. I highly recommend this book to any concious reader who would like to greatly reduce their impact upon this earth.

Chemical Equilibria and Kinetics in Soils

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Chemical Equilibria and Kinetics in Soils
Garrison Sposito
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Surface Chemistry of Natural Particles

ASIN: 0195075641

Book Description

This book clearly illustrates the limitations of using chemical thermodynamics to describe chemical phenomena in soils--especially with regard to kinetics and molecular mechanisms--and proposes that the quantitative description of soils is not complete without adequate characterization of the rates of the chemical reactions. The author, a renowned authority in the field, focuses on reactions in the soil solution and considers aqueous phase properties. He also cogently draws distinctions between thermodynamic chemical species and kinetic chemical species. This critical introduction to the use of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics for describing reactions in the soil solution will appeal not only to professionals but to students as well.

War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Studies in Environment and History)

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creative synthesis
angels and insects

War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Studies in Environment and History)
Edmund Russell
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521790034

Book Description

While cultural and scholarly traditions have led us to believe that war and control of nature are separate, there are many more similarities than most people might suspect. Tracing the history of chemical warfare and pest control, Edmund Russell shows how war and control of nature coevolved. Ideologically, institutionally, and technologically, the paths of chemical warfare and pest control intersected repeatedly in the twentieth century. War and Nature helps us to understand the impact of war on nature and vice versa, as well as the development of total war, and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Edmund Russell is an assistant professor in the Division of Technology, Culture, and Communication in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. This is his first book.

Customer Reviews:

creative synthesis.......2003-05-01

In War and Nature Edmund Russell, Associate Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia, cleverly traces the interaction between chemical warfare and pest control from World War I to the Vietnam War. His central thesis is that war and control of nature have coevolved: "the control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature" (p. 2). Following up on his dissertation (University of Michigan, 1993), which won the Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, Russell culled a wide variety of recently declassified U.S. government documents, business publications, and contemporary books and articles. Russell finds that World Wars I and II and the Cold War forged close ties between military and scientific institutions, and efforts to maintain such links became hallmarks of the post-World War II era. Scientifically and technologically, pest control and chemical warfare each created knowledge and tools that reinforced the other (p. 4) For example, on the eve of World War I, there were few U.S. chemical companies. They manufactured primarily low-profit bulk chemicals. In contrast, Germany had the best chemical factories and schools and had the largest output of sophisticated products. Eight German companies made up almost 80 percent of the world's dyes (p. 18). However, the increased use of mustard and chlorine gas in the war boosted the demand by European allies for these chemicals from the United States. The "Chemical Warfare Service" was created within the U.S. Army to employ civilian chemists to conduct research on war gases. This research also stimulated the invention of new insecticides to deal with such menaces as the boll weevil (attacking cotton crops), house fly (spreading typhus), the San Jose scale (damaging fruit trees), and mosquitoes (spreading malaria).
The use of chemicals in warfare is not new. Interestingly, Russell points out that the first recorded use of poison gas was in 428 BC, when Spartans besieging Plataea attempted to kill its defenders by burning wood soaked in pitch and sulfur under city walls (p. 4). However, chemical warfare increased throughout the twentieth century. According to Russell, at least 90,000 people were killed in World War I by gas, and estimated 350,000 were killed by gas in World War II, not including all the victims in Hitler's gas chambers. Even these figures seem low. Russell skillfully shows through cartoons how federal entomologists and chemists used insects in their propaganda as metaphors for human enemies. One cartoon depicts a conversation between two worms, one of them exclaiming: "What! Me sabotage that guy's victory garden? What do you take me for-a Jap? (p. 100)."
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 sought to exclude gas from warfare and define the rights of combatants. Public outrage at the use of chemicals as weapons of war continued to mount. After World War II, the Chemical Warfare Service and other chemical companies lobbied Congress vigorously, stressing the need to develop war gases as insecticides, for which increased funding was required. Noted chemists testified before Congress, claiming also that chemical and biological warfare was "more humane" than conventional warfare. According to Russell, who interviewed several of these chemists, Chief Chemical Officer William Creasy inanely argued in 1958 that 25,000 American casualties on Iwo Jima could have been avoided had the U.S. military employed chemical weapons (p. 208). Miracle "psychochemicals" were promoted, such as LSD-25 that could temporarily incapacitate troops but not permanently harm them. Russell cites a US Army propaganda film produced in 1958 in which a cat chased and caught a mouse, inhaled an unnamed gas, and then cowered from another mouse (p. 208). This publicity campaign persuaded Pentagon authorities to increase the U.S. Army's budget to $80,000,000 for chemical research.
Research to fight insects increased simultaneously with the development of chemicals to fight humans. As thousands of families moved to the suburbs in the 1950s, gardening became a popular hobby and stimulated the desire for pest control. Pesticide manufacturers such as Du Pont and Dow increased their marketing to this group of consumers, while federal crop dusting programs using DDT were initiated.
Russell shows how Rachel Carson's publication of Silent Spring in 1962 galvanized the American environmental movement, leading eventually to the ban on DDT in 1972. This immediate bestseller detailed the noxious effects of DDT on plants and animals and characterized pest control as a self-defeating form of warfare (p. 229).
Reading this book, one is struck by the immense irony of the twentieth century and the causal interaction of peace and war. Never before have so many human lives been saved (thanks to pesticides killing disease-carrying insects and increasing crop yields) and so many destroyed (mostly due to incendiaries, but also chemical weapons). Americans got better at saving lives partly because they got better at taking them, and vice versa. While War and Nature is almost too dazzling in its rich detail and sometimes a bit careless in its logic (e.g. implying that human beings should not be considered part of nature), the book breaks new ground in its connection of two traditionally disparate fields of inquiry, environmental and military history. It should be required reading in college courses in both security studies and environmental science.---Johanna Granville, Ph.D. (Stanford University)

angels and insects.......2002-10-01

World War I was just the beginning of an ongoing cultural and scientific process in which chemical based weapons were created and marketed for use against human and insect enemies. Russell reminds us that the cultural, institutional, and political evolution of twentieth century science and warfare in the United States began not with the J. Robert Oppenheimer and the physicists of Los Alamos but with chemists like James B. Conant and his colleagues at Harvard and American University, emergent corporations like Dupont and the Hooker Company, and government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the United States Chemical Warfare Service. With an eye for detail and a witty and readable narrative style, the author assembles scientific papers, declassified governmental and military planning documents, trade journals, and propaganda and advertising literature to reshape our understanding not only of the role of chemistry in warfare, but more importantly the reflexive nature of our understanding and relation to both technology and nature during times of peace.

Allelopathy: A Physiological Process with Ecological Implications

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Allelopathy: A Physiological Process with Ecological Implications

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1402042795

Book Description

This book provides the reader with relevant information about actual knowledge of the process of allelopathy, covering all aspects from the molecular to the ecological level. Special emphasis is given to the physiological and ecophysiological aspects of allelopathy. Several ecosystems are studied and methodological considerations are taken into account in several chapters. The book has been written to be useful both for Ph.D. students and for senior researchers, so the chapters include all necessary information to be read by beginners, but also include a lot of useful information and discussion for the initiated.

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