InTech Open Scienceis a multidisciplinary collection of books and journals in the field of science, technology and medicine (full texts of chapters from books and journal articles).
The company is positioning itself as the world's leading publisher of open access books.
At the moment, nearly 5,000 books have been submitted, including 164 about the environment, namely:
The growth in the human population has forced mankind to convert forested land into other land uses such as agricultural land, residential, urban, road construction and mining activities. The degradation of forest due to anthropogenic activities is significantly reducing forests in the world. These practices result in significant impacts on the forest structure, species composition and ecology, which will consequently reduce forest productivity and ecosystem functions. Due to deforestation, half of the earth's vegetation surface has reduced to one-third, resulting in large degraded areas. The significant reduction of the forest areas requires appropriate planning for sustainable management of the forests. This book reviews the extent and consequences of deforestation around the world. It highlights case studies of the causes of deforestation in Malaysia, Korea, India, Bangladesh, Columbia, Brazil and Mali. It is hoped that the book will provide insights on the importance of effective forest planning and management for the sustainable development of forest resources.
Lignocellulosic wastes has been widely discussed as a promising natural chemical source and alternative feedstock for second-generation biofuels. However, there are still many technical and economic challenges facing its utilization. Lignin is one of the components of lignocellulosic biomass, and is the most rigid constituent and can be considered as a glue providing the cell wall with stiffness and the plant tissue with compressive strength. In addition, it provides resistance to chemical and physical damage. Resistance of lignocelluloses to hydrolysis is mainly from the protection of cellulose by lignin and cellulose binding to hemicellulose. The present book provides basic knowledge and recent research on different applications of biomass, focusing on the bioenergy and different pretreatment methods that overcome the aforementioned hurdles.
This book describes aspects of rainfall including the extremes, distribution and properties. The introductory chapter focusses on drought and flooding rains over Australia, placing extreme rainfall events from recent decades into a historical context using reconstructions from proxy data. The next three chapters focus on distribution and impacts of rainfall. The first of these chapters presents a statistical analysis of rainfall patterns for Jeddah City and considers future impacts. The second examines rainfall in the context of impacts, vulnerability and climate change in eastern Africa. The third examines extreme rainfall and drought in the Asia-Pacific, through application of monitoring from space. The final chapters focus on properties of rain, one examining aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions, while another considers the chemical nature of individual size-resolved raindrops.
