The book is a collection of sixteen essays on issues of regional and national identities and perceptions in literature ranging from South Africa to the United States. Discussions include the American frontier, the relationship between non-fiction and place, linguistic and postcolonial boundaries.

The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world’s stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future. Nature’s Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals. The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world’s pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.

Nature has been a key attraction factor for tourism in the Nordic countries for decades. The demand for nature-based tourism has steadily grown and is one of the most rapidly expanding sectors within tourism across Europe and elsewhere. This demand has created opportunities for nature-based tourism to develop as an economic diversification tool within regions rich in natural amenities. But nature-based tourism is not only about tourism businesses and tourists visiting nature. The natural environment as a basis for tourism involves many challenges related to local communities, public access, nature protection and the management of natural resources. This book covers a broad set of topics in contemporary nature-based tourism from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Areas discussed are innovation, fishing rights and supply of angling, recreation experience preferences, national park attractions, the cultural clash between established outdoor recreational use and new tourism activities, the Right of Public Access as opportunity and obstacle, preferences of tourism landscapes, controversies around wilderness development, management of hiking trails, eco-tourism certification, and financing of recreational infrastructure. This book was published as a special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism.

This volume includes selected contributions presented during the 2nd edition of the international conference on WaterEnergyNEXUS which was held in Salerno, Italy in November 2018. This conference was organized by the Sanitary Environmental Engineering Division (SEED) of the University of Salerno (Italy) in cooperation with Advanced Institute of Water Industry at Kyungpook National University (Korea) and with The Energy and Resources Institute, TERI (India). The initiative received the patronage of UNESCO – World Water Association Programme (WWAP) and of the International Water Association (IWA) and was organized with the support of Springer (MENA Publishing Program), Arab Water Council (AWC), Korean Society of Environmental Engineering (KSEE) and Italian Society of Sanitary Environmental Engineering Professors (GITISA). With the support of international experts invited as plenary and keynote speakers, the conference aimed to give a platform for Euro-Mediterranean countries to share and discuss key topics on such water-energy issues through the presentation of nature-based solutions, advanced technologies and best practices for a more sustainable environment. This volume gives a general and brief overview on current research focusing on emerging Water-Energy-Nexus issues and challenges and its potential applications to a variety of environmental problems that are impacting the Euro-Mediterranean zone and surrounding regions. A selection of novel and alternative solutions applied worldwide are included. The volume contains over about one hundred carefully refereed contributions from 44 countries worldwide selected for the conference. Topics covered include (1) Nexus framework and governance, (2) Environmental solutions for the sustainable development of the water sector, (3) future clean energy technologies and systems under water constraints, (4) environmental engineering and management, (5) Implementation and best practices Intended for researchers in environmental engineering, environmental science, chemistry, and civil engineering. This volume is also an invaluable guide for industry professionals working in both water and energy sectors.

Historically, science has developed by reducing complex situations to simple ones, analyzing the components and synthesizing the original situation. While this 'reductionist' approach has been extremely successful, there are phenomena of such complexity that one cannot simplify them without eliminating the problem itself. Recently, attention has turned to such problems in a wide variety of fields. This is in part due to the development of fractal geometry. Fractal geometry provides the mathematical tools for handling complexity. The present volume is a collection of papers that deal with the application of fractals in both traditional scientific disciplines and in applied fields. This volume shows the advance of our understanding of complex phenomena across a spectrum of disciplines. While these diverse fields work on very different problems, fractals provide a unifying formalism for approaching these problems.

Frontiers in Natural Product Chemistry is a book series devoted to publishing monographs that highlight important advances in natural product chemistry. The series covers all aspects of research in the chemistry and biochemistry of naturally occurring compounds, including research on natural substances derived from plants, microbes and animals. Reviews of structure elucidation, biological activity, organic and experimental synthesis of natural products as well as developments of new methods are also included in the series. Volume seven of the series brings seven reviews covering these topics: - Plant-Derived Anticancer Compounds Used in Cancer Therapies - Pradimicin and Benanomicin Antibiotics - The Chemical Compositions of Bixa orellana and their Pharmacological Activities - Overview of Phytochemistry and Pharmacology of Nilakanthi (Ajuga bracteosa Wall. ex Benth.) - Tetracyclic benzocarbazoles and derivatives - Chalcones as Antiinflammatory, Antidiabetic, and Antidepressant Agents - Bioactive Steroids from Marine Organisms

This book discusses policy strategies for the effective management of natural resources in Africa within the context of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). While natural resource wealth has the potential to lift many out of poverty, sustain economic growth, and foster political stability, it does not guarantee these benefits. The absolute levels of human development in many resource-rich countries remain low, despite their apparent wealth. The challenge is to adopt policies that better harness the potential of natural resources, not only as an opportunity for development, but also to foster policies and institutional innovations that manage resource wealth equitably and boost human capital. To this end, this volume highlights key opportunities and solutions for harnessing natural resources for sustained economic development and explain how such approaches should be incorporated into the SDG agenda. These opportunities are communicated in the form of policy recommendations that in some cases, are country specific but can (and should) be adapted by individual African countries where applicable. With a broad perspective supplied by a diverse group of authors, this book will be useful for graduate students and academicians studying Africa, development economics, economic policy, and resource management, as well as policy makers, NGOs, and IGOs.

Organisms endowed with life show a sense of awareness, interacting with and learning from the universe in and around them. Each level of interaction involves transfer of information of various kinds, and at different levels. Each thread of information is interlinked with the other, and woven together, these constitute the universe — both the internal self and the external world — as we perceive it. They are, figuratively speaking, Nature's longest threads. This volume reports inter-disciplinary research and views on information and its transfer at different levels of organization by reputed scientists working on the frontier areas of science. It is a frontier where physics, mathematics and biology merge seamlessly, binding together specialized streams such as quantum mechanics, dynamical systems theory, and mathematics. The topics would interest a broad cross-section of researchers in life sciences, physics, cognition, neuroscience, mathematics and computer science, as well as interested amateurs, familiarizing them with frontier research on understanding information transfer in living systems.

The first in a two volume tribute to Walter Isard, the second being "Dynamics and Conflict in Regional structural Change", this book looks at new frontiers in regional science. Together they contains 50 papers by experts in this field, and look at subjects such as location theory.

Collection of selected, peer reviewed papers from the Second International Conference on Green Building, Materials and Civil Engineering (GBMCE 2013), August 21-23, 2013, Taiwan. Volume is indexed by Thomson Reuters CPCI-S (WoS). The 401 papers are grouped as follows: Chapter 1: Architecture and Landscape Design, Residential, Regional and Urban Planning, Sustainable City and Ecological Planning; Chapter 2: Environmental Energy, Protection, Technologies and Engineering, Emission Control; Chapter 3: Outdoor, Indoor Engineering and Design, HVAC Technologies; Chapter 4: Materials Engineering and Technologies, Materials in Industrial Processes; Chapter 5: Building Materials and Technologies; Chapter 6: Green Building and Engineering; Chapter 7: Energy Saving Building and Technologies, Photovoltaic and Solar Energy Applications, Energy Control; Chapter 8: Civil Engineering Technologies; Chapter 9: Construction Dynamics, Stability and Strength, Geotechnical and Seismic Engineering; Chapter 10: Modelling and Simulation Technologies; Chapter 11: Project Management and Marketing, Assessment and Safety.