Soil Respiration and the Environment

The first treatise on soil respiration processes critical to our understanding of global warming, climate change, and ecosystem functions

Luo Yiqi (Author), Xuhui Zhou (Author)

9780120887828, Elsevier Science

Hardback, published 28 September 2006

328 pages, Approx. 100 illustrations
22.9 x 15.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.63 kg

"As effective communication is paramount to advancing scientific understanding, and having a broad understanding of a scientific field is wise before embarking on specific research, there is certainly a need for such a book...The authors have written this book to fill a void and stimulate broad interests in this subject among students, scientists, environmental managers, and policy makers from different disciplines. The authors have successfully achieved this role...they have done a good job breaking the subject into discrete units even though many of the processes that control the rate at which carbon is released from the soil are interrelated and often confound our interpretation of the underlying mechanisms...an excellent text. I would not be surprised to see this book become the standard textbook on soil respiration." --James Irvine, Oregon State University, in ECOLOGY

"Overall we highly recommend this book as an excellent referece on soil respiration science. It is valuable to anyone who studies in areas of ecology, soil science, biogeochemistry, earth system science, atmosphere, climate molders, microbiology, agronomy, plant physiology, global change biology, and enviornmental sciences. Viewed as a whole, this book exceeds its goal achieving a nice balance of scaling basic fundamental concepts, methodology and application. The authors address a long-felt need in the community. Its reading ease is one of the many attractive aspects of this book." --Natchaya Pingintha, The University of Georgia, in AGRICULTURAL AND FOREST METEOROLOGY

The global environment is constantly changing and our planet is getting warmer at an unprecedented rate. The study of the carbon cycle, and soil respiration, is a very active area of research internationally because of its relationship to climate change. It is crucial for our understanding of ecosystem functions from plot levels to global scales. Although a great deal of literature on soil respiration has been accumulated in the past several years, the material has not yet been synthesized into one place until now. This book synthesizes the already published research findings and presents the fundamentals of this subject. Including information on global carbon cycling, climate changes, ecosystem productivity, crop production, and soil fertility, this book will be of interest to scientists, researchers, and students across many disciplines.

Part I: Context

Subject Areas: Soil science, sedimentology [RBGB]