This document examines the global and regional evolution of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and offers recommendations so these flows can contribute to the region's productive development processes.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Telematics and Computing, WITCOM 2019, held in Merida, Mexico, in November 2019. The 31 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: GIS & climate change; telematics & electronics; artificial intelligence & machine learning; software engineering & education; internet of things; and informatics security.
CiteSpace is a freely available computer program written in Java for visualizing and analyzing literature of a scientific domain. A knowledge domain is broadly defined in order to capture the notion of a logically and cohesively organized body of knowledge. It may range from specific topics such as post-traumatic stress disorder to fields of study lacking clear-cut boundaries, such as research on terrorism or regenerative medicine. CiteSpace takes bibliographic information, especially citation information from the Web of Science, and generates interactive visualizations. Users can explore various patterns and trends uncovered from scientific publications, and develop a good understanding of scientific literature much more efficiently than they would from an unguided search through literature. The full text of many scientific publications can be accessed with a single click through the interactive visualization in CiteSpace. At the end of a session, CiteSpace can generate a summary report to summarize key information about the literature analyzed. This book is a practical guide not only on how to operate the tool but also on why the tool is designed and what implications of various patterns that require special attention. This book is written with a minimum amount of jargon. It uses everyday language to explain what people may learn from the writings of scholars of all kinds.
The rapidly increasing global population has dramatically increased the demands for natural resources and has caused significant changes in quantity and quality of natural resources. To achieve sustainable resource management, it is essential to obtain insightful guidance from emerging disciplines such as landscape ecology. This text addresses the links between landscape ecology and natural resource management. These links are discussed in the context of various landscape types, a diverse set of resources and a wide range of management issues. A large number of landscape ecology concepts, principles and methods are introduced. Critical reviews of past management practices and a number of case studies are presented. This text provides many guidelines for managing natural resources from a landscape perspective and offers useful suggestions for landscape ecologists to carry out research relevant to natural resource management. In addition, it will be an ideal supplemental text for graduate and advanced undergraduate ecology courses.
A unique approach to the challenges of complex environmental systems Environmental Transport Processes, Second Edition provides much-needed guidance on mass transfer principles in environmental engineering. It focuses on working with uncontrolled conditions involving biological and physical systems, offering examples from diverse fields, including mass transport, kinetics, wastewater treatment, and unit processes. This new edition is fully revised and updated, incorporating modern approaches and practice problems at the end of chapters, making the Second Edition more concise, accessible, and easy to use. The book discusses the fundamentals of transport processes occurring in natural environments, with special emphasis on working at the biological physical interface. It considers transport and kinetics in terms of systems that involve microorganisms, along with in-depth coverage of particles, size spectra, and calculations for particles that can be considered either spheres or fractals. The book's treatment of particles as fractals is especially unique and the Second Edition includes a new section on exoelectrogenic biofilms. It also addresses dispersion in natural and engineered systems unlike any other book on the subject. Readers will learn to tackle with confidence complex environmental systems and make transport calculations in heterogeneous environments with mixtures of chemicals.
This timely work draws implications from scientific studies for the wise management of old field ecosystems in the neotropics, where conversion of land to cropping systems is the most common kind of disturbance and many landscapes are defined by areas recovering from agriculture. Understanding old field succession can help us address important scientific and social issues, such as deforestation and forest regeneration, forest restoration, sustainability of agriculture, maintenance of biodiversity, and impacts of global climate change on forest dynamics. This book provides restoration and management strategies, as well as new farming methodologies for practical application.
Based on five Special Issues in Coatings, this e-book contains a series of 15 articles demonstrating actual perspectives and new trends in advanced coatings in buildings. Innovative materials and multiperformance solutions provide a basis, contributing also to the better protection of buildings' surfaces during the service life, and the users' wellbeing.
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of a complete subduction orogen, the Andes. To date the results provide the densest and most highly resolved geophysical image of an active subduction orogen.
Soil and Sediment Remediation discusses in detail a whole set of remediative technologies currently available to minimise their impact. Technologies for the treatment of soils and sediments in-situ (landfarming, bioscreens, bioventing, nutrient injection, phytoremediation) and ex-situ (landfarming, bio-heap treatment, soil suspension reactor) will be discussed. The microbiological, process technological and socio-economical aspects of these technologies will be addressed. Special attention will be given to novel biotechnological processes that utilise sulfur cycle conversions, e.g. sulfur and heavy metal removal from soils. Also the potential of phytoremediation will be highlighted. In addition, treatment schemes for the clean-up of polluted megasites, e.g. harbours and Manufactured Gaswork Plants (MGP), will be elaborated. The aim of Soil and Sediment Remediation is to introduce the reader in: the biogeochemical characteristics of soil and sediments- new techniques to study soil/sediment processes (molecular probes, microelectrodes, NMR) clean up technologies for soils polluted with organic (PAH, NAPL, solvents) or inorganic (heavy metals) pollutants- preventative and remediative strategies and technologies available in environmental engineering novel process applications and bioreactor designs for bioremediation the impact of soil pollution on society and its economic importance.