Book Description

Well-known for its balanced approach to media industries and professions, Dynamics of Mass Communication offers a lively, thorough, and honest introduction for mass communication majors and nonmajors alike. This new edition embraces the digital age with a free Student CD-ROM that adds video and interactivity to the student's textbook experience, and brings students up-to-date on the latest developments in mass communication--from the emerging role of PDA's and cell phones in the mass media mix to the recording industry's actions against file-sharing. ... Read more

Book Description

A Guide to Golf Course Irrigation System Design and Drainage details every phase of an irrigation program - from the system design to construction, from scheduling to operation, and much more.  It also covers the fundamentals of drainage design and installation.  Turfgrass managers and golf course superintendents will refer to this handy book often to plan and implement effective irrigation systems, ensure appropriate capacity, easy installation, and practical operation and maintenance. ... Read more

Book Description

Practical Drainage is easy to read and presented in a non-technical style generously supported with helpful illustrations. There are three key messages in this book: water moves sideways only slowly through soil—leading to a detailed description of how drains work; the how-and-why of perched water table methods of construction; and sands are different from one another—they must be tested before use in turf root zones. These key messages are preceded by detailed descriptions of how water moves into soils and the effects of compaction on that movement. The final chapters give step-by-step guidelines for calculating drain spacings and depths, based on measurements of the hydraulic conductivity of the soil and its various layers. There are also chapters about how to measure hydraulic conductivity and how to design and install sub-soil drainage systems. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

great reference
This book provides an excellent, easy to follow description about not only sportsturf drainage but drainage in general. The diagrams also prove very helpful to aid in understanding the material. Highly recommended. ... Read more

Book Description

This book bridges the gap between users of drip irrigation systems and soil physicists, agronomists, horticulturists, hydraulic engineers, designers and manufacturers. Emphasis is placed on the practical aspects of drip irrigation and the principles of drip system design from the choice of emitters and laterals to the design of the main lines, with sections on filtration, fertigation and subsurface drip design, with a special chapter on the monitoring and management of these systems. ... Read more

Book Description

Commonly, we think of soil as just a medium to walk above or build upon. If we had the ability to shrink ourselves to the size of a soil particle, we would be amazed at the vibrant life and ever-changing interactions taking place all around us. The activity, physical changes and diverse life forms would overwhelm the senses. Soil moisture fuels this activity. The soil and water dynamic together as one entity is both the introduction and ending of a novel on the living. Where time is a method used to record events, the soil-water dynamic is time. Together, they tell us where we've been and point us in the direction we need to go.

"Retaining Soil Moisture in the American Southwest" is a culmination of the author's extensive interest in soil and water interactions, soil remediation, land application of treated wastes, conservation, air, soil, and water quality issues, and an overall appreciation for improvement for the quality of life.

Awareness of the players in the soil-water-plant continuum aids in understanding the processes that either reduce or conserve soil moisture. The dry climate of the American Southwest demands this understanding to ensure that waters which may have taken hundreds to thousands to millions of years to amass are not wiped out in the span of a generation. ... Read more

Book Description

In the Kangra Valley of India's western Himalaya, farmers have for centuries relied on community-managed kuhl systems--intricate networks of collectively built and maintained irrigation channels--for their rice and wheat farming. Over the years, earthquakes and floods have repeatedly destroyed villagers' kuhls. More recently, increasing nonfarm employment has drawn labor away from kuhl maintenance and from farming itself. Prevailing theories of common property resource management suggest that such conditions should cause the kuhls to die out; instead, most have beentransformed and remain alive and well.

In this book, Mark Baker offers a comprehensive explanation for the durability of the kuhls of Kangra in the face of recurring environmental shocks and socioeconomic change. In addition to describing how farmers use and organize the kuhls, he employs varied lines of theory and empirical data to account for the persistence of most kuhls (and the demise of a few) in the late twentieth century. Into his explanatory framework he incorporates the history of regional politics and economics as they affected kuhls during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods; the role of state involvement in kuhl construction and management; the benefits of exchanges of labor and water among members of networked kuhls; and the ways in which kuhl systems are embedded in and reproduce core cultural beliefs and practices.

Scholars interested in common property resource regimes have long focused on self-organizing, community-based irrigation systems. Yet their theories cannot entirely account for the durability of common property regimes under the extreme conditions of ecological stress, economic change, and social differentiation that exist in Kangra. Baker adds new dimensions to such theories by reaching beyond them to incorporate "exogenous" factors such as the roles statemaking practices play in common property resource regimes, the importance of networks in buffering individual resource regimes from environmental stress, and the ways in which regimes are sites for reproducing and occasionally contesting the relations that constitute place and region.In doing so, he advances a new way of thinking about community-based systems of resource management--a timely subject given recent trends in many countries toward the devolution of authority over natural resource management from government to rural communities. ... Read more

Book Description

The author of this book has traveled extensively in many desert and semi-desert territories of the U.S.S.R., Morocco, Tunisia, the Egyptian region of the U.A.R., Pakistan and India where he realized the importance of water for the reclamation of vast areas of arid and semi-arid lands.

During his visits the author became acquainted with the theory and practice of land irrigation in many countries of North Africa and Asia.

The present book is the first attempt at generalizing the vast amount of material dealing with the hydrogeology of the irrigated lands of the arid zone of North Africa and Asia, stretching from the African coastline of the Atlantic Ocean to the central parts of Asia.

Outlined in this book are the origin and distribution of saline lands in the deserts of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Iran Highlands, Middle Asia, China and Mongolia.A description is given of the surface waters in irrigated areas of the arid zone together with the sources, movement and draining, infiltration, condensation and evaporation of water in the desert and semi-desert territories.The book gives a sketch of the regime of free ground waters in irrigated areas and methods of studying it, problems of water balance and its forecasting, based on experimental research and simple theoretical calculations.Principles of the hydrogeological division of irrigated lands into districts and basic measures to prevent their salinization are also given.

The book can serve as a textbook for engineer-hydrogeologists, melioration specialists and students at specialized hydrogeological and agricultural institutes and schools. ... Read more

Book Description

This book draws together the knowledge that has been gained in irrigation and drainage performance assessment over the last 10 to 15 yers. Performance assessment is an essential management task. If the use of water for irrigation is to be improved, then we must understand current levels of performance and identify measures for improvement. This book provides guidelines to enable practitioners to apply the process and procedures that have evolved. Developed by a working group of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID), it provides a theory and practice of how to audit and assess the performance of irrigation and drainage schemes. This book will be of interes to researchers and professionals in irrigation, drainage, soils and agricultural engineering. ... Read more

Book Description

Utilizing observation-based research approaches to study the dynamic behavior of global water systems and the underlying variables affecting global water balance and supply, this reference specifically focuses on the study, characteristics, and management of fossil groundwaters—providing more than 280 current references, tables, and figures for comprehensive examination and further study of the global water cycle, the geohydroderm, and its major groundwater-containing geosystems. ... Read more

Book Description

In recent years there has been growing worldwide concern about a wide range of issues relating to the management of riverine basins.Significant advances have now been made in the development and application of hydroinformatics software tools, integrated within management information systems, to ensure that efficient and cost-effective environmental management and engineering decisions are made. Presenting contributions from the First International Conference on River Basin Management, this book marks the increasing academic and professional interest being shown in this field.

Topics highlighted include Total Catchment Modelling and Management;Riverine Hydraulics and Hydrology;Flood Mapping and Prediction;Wetland Restoration and Management;Water Quality and Environmental Modelling;Ecological and Bacteriological Perspectives;Hydrological Modelling, GIS and Remote Sensing;Hydroinformatics Technologies;and Engineering Solutions and Case Studies.Specific projects from a wide range of areas including Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Far East are also reviewed.

The papers featured will be of interest to many specialists including environmental managers, consulting engineers and planners, and staff in regulatory authorities, government departments and water companies, as well as the scientific and academic communities. ... Read more

Book Description

AudienceAgricultural engineers, irrigation specialists, landscape architects, golf course architects, and USDA regulators. ... Read more

Book Description

This is a reprint of a 1959 Soviet publication. The introduction of modern industrial methods into the intensively expanding agriculture of the Soviet Union has caused an active development in many other branches of knowledge. One such sphere, the detailed research of underground water regimes and the extensive utilization of these sources, covering the entire territory of the country, is indispensable for proper irrigation, land reclamation, construction of ponds and reservoirs, as well as for rural water supply. This is of particular importance in the arid southeastern and southern regions. The All-Union Institute of Hydrology and Engineering Geology has therefore printed the present manual with the aim of presenting the principles of underground water processes as the natural result of individual stages in their historical development. ... Read more

Book Description

With limited water resources to divert for agriculture, innovations aimed at increasing efficient use of irrigation water must be developed. Among the means to survive the consequences of water scarcity and yet to sustain high crop production under irrigated agriculture with decreasing share of water, deficient irrigation programs are highly valued and their adoption is widely promoted. However, to ensure that the same level of crop yields as in full irrigation can still be achieved with deficient irrigation, experience regarding crop yield response to deficient irrigation programs must be gained. This book discusses general concept and management issues of deficient irrigation practices, covering a wide range of field crops including cotton, maize, soybean, wheat, sugar cane, and the like, based on five years of field research implemented in fourteen different countries, in Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia. Additionally, guidelines are given for experimental methodology and data analysis for evaluating crop yield response to deficient irrigation. Experimental data, discussions and cited references will be an asset not only to field irrigation engineers but also to research scientists including soil and irrigation scientists and agronomists, for whom the book would be an invaluable reference source. ... Read more