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Medicinal plant research is an evergreen subject. There is a tremendous increase in popularity of herbal medicine in traditional medicine, ethnomedicine, modern medicine and as over the counter food supplements. Even after this increased demand, supply is neither uniform nor assured as most of these plants are collected from wild. In developing countries of tropical and subtropical regions where majority of herbal drugs are produced, this is not organised sector making it vulnerable to several malpractices, hence standardization of all aspects required. This has also negative impact on biodiversity and conservation of plants as well as supply of uniform material. This book is aimed to provide up to date information about sustainable use of selected medicinal plants, their active ingredients and efforts made to domesticate them to ensured uniform supply. Development of agrotechnology, biotechnology and cultivation practices using conventional and non-conventional methods arepresented. Where these efforts will lead the medicinal plant research and future perspective are discussed. The chapters are written by well recognised group leaders in working in the field. The book contains topics on general biology of medicinal plants, their sustainable use and, cultivation and domestication efforts. A uniform chapter structure has been designed to keep consistency. The book will be useful for academicians, agriculturists, biotechnologists and researcher, and industries involved in manufacturing herbal drugs and supplementary products.

This is a comprehensive regional geography synthesis of the most important physical and human spatial processes that shaped Serbia and led to many interesting regional issues, not only to Serbia but to the Balkans and Europe. The book provides an overall view on the Serbian physical environment, its population and economy. It also highlights important regional issues such as regional disparities and depopulation, sustainable development and ecological issues and rural economy in the context of rural area development, which have been shaped by different political and historical processes.This highly illustrated book provides interesting and informative insights into Serbia and its context within the Balkans and Europe. It appeals to scientists and students as well as travelers and general readers interested in this region.

This book identifies the cultural and moral foundations of country-specific educational governance and school leadership and presents the principles of justice and the diversity of common goods that guide leadership practices in schools. It contributes to an existing research field that studies diversity and ethical leadership in schools. The social dimension of school leadership is not limited to issues related to equality and equity, or social inclusion. The capacity of leaders to promote civic-mindedness and social cooperation, consensus and acceptance of others, the right balance between freedom and duties, and reciprocity of obligations, are essential to maintain democratic rights and facilitate the life together while respecting ethnic and cultural differences. Therefore, the book gathers contributions from a range of international authors capable of reporting these moral and cultural features, while broadening the research perspectives on school leadership.

This edited volume covers many aspects of the Metropolitan Landscapes. Solutions are needed to meet the demand of the citizens of a renewed metropolitan region landscape. It opens up discussions about possible toolkits for strategic actions based on understanding the territory from geographical, urban, architectural, economic, environmental, and public policy perspectives. This book intends to promote the Metropolitan dwelling quality, ensuring human well-being proposing a discussion on the resilient articulation of the interface space among the city's infrastructure, agriculture, and nature.This book results from the Symposium: Metropolitan Landscapes that MSLab of the Politecnico di Milano and ETSA (Sevilla) organized at the IALE 2019 Conference (Milan, July 2019) to manage radical territory transformation with a strategic vision. The widespread growth of urban areas indicates the importance of building resilient sustainable cities capable of minimizing climate-change impact production.The Symposium aimed to discuss the Urban Metabolism approach considering the combination of Landscapes set in a single Metropolitan Ecosystem. Accordingly, new design strategies of transformation, replacement or maintenance can compose Urban-Rural Linkage patterns and a decalage of different landscape contexts. Ecological interest in environmental sustainability, compatibility, and resilience is not tied exclusively to the balance between production and energy consumption. Thus, it is the integration over time and at several scales of the urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants that nourish the Metropolitan Bioregion.Moreover, the Metropolitan Landscape Book's research hypothesis is the need for a Glossary, strengthening the basis of understanding Metropolitan Landscape's complexity.This book's topic is particularly relevant to Landscape Urbanism, Architecture, Urban disciplines Scholars, Students and Practitioners who want to be connectedin a significant way with Metropolitan Discipline¿s research field.

This book defines and describes a new discipline, named ¿computational psychometrics,¿ from the perspective of new methodologies for handling complex data from digital learning and assessment. The editors and the contributing authors discuss how new technology drastically increases the possibilities for the design and administration of learning and assessment systems, and how doing so significantly increases the variety, velocity, and volume of the resulting data. Then they introduce methods and strategies to address the new challenges, ranging from evidence identification and data modeling to the assessment and prediction of learners¿ performance in complex settings, as in collaborative tasks, game/simulation-based tasks, and multimodal learning and assessment tasks.Computational psychometrics has thus been defined as a blend of theory-based psychometrics and data-driven approaches from machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. All these together provide a better methodological framework for analysing complex data from digital learning and assessments. The term ¿computational¿ has been widely adopted by many other areas, as with computational statistics, computational linguistics, and computational economics. In those contexts, ¿computational¿ has a meaning similar to the one proposed in this book: a data-driven and algorithm-focused perspective on foundations and theoretical approaches established previously, now extended and, when necessary, reconceived. This interdisciplinarity is already a proven success in many disciplines, from personalized medicine that uses computational statistics to personalized learning that uses, well, computational psychometrics. We expect that this volume will be of interest not just within but beyond the psychometric community.In this volume, experts in psychometrics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and natural language processing illustrate their work, showing how the interdisciplinary expertise of each researcher blends into a coherent methodological framework to deal with complex data from complex virtual interfaces. In the chapters focusing on methodologies, the authors use real data examples to demonstrate how to implement the new methods in practice. The corresponding programming codes in R and Python have been included as snippets in the book and are also available in fuller form in the GitHub code repository that accompanies the book.

This book focuses on sustainability concepts in architecture and urban design, environmental issues, and natural resources. Today it has become essential to reduce carbon emissions, protect habitats, and preserve the delicate ecosystems of our planet. Accordingly, sustainable development has to be improved by decreasing the consumption of non-renewable resources, in order to help nature replenish itself.Further, it highlights the efforts that have been made by architects, environmentalists, engineers, students, planners and everyone in between in order to improve sustainability in various developing communities and countries.

This text covers the key technologies employed in wireless links that enable increased data rates and thus are likely to be employed in support of 5G wireless transport networks, i.e., backhaul, midhaul, and fronthaul networks. The author presents technologies at an introductory level but nonetheless at a level that imparts to the reader a sound understanding of the fundamentals. The book is intended for those practicing engineers and graduate and upper undergraduate students who have an interest in acquiring, where missing, the necessary technology background in order to comprehend the functioning and capability of 5G based wireless transport links. The author focuses on those technologies that are key to achieving the high data rates and high reliability required of this transport. The material is presented in a clear, concise, and mathematically light fashion.Covers key wireless transport (backhaul, midhaul, and fronthaul) technologies for 5G and beyond, presented in a clear tractable fashion;Outlines the basic wireless transport transmitter/receiver terminal architecture, provides specifications of some such terminals, and indicates the link performance afforded by such terminals;Provides sufficient mathematics to make it technically coherent, but not so much as to make it challenging for a reader with no or limited familiarity with these technologies.

This book provides a general overview and current state of the art of different types of metal oxide nanomaterials, either in nanoparticles or thin film structure. It covers from the development and optimization of different nanofabrication/synthesis techniques for nanostructures which are currently the attention of the research community, the study of the structure and interactions by different characterization techniques of heterostructured materials and the final impact in different applications such as nanotherapy, data storage, super magnets, high-frequency devices. The book¿s 13 chapters provide deep insight into the intriguing science of oxide materials and include contributions on novel technologies to fabricate nanomaterials with a broad range of functional properties (semiconducting, magnetic, ferroelectric, thermoelectric, optical, flexible and mechanical). This book is intended to the experts for consolidation of their knowledge but also for students who aim to learn and get basics of nanostructured metal oxides in diverse forms.

This edited volume examines how climate action plans engage justice at the scale of the city. Recent events in the United States make the context particularly ripe for a discussion of justice in urban climate politics. On the one hand, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd¿s death, and the prominence of racial discrimination in the public realm have mainstreamed the notion of justice. On the other hand, the dire consequences of increased frequency and severity of climate events on vulnerable segments of urban populations are undeniable. While some cities have been proactive about integrating justice in their climate action planning, in most places an explicit and systematic link between both spheres has been lacking. This book explores this interface as it seeks to understand how cities can respond to climate change in a just way and for just outcomes. While resilience strategies based on ¿development¿ may engage historic inequities, they may at the same time result in marginalizing certain populations through various processes, from mismatched solutions to outright exclusion and climate gentrification. By identifying how certain populations are included in or excluded from climate action planning practices, the chapters in this volume draw on case studies to outline the differential outcomes of climate action in American cities, also proposing a template for comparative work beyond the US. The authors tackle the debate about how justice is or is not integrated in climate action plans and assess practical implications, while also making theoretical and methodological contributions. As it fills a gap in the literature at the intersection of justice and climate action, the book produces new insights for a wide-ranging audience: students, practitioners, policy-makers, planners, the non-profit sector, and scholars in geography, urban planning, urban studies, environmental studies, ecology, political science, or anthropology. Along five axes of investigation¿theory, resilience, equity, community, and comparison as method¿the contributors offer various pathways into the intersection between urban climate action and different understandings of justice. Collectively, they invite a reflection that can lead to practical initiatives in climate mitigation, while also advancing the theorization of social justice to account for the urban as a node where (in)justice plays out and can be addressed with significant results.

The book contains two contributions about the work of Emmanuele DiBenedetto and a selection of original papers. The authors are some of the main experts in Harnack¿s inequalities and nonlinear operators. These papers are part of the contributions presented during the conference to celebrate the 70th birthday of Prof. Emmanuele DiBenedetto, which was held at ¿Il Palazzone¿ in Cortona from June 18th to 24th, 2017. The papers are focused on current research topics regarding the qualitative properties of solutions, connections with calculus of variations, Harnack inequality and regularity theory. Some papers are also related to various applications. Many of the authors have shared with Prof. DiBenedetto an intense scientific and personal collaboration, while many others have taken inspiration from and further developed his field of research. The topics of the conference are certainly of great interest for the international mathematical community.

In this book international geography educators discuss the ways in which geographical knowledge is recontextualised in schools and consider effective approaches to facilitate, improve and advance geography education in research and practice. It addresses key topics in recontextualising geography such as the epistemic relationships between the university discipline and the school subject, designing and evaluating the geography curriculum, the role of students in the transformation of knowledge in the classroom and selecting and transforming geographical content knowledge for the primary school curriculum. At an international level, the contributors and editors bring together an advanced collection of research and discussion surrounding the opportunities and challenges of recontextualising geography in education. The book is of interest to geography educators internationally, including academics at universities, teachers in schools, and professional geographers with an interestin education.

This book covers the range of methodological approaches, methods and tools currently used in various areas of building science and technology research and addresses the current lack of research-method literature in this field. The book covers the use of measurement-based methods in which data is collected by measuring the properties and their variations in ¿actual¿ physical systems, simulation-based methods which work with ¿models¿ of systems or processes to describe, examine and analyze their behaviors, performances and operations, and data-driven methodologies in which data is collected via measurement or simulation to identify and examine the associations and patterns and predict the future in a targeted system. The book presents a survey of key methodologies in various specialized areas of building science and technology research including window systems, building enclosure, energy performance, lighting and daylighting, computational fluid dynamics, indoor and outdoor thermal comfort, and life cycle environmental impacts.Provides advanced insight into the research methods and presents the key methodologies within the field of building science and technology.Reviews simulation-based and experimentation/field-based methods of data collection and analysis in diverse areas of building science and technology, such as energy performance, window and enclosure studies, environmental LCA, daylighting, CFD, and thermal comfort.Provides a range of perspectives from building science faculty and researcher contributors with diverse research interests.Appropriate for use in university courses.

This book focuses on the role of hydrogen sulfide in the protection of plants against abiotic stresses and abiotic stress-induced complications by the way of converging advanced key methods of proteomics, genomics, and metabolomics. It provides an update on the biosynthesis, signaling, and mechanism of action of hydrogen sulfide in combating abiotic stresses in plants. Also, special emphasis is given to the interaction of hydrogen sulfide with other signaling molecules (such as nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen peroxide etc.), phytohormones, mineral nutrients, ions, and ion channels in plants.This work, uniquely, covers key aspects of hydrogen sulfide signaling in relation to abiotic stresses in plants, including programmed cell death, stomatal movement, and fruit ripening.

This exciting new book brings fresh knowledge of affective pedagogies in early childhood education and care. The book draws on cultural-historical theory in alignment with visual methodologies to elucidate infant-toddlers¿ affective pedagogies through analysis of case examples. The book reveals contemporary pedagogical practices in the infant-toddler space like mealtimes, nappy change and play. These pedagogical practices show the highly specialised nature of working with infant-toddlers such as the affective relations between educators and infant-toddlers, affective dialogue, affective engagement, and the creation of affective spaces. The value of collaboration is highlighted through creating an affective space for educators to become aware, reflect and position themselves as effective and affective educators. The book introduces innovative methodological tools such as images and collective drawings for collaborative reflection.

This book encompasses current knowledge of soil microbiomes and their potential biotechnological application for plant growth, crop yield, and soil health under the natural as well as harsh environmental conditions for sustainable agriculture. The microbes are ubiquitous in nature. The soil is a natural hotspot of the soil microbiome. The soil microbiome plays a critical role in the maintenance of global nutrient balance and ecosystem functioning. The soil microbiomes are associated with plant ecosystems through the intense network of plant¿microbe interactions. The microbes present in bulk soil move toward the rhizospheric region due to the release of different nutrients by plant systems. The rhizospheric microbes may survive or proliferate in rhizospheric zone depending on the extent of influences of the chemicals secreted into the soil by roots. The root exudates contain the principal nutrients factors (amino acids, glucose, fructose, and sucrose). The microbes present in rhizospheric region have capabilities to fix atmospheric nitrogen, produce different phytohormones, and solubilize phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. The plant systems take these nutrients for their growth and developments. These soil and plant associated microbes also play an important role in protection of plants from different plant pathogenic organisms by producing different secondary metabolites such as ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, siderophores, and hydrolytic enzymes. The soil microbiomes with plant growth-promoting (PGP) attributes have emerged as an important and promising tool for sustainable agriculture. The soil microbiomes promote the plant growth and enhance the crop yield and soil fertility via directly or indirectly different plant growth-promoting mechanism. The soil microbes help the plant for adaptation in extreme habitats by mitigating the abiotic stress of high/low temperatures, hypersalinity, drought, and acidic/alkaline soil. These PGP microbes are used as biofertilizers/bioinoculants to replace the harmful chemical fertilizers for sustainable agriculture and environments.The aim of the book ¿Soil Microbiomes for Sustainable Agriculture¿ is to provide the recent advances in mechanisms of plant growth promotion and applications of soil microbiomes for mitigation of different abiotic stresses in plants. The book is useful to scientists, researchers, and students related to microbiology, biotechnology, agriculture, molecular biology, environmental biology, and related subjects.

The book aims to provide city administrators and planners with a tool to accompany them in experimenting with the regeneration of no longer used parts of the built heritage, called leftovers, by adopting an innovative approach. A new and radically different form of project, with the task of proposing a new aesthetic code and a style of thought aimed at creating shelters for nomads of the third millennium.In the design field, the 21st century will be destined to measure itself against temporariness and precariousness, also in terms of aesthetic practices. Based on this hypothesis, the text identifies the design of the unfinished as the perspective for attributing to the leftovers a character, which is representative of the conditions of the just begun century. Through a transdisciplinary, exhibition-like and reversible approach, the elements of degradation of the existing work are welcomed in the project as a "gift", to be translated into a syntax aimed at giving form and meaning to the internal and external environments, with the inclusion of "additional components".

The book presents governance with a particular focus on the social and spatial aspects of climate responsiveness and reads the practice of governance across different scales. It conceptualizes a framework of scale composed of three main categories including (i) scientific knowledge, (ii) plans and policies, and (iii) authorities of action. This framework presents ¿practice¿ as the social context in which these three can interplay adaptively. Within this framework, the book presents case studies from Turkey, Italy, Ecuador, Chile and the UK, that reach meaningful planning and design solutions at national, city, and neighbourhood scales in the face of climate change. It offers implementation clues that are transferable to ever-increasing climate action around the globe. The book will be of interest to both professionals and scholars involved in urban design, urban planning and architecture, especially those in the field of climate responsive urbanism. It will also be a valuable resource for non-governmental organizations and social enterprises dealing with sustainability and climate change policies.