An important part of the risk management of natural hazards in mountain regions concerns the hazard assessment and the planning of protection measures in steep headwater catchments, i.e. torrent control and slope stabilization. Torrent processes in steep channels have their rightful place among the various alpine natural hazards and the correspondi

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As the vast expanses of natural forests and the great populations of salmonids are harvested to support a rapidly expanding human population, the need to understand streams as ecological systems and to manage them effectively becomes increasingly urgent. The unfortunate legacy of such natural resource exploitation is well documented. For several decades the Pacific coastal ecoregion of North America has served as a natural laboratory for scientific and managerial advancements in stream ecology, and much has been learned about how to better integrate ecological processes and characteristics with a human-dominated environment. These in sightful but hard-learned ecological and social lessons are the subject of this book. Integrating land and rivers as interactive components of ecosystems and watersheds has provided the ecological sciences with impor tant theoretical foundations. Even though scientific disciplines have begun to integrate land-based processes with streams and rivers, the institutions and processes charged with managing these systems have not done so successfully. As a result, many of the watersheds of the Pacific coastal ecoregion no longer support natural settings for environmental processes or the valuable natural resources those processes create. An important role for scientists, educators, and decision makers is to make the integration between ecology and con sumptive uses more widely understood, as well as useful for effective management.

Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) describes an approach to system development that is process-oriented. It makes no great distinction between hardware and software. It has a major root in the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). However, the underlying theory is not limited to CSP. The importance of mobility of both channel and process within a network sees integration with ideas from the ð-calculus. Other formalisms are also exploited, such as BSP and MPI. The focus is on sound methods for the engineering of significant concurrent systems, including those that are distributed (across the Internet or within a single chip) and/or software-scheduled on a single execution unit. Traditionally, at CPA, the emphasis has been on theory and practice - developing and applying tools based upon CSP and related theories to build high-integrity systems of significant size. In particular, interest focuses on achieving scalability and security against error. The development of Java, C, and C++, libraries to facilitate secure concurrent programming using 'mainstream' languages has allowed CPA to continue and proliferate. This work continues in support of the engineering of distributed applications. Recently, there has been greater reference to theory and its more direct application to programming systems and languages. In this volume the formal CSP is very well presented. The papers provide a healthy mixture of the academic and commercial, software and hardware, application and infrastructure, which reflects the nature of the discipline.

In recent years there has been a marked increase in funding andemployment in river restoration. Methods in Fluvial Geomorphologyprovides an integrated approach to the interdisciplinary nature ofthe subject and offers guidance for researchers and professionalson the tools available to answer questions on river management onvery difference scales. * Each chapter is organised to cover everything from generalconcepts to specific techniques * Topics covered include evolution of methods, guiding concepts, aframework for deciding when to apply specific tools, advantages andlimitation of the tools, sources of data, equipment and suppliesneeded, and a summary table * Provides the professional with a useful handbook covering alltools used in fluvial geomorphology * Also provides valuable information on the advantages andlimitations of the tools * All chapters include case studies to give examples of theapplications of the tools discussed