The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century witnessed important changes in ecology, climate and human behaviour that favoured the development of urban pests. Most alarmingly, urban planners now face the dramatic expansion of urban sprawl, in which city suburbs are growing into the natural habitats of ticks, rodents and other pests. Also, many city managers now erroneously assume that pest-borne diseases are relics of the past. All these changes make timely a new analysis of the direct and indirect effects of present-day urban pests on health. Such an analysis should lead to the development of strategies to manage them and reduce the risk of exposure. To this end, WHO invited international experts in various fields - pests, pest-related diseases and pest management - to provide evidence on which to base policies. These experts identified the public health risk posed by various pests and appropriate measures to prevent and control them. This book presents their conclusions and formulates policy options for all levels of decision-making to manage pests and pest-related diseases in the future. [Ed.]

The adoption of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 is a major landmark for the global governance of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. The way in which it will be translated into practice will however depend on the concrete implementation in national country legislation across the world. Implementing the Nagoya Protocol compares existing ABS regimes in ten European countries, including one non-EU member and one EU candidate country, and critically explores several cross-cutting issues related to the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol in the EU. Gathering some of the most professional and widely acclaimed experts in ABS issues, this book takes a major step towards filling a gap in the vast body of literature on national and regional implementation of global commitments regarding ABS and traditional knowledge.

The Encyclopedia of Caves and Karst Science contains 350 alphabetically arranged entries. The topics include cave and karst geoscience, cave archaeology and human use of caves, art in caves, hydrology and groundwater, cave and karst history, and conservation and management. The Encyclopedia is extensively illustrated with photographs, maps, diagrams, and tables, and has thematic content lists and a comprehensive index to facilitate searching and browsing.

This vividly illustrated history of the International Congress of Mathematicians- a meeting of mathematicians from around the world held roughly every four years- acts as a visual history of the 25 congresses held between 1897 and 2006, as well as a story of changes in the culture of mathematics over the past century. Because the congress is an int

Presented at a symposium held in 1990 to celebrate the Getty Museum's acquisition of the only known illuminated copy of The Visions of Tondal, twenty essays address the celebrated bibliophilic activity of Margaret of York; the career of Simon Marmion, a favorite artist of the Burgundian court; and The Visions of Tondal in relation to illustrated visions of the Middle Ages. Contributors include Maryan Ainsworth, Wim Blockmans, Walter Cahn, Albert Derolez, Peter Dinzelbacher, Rainald Grosshans, Sandra Hindman, Martin Lowry, Nigel Morgan, and Nigel Palmer.

This book is a comprehensive study of secession from an international law perspective.

Alluvial fans are important sedimentary environments. They trap sediment delivered from mountain source areas, and exert an important control on the delivery of sediment to downstream environments, to axial drainages and to sedimentary basins. They preserve a sensitive record of environmental change within the mountain source areas. Alluvial fan geomorphology and sedimentology reflect not only drainage basin size and geology, but change in response to tectonic, climatic and base-level controls. One of the challenges facing alluvial fan research is to resolve how these gross controls are reflected in alluvial fan dynamics and to apply the results of studies of modern fan processes and Quaternary fans to the understanding of sedimentary sequences in the rock record. This volume includes papers based on up-to-date research, and focuses on three themes: alluvial fan processes, dynamics of Quaternary alluvial fans and fan sedimentary sequences. Linking the papers is an emphasis on the controls of fan geomorphology, sedimentology and dynamics. This provides a basis for integration between geomorphological and sedimentological approaches, and an understanding how fluvial systems respond to tectonic, climatic and base-level changes.