Featuring papers from the Ninth International Conference on Water Pollution, this volume covers coastal areas and seas, lakes and rivers, groundwater and aquifer issues, oil spills, agricultural contamination, environmental monitoring and sensing, and remote sensing applications.

In 1997, New York City adopted a mammoth watershed agreement to protect its drinking water and avoid filtration of its large upstate surface water supply. Shortly thereafter, the NRC began an analysis of the agreement's scientific validity. The resulting book finds New York City's watershed agreement to be a good template for proactive watershed management that, if properly implemented, will maintain high water quality. However, it cautions that the agreement is not a guarantee of permanent filtration avoidance because of changing regulations, uncertainties regarding pollution sources, advances in treatment technologies, and natural variations in watershed conditions. The book recommends that New York City place its highest priority on pathogenic microorganisms in the watershed and direct its resources toward improving methods for detecting pathogens, understanding pathogen transport and fate, and demonstrating that best management practices will remove pathogens. Other recommendations, which are broadly applicable to surface water supplies across the country, target buffer zones, stormwater management, water quality monitoring, and effluent trading.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Biochemical ecology is here presented only in the context of water pollution. This is not to minimize the importance of land animals and plants in their environment or the significance of air pollution as it relates to ecology. It merely indicates that water pollution is a problem of sufficiently broad magnitude to warrant consideration by itself. Water pollution is a problem which requires the attention of a variety of disciplines. The presentation tends therefore to follow the problem ap proach, as do most interdisciplinary topics. An appreciation of various viewpoints is needed among chemists, ecologists, economists, engineers, lawyers, limnologists, managers, microbiologists, and politicians, whose communications are often "hung up" in each other's jargon. Perhaps the presentation is too elementary at times. This was done in an attempt to bridge the diverse backgrounds of those concerned with the subject. It is hoped that engineers, economists, biologists, public servants, and others will gain a greater appreciation of the interrelationship of gross observations and biological events that occur at the cellular and molecular level. Lack of such understanding is, to a large extent, the reason for our present environmental condition. At other times the presentation is perhaps too technical. This was done on the assumption that some information on chemical details may not be readily available but is desirable for an "in depth" appreciation of the biochemical events encountered in water pollu tion.

Ninth International Conference on Water Pollution Research focuses on the methods, measures, and technologies involved in the treatment of wastewater, including the treatment of sludges and pollutants in bodies of water. The selection first offers information on carbon adsorption as an advanced wastewater treatment process, nitrification of surface water, and methods for measuring the thickenability of sludges. Topics include factors that influence adsorption, principle of biological nitrification, and characterization of sludges. The text also discusses the utilization of pulped newsprint as a conditioning aid in the vacuum filtration of a municipal sludge and the purification of pulp-bleaching wastewater with aluminum oxide. The publication reviews the properties and treatment of lime-algae sludge, concept of filterability, prediction of bacterial pollution in sea water, and the role of retained particles in deep bed filtration. The text also describes the immediate and continuous measurement of activated sludge quantity in sewage biological treatment tanks; comparative assessment of pollution loadings from non-point sources in urban land use; and wastewater control technology in steam-electric power plants. The book is a vital reference for readers interested in water pollution research.