Policy-makers and the public, it has famously been said, are more interested in the possibility of non-linear dislocations and surprises in the behaviour of the environment than in smooth extrapolations of current trends. The International Task Force in Forecasting Environmental Change (1993-1998) dedicated its work to developing procedures...

Recent research by the EPA has concluded that one in six women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies, which puts 630,000 newborn babies each year at risk of neurological impairment. Mercury poses severe risks to the health of animals and...

Modeling problems in this book are addressed mainly from the computational viewpoint. The primary concerns are how to define an objective function for the optimal solution to a image analysis or computer vision problem and how to find the optimal solution. The solution is defined in an optimization sense because the perfect solution is...

This book advocates a fresh approach to planning that anticipates, rather than reacts to, the changes in climate currently in process. Today’s spatial planning procedures rely on historical evidence instead of preparing for factors that by definition lie in the future, yet which are relatively uncontroversial: shortages of water, sea...

Surfaces are a central to geographical analysis. Their generation and manipulation are a key component of geographical information systems (GISs). However, geographical surface data is often not precise. When surfaces are used to model geographical entities, the data inherently contains uncertainty in terms of both position and attribute....

In this book, a systematic treatment of this practical design...

Reliability-based design is the only engineering methodology currently available which can ensure self-consistency in both physical and probabilistic terms.  It is also uniquely compatible with the theoretical basis underlying other disciplines such as structural design. It is especially relevant as geotechnical design becomes subject to...

The sliding mode control methodology has proven effective in dealing with complex dynamical systems affected by disturbances, uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics. Robust control technology based on this methodology has been applied to many real-world problems, especially in the areas of aerospace control, electric power systems,...