Networks on networks : the physics of geobiology and geochemistry /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Hunt, Allen G. (Allen Gerhard), author.
Imprint:San Rafael [California] (40 Oak Drive, San Rafael, CA, 94903, USA) : Morgan & Claypool Publishers, [2015]
Bristol [England] (Temple Circus, Temple Way, Bristol BS1 6HG, UK) : IOP Publishing, [2015]
Description:1 online resource (various pagings) : illustrations (some color).
Language:English
Series:[IOP release 2]
IOP concise physics, 2053-2571
IOP (Series). Release 2.
IOP concise physics.
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11319921
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Varying Form of Title:Physics of geobiology and geochemistry.
Other authors / contributors:Manzoni, Stefano, author.
Morgan & Claypool Publishers, publisher.
Institute of Physics (Great Britain), publisher.
ISBN:9781681741598
9781681742236
9781681740317
Notes:"Version: 20151201"--Title page verso.
"A Morgan & Claypool publication as part of IOP Concise Physics"--Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
Also available in print.
Allen Hunt was trained as a physicist in the application of percolation theory to transport in disordered systems. Post-doctoral experience in soil physics, geomorphology, and hydrology acquainted him with a series of difficult physics problems in porous media, particularly those of soil formation and soil processes. Hunt has over more than 120 refereed publications in the above fields, climate dynamics, and biological sciences in 45 traditionally archived journals, including Nature. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, and a National Science Foundation Program Director. He is currently Professor at Wright State University, with appointments in the Physics Department and in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department. His book, Percolation Theory for Flow in Porous Media (Lecture Notes in Physics, Springer) has gone through three editions in the past 10 years. He has earned teaching distinctions at the local and national levels, and his PhD student, Behzad Ghanbarian, received the Turcotte Award in 2015 from the American Geophysical Union for his dissertation advancing the science of non-linear geophysics. Stefano Manzoni graduated magna cum laude in Environmental Engineering from Politecnico of Torino (Italy) in 2004. He moved to Duke University to pursue a PhD in Hydrology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a focus on the linkages between hydrology and biogeochemical cycling in soils. As a Research Scientist in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University he investigated how plants respond to changing water availability. After gaining further experience in the area of plant science and ecology at the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences, he joined the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University, as a Senior Lecturer. There he continues developing models to capture the hydro-climatic impacts on vegetation and soil processes spanning physiological to global scales. Manzoni has 45 articles in multidisciplinary, soil science, ecology, and hydrology journals, including Science and Ecology Letters. In 2014, he received the 'AGU Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award' in recognition of his new theories of soil water-biota interactions.
Title from PDF title page (viewed on January 10, 2016).
Summary:Order from chaos is simultaneously a mantra of physics and a reality in biology. Physicist Norman Packard suggested that life developed and thrived at the edge of chaos. Questions remain, however, as to how much practical knowledge of biology can be traced to existing physical principles, and how much physics has to change in order to address the complexity of biology. Phil Anderson, a physics Nobel laureate, contributed to popularizing a new notion of the end of 'reductionism'. In this view, it is necessary to abandon the quest of reducing complex behavior to known physical results, and to identify emergent behaviors and principles. In the present book, however, we have sought physical rules that can underlie the behavior of biota as well as the geochemistry of soil development. We looked for fundamental principles, such as the dominance of water flow paths with the least cumulative resistance, that could maintain their relevance across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, together with the appropriate description of solute transport associated with such flow paths. Thus, ultimately, we address both nutrient and water transport limitations of processes from chemical weathering to vascular plant growth. The physical principles guiding our effort are established in different, but related concepts and fields of research, so that in fact our book applies reductionist techniques guided by analogy. The fact that fundamental traits extend across biotic and abiotic processes, i.e., the same fluid flow rate is relevant to both, but that distinctions in topology of the connected paths lead to dramatic differences in growth rates, helps unite the study of these nominally different disciplines of geochemistry and geobiology within the same framework. It has been our goal in writing this book to share the excitement of learning, and one of the most exciting portions to us has been the ability to bring some order to the question of the extent to which soils can facilitate plant growth, and what limitations on plant sizes, metabolism, occurrence, and correlations can be formulated thereby. While we bring order to the soil constraints on growth, we also generate some uncertainties in the scaling relationships of plant growth and metabolism. Although we have made a first attempt to incorporate edaphic constraints into allometric scaling, this is but an initial foray into the forest.
Target Audience:Earth & environmental scientists, engineers, and students.
Other form:Print version: 9781681740317
Standard no.:10.1088/978-1-6817-4159-8
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Foreword
  • 1. The physics of geobiology and geochemistry
  • 1.1. Introduction
  • 1.2. Fundamental scaling relationships : advection versus diffusion
  • 1.3. Summary
  • 2. Percolation theory, the effective-medium approximation and upscaling
  • 2.1. Introduction and background
  • 2.2. Percolation theory and scaling properties
  • 2.3. Critical path analysis
  • 2.4. The effective-medium approximation
  • 3. Physical, hydraulic and conduction properties in porous media using percolation theory
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. Media models
  • 3.3. Saturated hydraulic conductivity
  • 3.4. Saturation-dependent properties
  • 4. Solute transport in soils and other heterogeneous porous media
  • 4.1. Percolation theory of solute transport
  • 4.2. Dispersivity
  • 4.3. Solute arrival time distributions
  • 4.4. Reaction-rate scaling
  • 4.5. Summary
  • 5. Water transport in plants
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • 5.2. Pore scale
  • 5.3. Tissue scale
  • 5.4. Ecological implications of the safety-efficiency trade-off
  • 5.5. Plant scale
  • 6. Allometric scaling and metabolism
  • 6.1. Introduction
  • 6.2. A general model for scaling of metabolic rate
  • 6.3. Plant allometry emerging from fractal branching network
  • 6.4. The problem of conduit furcation
  • 6.5. Scaling of above-ground and below-ground characteristic sizes
  • 6.6. Scaling of size and age
  • 6.7. Ecosystem scale
  • 7. Edaphic constraints : the role of the soil in vegetation growth
  • 7.1. Introduction and motivation
  • 7.2. Fundamental results
  • 7.3. Soil data
  • 7.4. Vascular plant data
  • 7.5. Generalizations and implications
  • 7.6. Concluding remarks
  • 8. Revisiting the Gaia hypothesis.