Rapid transformation processes occur in the Majority World, where most of the global population is living (estimated around ¾ of the global population), often deprived of access to infrastructure, services, exposed to hazards and degrading environmental conditions. The continuous urbanization in many African, Asian and Latin American cities is coupled with rapid socio-economic and demographic changes in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. These changes often increase socio-economic fragmentation and existing disparities. According to the United Nations, of the 36 fastest growing cities (with an average annual growth rate of more than 6%), seven are located in Africa, while 28 are found in Asia. On top of the socio-economic transformations, the increasing impact of climate change is expected to increase local vulnerabilities. However, data to understand these transformation processes and relationships are either unavailable, scarce or come with high degrees of uncertainty. Earth Observation information and methods have a great potential to fill data gaps, but they are not exploited to their full potential. Most urban remote sensing studies in the Majority World focus on the primary cities, while not much is known about secondary cities, urbanizing zones or peri-urban areas.

Land deterioration, drought, desertification, and water resources shrinkage threaten natural resources, negatively impacting environmental, economic, and political stability. The increasing occurrence of climate change (extremes) impacts land degradation processes, soil erosion by water and wind, and salinization. The researchers have invested several years of scientific research in natural resources deterioration, including soil degradation and erosion, land degradation, desertification, and climate changes, which are interesting enough. However, the link between science and policymaking appears to be less active as serious actions do not take fast. The eighteen chapters of this book focus more on topics related to natural resources deterioration, such as land degradation, desertification, drought, climate change, and analysis of numerous case studies.

The book is an historical monograph on deep-sea mineral-related activities and attitudes towards deep-sea mining in the 20th Century which makes comparisons with the current situation in regard to those activities and attitudes. It reviews developments in the study of, and prospects and plans for mining deep-sea manganese nodules, cobalt-rich crusts, hydrothermal deposits, and phosphorites, and discusses associated environmental, technological, and economic issues. It is based on several sources. First, the author’s experience gleaned from around 50 years of attending conferences on the subject (the most important of which was the annual Underwater Mining Institutes held from 1970 onwards at which much of the material in the book was first exposed), second, discussions with and advice from the author's colleagues on the subject, all attributed, and third, the published literature.

This book explains different phenomena that occur in Naturally Fractured Reservoirs (NFRs) of carbonate rocks neighboring a salt structure and how it affects well drilling. Prediction of carbonate pore pressure is difficult; therefore, a new set of pore pressure equations for carbonates were developed, accounting for overpressure and depleted conditions. A detailed description of a fully coupled model is shown in order to discuss geomechanics and the coupling of fluid flow in porous media and to achieve a better representation of the mechanics involved in the exploitation of NFRs. Additionally, results of a new model of geomechanics in vuggy carbonate reservoirs are presented. This book also displays a wide discussion, analysis, and numerical implementation of six different salt rheology models. Furthermore, the most representative rheology salt models were studied aside with the fully coupled model of geomechanics and fluid flow in porous media. Finally, it presents an answer to areal case of a well drilled near a salt diapir where anomalous pore pressure was found.

This book compiles the second part of contributions to the China–Europe Conference on Geotechnical Engineering held 13.-16. August 2018 in Vienna, Austria. About 400 papers from 35 countries cover virtually all areas of geotechnical engineering and make this conference a truly international event.
The contributions are grouped into thirteen special sessions and provide an overview of the geoengineering research and practice in China, Europe and the world:

This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2019 (LEAP-ASIA-2019) following the LEAP-UCD-2017 whose results have been published as a first volume. In addition to the research targets set in the previous one, such as the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading on mildly sloping liquefiable sand, this volume includes research efforts to validate the generalized scaling law (hereafter “GSL”) for the identical prototype with the one employed in UCD-2017. In LEAP-ASIA-2019, 10 institutes around the world conducted 23 tests in total. It was the first multi-institutional attempts to investigate the validity of the generalized scaling law for the saturated sandy sloping deposit with wide range of initial conditions. The experimental data provided a unique basis for assessing the capabilities of six different simulation platforms for numerical simulation of soil liquefaction. The results of the experiments and the numerical simulations are presented and discussed in papers submitted by the project participants.

This book focuses on reservoir surveillance and management, reservoir evaluation and dynamic description, reservoir production stimulation and EOR, ultra-tight reservoir, unconventional oil and gas resources technology, oil and gas well production testing, and geomechanics. This book is a compilation of selected papers from the 13th International Field Exploration and Development Conference (IFEDC 2023).

This book highlights the latest advances, innovations, and applications in the field of structural and geotechnical engineering, as presented by leading international researchers and engineers at the 2nd Eurasian Conference on OpenSees—Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (EOS), held in Turin, Italy, on July 7–8, 2022. The conference was meant to give an overview on the latest developments made with the OpenSees framework as well as to present research and practical outcomes in which OpenSees plays an important role. Conference topics cover cutting-edge applications of OpenSees in the field of structural and geotechnical engineering, the development of new elements and materials, and also the development of new pre- and post-processors. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, present a wealth of exciting ideas that will open novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaboration among different specialists.

This book highlights the key role of green infrastructure (GI) in providing natural and ecosystem solutions, helping alleviate many of the environmental, social, and economic problems caused by rapid urbanization.

This book introduces the basic structure, modeling methods, numerical calculation processes, post-processing, and system functions of MatDEM, which applies the basic principles and algorithm of the discrete element method. The discrete element method can effectively simulate the discontinuity, inhomogeneity, and large deformation damage of rock and soil. It is widely used in both research and industry.

This book is about the technology of using fluid production or injection and pressure measurement signals from wellbores and relating those signals to the subsurface geology and subterranean reservoir properties. It is aimed at students of well-testing and practicing petroleum engineers or geoscience professionals for subsurface characterization and modeling.

Seismic Soil Structure Interaction Analysis with PALXIS 3D

Different physical or geophysical methods provide information about distinctive physical properties of the objects, e.g., rock formations and mineralization. In many cases, this information is mutually complementary, which makes it natural for consideration in a joint inversion of the multiphysics data. Inversion of the observed data for a particular experiment is subject to considerable uncertainty and ambiguity. One productive approach to reducing uncertainty is to invert several types of data jointly. Nonuniqueness can also be reduced by incorporating additional information derived from available a priori knowledge about the target to reduce the search space for the solution. This additional information can be incorporated in the form of a joint inversion of multiphysics data.

The book develops a practical understanding of the fundamental scientific principles and logic underlying the art of turf pitch preparation, measuring, analysing, and interpreting pitch surface behaviour. It’s an attempt to understand how the captains, players, coaches, curators, and groundsmen comprehend and analyse the cricket pitch behaviour (days before and during the matches) and whether the pitch behaviour can be standardised and quantified (through bench marking or forming a data-based management system (DBMS) of a pitch profile, pitch quality standards, a pitch behaviour analysis index (PBAI), or pitch behaviour forecasting (PBF) by examining or analysing its mineralogical, chemical, physical, or morphological compositions, weather variables, and different pitch preparation methods and techniques. Individual chapters in this book deal with clay mineralogy, the bench-marking of cricket pitch soils, pitch soil chemical properties, pitch soil water, pitch turf grass, pitch soil organic matter, integrated rolling management, soil structure, and compressibility.

This book provides an overview of the progress in landslide research and technology and is part of a book series of the International Consortium on Landslides (ICL). The book provides a common platform for the publication of recent progress in landslide research and technology for practical applications and the benefit for the society contributing to the Kyoto Landslide Commitment 2020, which is expected to continue up to 2030 and even beyond to globally promote the understanding and reduction of landslide disaster risk, as well as to address the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals.