Securing Our Water Supply

Landscape architects, design professionals and contractors alike require a good working knowledge of how to achieve plant establishment under a variety of conditions and situations. Overlooking the physiological needs of plants can lead to potential problems that can have negative financial and design impacts. Plants and Planting on Landscape Sites is a practical book giving practitioners in landscape design the essential horticultural knowledge and concepts needed to understand the limits of the material they are working with and make informed decisions.

This book examines how government, industry and society interact to reach a level of regulation that is deemed satisfactory for the newly-emerged transformative technology that is agricultural biotechnology. It considers issues of risk and trust surrounding genetically modified plants for the production of food and pharmaceuticals.

The transposable genetic elements, or transposons, as they are now known, have had a tumultuous history. Discovered in the mid-20th century by Barbara McClintock, they were initially received with puzzlement. When their genomic abundance began to be apparent, they were categorized as “junk DNA” and acquired the label of parasites. Expanding understanding of gene and genome organization has revealed the profound extent of their impact on both.

Meager water supply causes severe problems in the growth of plants, which rely on sufficient water transmitted by the soil to meet their needs. This new edition of Water Dynamics in Plant Production describes the basic scientific principles of water transport in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum, explains the linkage between transpiration water use and dry matter production paying particular attention to the various agronomic strategies for adaptation to climate-driven limitations of water resources.