Preface

This book is about interactions – those that occur between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere. Understanding biosphere-atmosphere interactions is a core activity within the discipline of earth system sciences. Many of the most pressing environmental challenges that face society (e.g., the anthropogenic forcing of climate change, urban pollution, the production of sustainable energy sources, and stratospheric ozone depletion), and their remedies, can be traced to biosphere-atmosphere interactions within the earth system. Traditionally, biosphere-atmosphere interactions have been studied within a broad range of conventional disciplines, including biology, the atmospheric and geological sciences, and engineering. In this book we take an integrated, interdisciplinary perspective; one that weaves together concepts and theory from all of the traditional disciplines, and organizes them into a framework that we hope will catalyze a new, synergistic approach to teaching university courses in the earth system sciences.

As we wrote the initial outline for the book, we recognized that the interdisciplinary perspective we sought, in a subtle way, had already emerged; it simply had not been formally collated into a synthetic format. For the past several years, biologists have been attending meetings and workshops traditionally associated with meteorology and geochemistry and conversely meteorologists and geochemists have been attending biology meetings. As a result, newly defined and integrative disciplines have already appeared with names such as “biometeorology,” “bioclimatology,” and “ecohydrology.” Thus, the foundations for the book had already been laid. We simply needed to find the common elements and concepts that permeated these emerging disciplines and pull them together into a single treatment.