Otto Richter & Bernd Diekkrüger 
Environmental Fate Modelling of Pesticides [PDF ebook] 
From the Laboratory to the Field Scale

This book is concerned with modelling the fate of organic substances in the soil. Once a chemical enters the soil it is subject to various transformation processes. It partitions between the liquid, solid and gaseous phase, it is sorbed to different binding sites with a different strength of bonding, it may decay by a simple chemical process or it may be transformed by microorganisms. Solute transport through soil and subsurface is mediated by water flow and is strongly influenced by solute sorption. To complicate matters, soil structures are heterogeneous. All these processes are embedded in a spatio-temporal hierarchy.
The book brings together many different aspects of environmental fate modelling of pesticides comprising such diverse subjects as, e.g., compartment theory, nonlinear biological degradation models, modelling toxicity, parameter identification, coupling of physical and biological processes, pedotransfer functions, translation of models across scales, coupling geographical information systems with models, and FUZZY-approaches.

Table of Content

Introduction
MATHEMATICAL PRELIMINARIES
Ordinary Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations
Geostatistics
KINETICS
Linear Models
Nonlinear Models
Kinetics of Dose-Response
Environmental Covariates
PARAMETER ESTIMATION IN KINETIC MODELS
Problem Statement
Models in Explicit Form
Models in Form of Ordinary Differential Equations
TRANSPORT AND REACTIONS IN THE SOIL
Water Movement
Applications of the Convection Dispersion Equation
Coupling of Nonlinear Kinetics and Transport
Soil Temperature Fields
PARAMETERS FOR WATER TRANSPORT MODELS
Pedotransfer Functions for Water Retention Curves and Saturated Hydraulic Conductivities
Inverse Problems in Partial Differential Equations
Worked Examples
REGIONALIZATION
Transport Processes in Random Environments
The Concept of Random Soil Columns
Microscale Variation of Spatial Structure
Effective Parameters
Macroscale Variation
FUZZY-Approaches
Appendix
References