GIS Based Chemical Fate Modeling: Principles and Applications

Preface

Ever since I was a young boy, I have been charmed by maps. They were one of the favorite subjects in my drawings. What I especially enjoyed was to draw maps of Europe, Italy, and the world, where I could give borders shapes I found logical, or interesting for some purpose, or simply bizarre. Giving regions a name and inventing empires or kingdoms or fierce independent republics, like Switzerland, or city-states or maybe lands with no patron, run by pirates or Robin Hood, was the start of meandering fantasy travels and a way to look at the world as a set of possibilites. Borders in the world change at a pace sometimes faster than our capacity to draw political maps: they fade as new communities find an identity, a common project. And the more a state expands, the more regions find reasons for their specificity: so, for instance, the continent of Europe, where I live, might turn into a federation where old national states become less and less compact and regions become more and more autonomous. And the whole world, with our globalized economy, is to some extent becoming a sort of federation with regions interacting in unforeseen ways. But a world of disappearing borders is more and more a world of continua—just as we see from satellites that detect temperature, or clouds, or ocean colors, or vegetation—and also a single runway for contaminants, which makes our world particularly united, where problems affect everybody and call for coordinated efforts. The perception of Earth ...