Purushothaman Chirakkuzhyil Abhilash

This book explores the significance of soil microbial diversity to understand its utility in soil functions, ecosystem services, environmental sustainability, and achieving the sustainable development goals. With a focus on agriculture and environment, the book highlights the importance of the microbial world by providing state-of-the-art technologies for examining the structural and functional attributes of soil microbial diversity for applications in healthcare, industrial biotechnology, and bioremediation studies. In seven chapters, the book will act as a primer for students, environmental biotechnologists, microbial ecologists, plant scientists, and agricultural microbiologists. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the soil microbiome, and chapter 2 discusses the below ground microbial world. Chapter 3 addresses various methods for exploring microbial diversity, chapter 4 discusses the genomics methods, chapter 5 provides the metaproteomics and metatranscriptomics approaches and chapter 6 details the bioinformatics tools for soil microbial community analysis, and chapter 7 concludes the text with future perspectives on further soil microbial uses and applications.

This brief explores several adaptive agricultural practices from around the world to fulfill current and future agricultural demands for food security due to the challenges posed by climate change and growing global population. Readers will discover how farmers adapt to environmental changes by adopting various agronomic practices at crop, farm and landscape levels. Particular attention is given to systemic and transformational adaptation strategies employed by farmers such as mulching, organic farming and crop diversification. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book that provides insights on how crops can build up resilience against periods of drought, high salinity, disasters such as floods, and diseases. The policy implications and future prospects of these adaptation strategies are also addressed. Environmental and plant scientists, agronomists and researchers in climate sciences will find this book interesting.