Fundamental Hydro-Biogeochemistry for Ecological Engineering and Environmental Sciences
2023-02-09
Preface
During my career, I have observed that Ecological and Environmental Engineers have access in their curriculum to strong engineering and hydrological fundamentals, at the cost of rudimentary exposure to biology, microbiology, biochemistry, etc. or in one word, to biogeochemistry. Fundamental and advanced knowledge in biogeochemistry already exists and is available in monumental reference books such as Biogeochemistry of Wetlands (Reddy and DeLaune 2008), or Treatment Wetlands (Kadlec and Wallace 2008), among many others. However, these books effectively target and are most beneficial to students and professionals who have acquired over time a solid background in biogeochemistry. But what about students who want to apply engineering to natural systems and want to call themselves Ecological Engineers? I hypothesized that a reference that would bridge the gap between the initial instruction and the advanced one would be very beneficial to students seeking 4-5 year degrees in Ecological and Environmental Engineering. This is the textbook part of the book. I also wanted for it to serve as a reference for targeted parts for which I have not found other references. These will be very helpful to graduate students and researchers interested in more in depth details. Overall, I thought there was a need to make better connectivity between fundamental chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry, microbiology, and hydrology to name a few, within the first four years of university, and also at the graduate level.
I have always thought of writing a book. This became even more evident following my Ph.D. in 2000. Not that I have always loved to read and write… In fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately. But the will to transmit to others what I have learned and understood has always been stronger than my early dislike for reading and writing. My Ph.D. project at NC State University in the late 1990s was about quantifying and modeling in-stream processes in agricultural canals (Birgand 2000) so that one could couple field and in-stream models to predict nutrient loads at the outlet of artificially drained agricultural watersheds. Dr. R. Wayne Skaggs, my first and main co-advisor, was an internationally acclaimed drainage engineer and hydrologist, but not at all a biogeochemist. J. Wendell Gilliam, a pioneer and internationally acclaimed riparian zone researcher in his own right, was my second co-advisor. Although I was extremely fortunate to have such giants as role models and advisers, the expertise I had direct access to was hydrology and water quality of shallow groundwater. But surface water hydrology and quality, wetland and stream biogeochemistry, not so much.
There was no course on ‘Fundamental Biogeochemistry for Potamologists’ or similar course offered back then at NC State… So, like many students, I had to build all the needed knowledge for my project directly from my reading of books and hundreds of research articles, which I manually gathered and photocopied during countless hours (yes, no pdf versions then, researchers of that and earlier era all deserve a medal!) in the already great then, and now world class NC State librairies. In retrospect, these were extraordinary times because the quest for discovery is exhilarating. However, I thought unnecessary for other students to have to go through the same difficulties. So I promised myself that I should do something about it at some point.
It has taken nearly twenty years before I felt ready to engage in this daunting task, and for which I am not sure I am that well prepared. Access to transformative technology such as the bookdown package in the R software to easily produce great looking books has provided a trigger. Teaching ‘Biogeochemical Processes for Ecological Engineering’ at the undergraduate and graduate levels for many years has also helped. Physical books will always play a central role in the transmission of knowledge. Online books offer complementary and additional possibilities. Not the least of which is the automatic translation into readers’ native language, still imperfect in the early 2020s, but which technology will undoubtedly improve with time. Online books also offer colors, links, videos, animations, interactive tools, all of which rendering them possibly more approachable and less intimidating than the ~1,000 page reference books mentioned above. I have taken advantage of this new technology offered to make what I call Fundamental Hydro-Biogeochemistry hopefully more easily approachable to all and bridge the gap identified.
This will doubtlessly remain an unfinished task. I vow that it might help a new generation of students and professionals acquire this basic knowledge and come up with new and transformative solutions to continue improving the quality of ground- and surface water throughout the world.