Increasing awareness of the irreversible and long-lasting impacts of
deterioration and pollution of soils and sediments has had an important
influence on environmental policies and research in the last decade. The
complexity of the soil and sediment systems and its processes cannot be
tackled properly unless scientists from different disciplines work
together. With this in mind, a number of multidisciplinary soil research
programmes have been started in various European countries. They involve
different disciplinary approaches and they aim at different fields of
application: agriculture, land use and town and country planning,
drinking water supply, nature management. The results that are now
appearing need to be integrated in a scientifically sound and useful
way. The first European Conference on Integrated Research for Soil and
Sediment Protection and Remediation was intended to foster this.
The volume contains the edited and selected proceedings of this
Conference.