This weighty encyclopaedia has been compiled largely by a team of scientists and engineers from the consulting and engineering company ARCADIS G&M, with the main editors having backgrounds in hydrogeology and environmental engineering. Some 1100 tables and 500 figures provide the bulk and contain data arranged under the following chapter headings: data management, international data collection, climate and precipitation, hydrologic elements, surface water, groundwater, water use, water quality, wastewater, environmental problems, water resources management, agencies and organisations, and constants and conversion factors.
By far the greatest fraction of these data relates to the USA, where the book will be of greatest value. As a test, the reviewer sought out information on hydraulic roughness and classical soil properties and was largely disappointed. In contrast, there are voluminous data tables that many international water scientists will regard as parochial. Because the compilation relies on a multitude of published sources, data records may be a decade or more out-of-date, reflecting their original date of publication. The mix of imperial and metric units, reflecting the original published sources, is a further distraction; the chapter on constants and conversion factors can be useful and even embraces the Miner's inch as a unit of flow measurement and its variation across North America.
Importantly, the breadth of data accessible in one place in hard copy form will mean that most will discover some gem of interest when browsing the book for the first time. One must also respect the painstaking work such compilations of data involve.
The very existence of data encyclopaedias as printed publications is clear1y being called into question in an internet age. This is apparent in the editors' introduction and the inclusion, in this 3rd edition, of opening chapters on data management and international data collection with discussion of metadata and Internet data access. Many of the tables would be of more practical value in digital form to support exploratory data analysis investigations. To this end the Internet address of the data source, if available, is given and a companion web site with hyperlinks to some datasets is promised. The main depository for this type of book must be the reference section of libraries to which this reviewer's copy is destined.
