Book reviews

variations in health status and health services, were they declining over time? Did they show that, in some ways, the poorer areas received more services?

In conclusion, the text will be a useful supplemental reading on health status in twentieth-century Britain, especially in bringing to attention some neglected topics. However, it seems difficult to see it as a main course text.

Martin Powell University of Hertfordshire

Statistics for the Environment V. Barnett and K. Feridum Turk- man (eds) John Wiley Chichester (1993) 427pp f49.95 ISBN 0 471 93467 4

This comprehensive edited volume contains papers presented to the Stat- istics in Public Resources, Utilities and in Care of the Environment (SPRUCE) Conference held in Lis- bon in 1992. The silhouetted tree on the green cover, however, manages to symbolize the aims of the enterprise more neatly than this rather convol- uted acronym. In fact, SPRUCE began as a collaboration between the statistics departments of the Universities of Lisbon and Sheffield intended to bring together statis- ticians, probabilists and other academics interested in environ- mental issues. The Lisbon Confer- ence was the first tangible product of this initiative. It was convened to demonstrate the role of statistics in assessing risk, consequence and effect from quantitative evidence as applied to the protection of the en- vironment, the supply of energy and the garnering of resources. The book

addresses this agenda in six parts dealing with ‘Environmental Moni- toring and Sampling’, ‘Measuring Levels and Consequences of Pol- lution and Contamination’, ‘Climato- logical and Meteorological Issues’, ‘Water Resources’, ‘Dynamics of Fish Populations’ and ‘Forestry: Supply and Conservation’ which, perhaps in deference to the principle of insufficient reason, each contain three contributions.

From the perspective of medical geography, only part two is of sub- stantial interest. It begins with a paper by Peter Diggle on ‘Point Pro- cess Modelling in Environmental Epidemiology’. The contents review the premises of his research on spa- tial clustering and space-time in- teraction in relation to one or more point sources of pollution, which was stimulated largely by the debate ab- out the possible links between radi- ation leaks from nuclear installations and the raised incidence of child- hood leukaemia in their vicinity. In ‘Estimation of Quantiles in Air- borne Pollution’, Lindgren, Zetter- qvist and Holmstedt develop a model for the concentration of nitro- gen oxides around natural gas fur- naces which, in northern Europe, have become increasingly prevalent sources of noxious emissions since the development of the North Sea resource. ‘A Stochastic Model for Times of Exposure to Air Pollution from a Point Source’ (Davidson and Ramesch) replicates the atmospheric transportation of radonuclides re- leased from nuclear installations. Particular attention is paid to ranges between 100 and 1000 km from the source and exposure through wet (high concentration) deposition.

The limited number of contri- butions with a medical connotation,

however, should not detract from this book’s obvious merits. It con- tains many materials that should be- come essential reading for anyone with a research interest in statistical and mathematical modelling in geography. The applications not only include problems already famil- iar to geographers, such as global warming (Smith), solute transport (Young and Lees) and the growth of tropical rain forests (Nokoe), but also fascinating analyses of less com- monly encountered topics like optimal harvesting models for wilderness areas (Reed) and the management of chinook salmon populations in the San Joaquin river system, California (Speed). A second feature of most contributions is the way spatial representations and space-time processes are routinely built into the model designs. This development contrasts sharply with the 1970s when joint conferences between geographers and statisticians often contained papers from the latter that treated spatial effects as a rather irritating and complicating distraction. Perhaps the most com- pelling reason for reading this volume is the way most contributors tailor their models to meet the specific needs of the problem in hand. Quan- titative geographers, who recently have tended to be brought up on a diet of packaged statistics and GIS, will learn much from this free-wheeling approach to the environment.

The standard of editing and pre- sentation is exceptionally high and plenty of text separates the equa- tions. Thoroughly recommended for any library shelf.

Richard Thomas University of Manchester

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