Preface

*Updates in Volcanology - Transdisciplinary Nature of Volcano Science* is a new addition to the successful Updates in Volcanology book series that includes three other volumes: *A Comprehensive Approach to the Volcanological Problems*, *New Advances in Understanding Volcanic Systems*, and *From Volcano Modelling to Volcano Geology*. These previous books discuss the evolution of volcano science in the last 10 years, providing unstructured snapshots of research outputs of a diverse array of subject areas. The evolution of book titles and their contents reflect the changes of research focus within volcanology.

Chapters from the previous three volumes in the series garnered many downloads and citations, including Web of Science citations (**Table 1**). While books are not measured and observed in the same way as scientific journals, it is evident that the published book chapters have a global impact, and their impact is growing.

The main subjects of the previously published books indicate a general trend within volcano science toward more volcanic system-based research in which various disciplines are utilized to understand volcanism in general. The current volume is no exception. It provides interesting transdisciplinary aspects of volcano science.

The book *Updates in Volcanology - Transdisciplinary Nature of Volcano Science* is divided into five sections: 1)"Introduction"; 2) "Source and Magmatic Plumbing Systems"; 3) "Monogenetic Volcanism"; 4) "Complex and Polygenetic Volcanism"; and 5) "Volcanic Geoheritage and Geotourism." The seventeen chapters represent cover also a broad array of geographical array of works from Australia, Azerbaijan, Canary Islands (Spain), Chile, China, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, and Salvador. The chapters are a good mixture of technical papers and broad overviews of novel ideas. Overall, the book reflects well the current trends in volcanology, and we hope readers will find the information contained herein useful. it will provide useful information to the readers.


**Table 1.**

*A summary of the bibliometric data of the Updates in Volcanology book series.*

I would like to acknowledge IntechOpen for the opportunity to collate this valuable book. I am also thankful for the time provided to me to complete this volume by the School of Agriculture and Environment, Massey University, New Zealand.

> **Károly Németh** School of Agriculture and Environment, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

> > **1**

Section 1

Introduction

Section 1 Introduction

**3**

**Chapter 1**

*Károly Németh*

**1. Introduction**

Introductory Chapter: Updates in

Volcanology - Transdisciplinary

Transdisciplinary approach of science appeared in recent years, partially as a result of the urgent need to deal with global and planetary changes [1–12]. Transdisciplinary science is to answer and solve environmental science questions and problems became the foundation of sustainable development, nature conservation and various environmental science education including geoeducation [13–17]. Transdisciplinary approach within volcanology was always a key element of volcano science as volcanology addresses key questions over volcanic hazards, risk and resilience naturally moving along the interface of social science, humanities, natural science and non-academic (e.g. indigenous) knowledge [18–25]. Especially in recent years more and more researches were conducted on subjects to help to understand the interface between western science and traditional knowledge [26–30]. Such works explored various aspects of volcanism that affected the human societies greatly both as processes that produce natural resources for development and in other hand continuous fear that need to be dealt with to prevent societies from their destructive powers [28, 31–34]. The transdisciplinary aspects of volcanology is reflected well in the new volcano model and volcano geology approach to understand volcanic systems and placing them in a geosystem perspective [35] (**Figure 1**). In many volcano research aimed in recent years to develop some sort of volcano model that explain the volcanic processes, their resulting eruptive products, and the way such models can help to develop a better strategy for resilience against volcanic hazard within a general natural hazard framework [40–43].

Nature of Volcano Science

**2. From volcano geology to volcano model development**

The various volcano models distinguish between type of volcanoes commonly

categorized monogenetic versus polygenetic volcanoes (and volcanism) as a reflection of the total eruptive volume, the total duration of volcanic activity, the strength of the link to the magma generation source and the stability and longevity of a volcanic conduit [44, 45]. In these models obviously the end-member types of volcanoes define short, small, simple (versus long-lasting, large and complex. Recent decade of research in addition, provided ample evidences that the scale of observation (hence the detail of information could be mined from volcanic systems) is important, and provides evidences to support that in real world end member type of monogenetic volcanoes are rare, and most of them shows some sort of complexity in a near continuous spectrum [20, 46–52]. This is more apparent when the magma that form those volcanic geoforms are more evolved [53, 54]. In recent years attention
