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Forrest Shreve (1878-1950) was an internationally known plant ecologist who spent most of his career at the Carnegie Institution's Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Shreve's contributions to the study of plant ecology laid the groundwork for modern studies and several of his works came to be regarded as classics by ecologists worldwide. This first full-length study of Shreve's life and work demonstrates that he was more than a desert ecologist. His early work in Maryland and Jamaica gave him a breadth of expertise matched by few of his ecological contemporaries, and his studies of desert plant demography, the physiological ecology of rain-forest plants, and vegetational gradients on southwestern mountain ranges anticipated by decades recent trends in ecology. Tracing Shreve's development from student to scientist, Bowers evokes the rigors and delights of fieldwork in the first half of this century and shows how Shreve's sense of place informed his scientific thoughtÑmaking him, in his own words, "not an exile from some better place, but a man at home in an environment to which his life can be adjusted without physical or intellectual loss."
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What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.
This book advances a spatial perspective on the history of ecology. Intrigued by broader debates in the humanities on the "spatial turn," the authors contribute to a more explicit and systematic development of spatial thinking in the history of ecology, exploring to which extent a spatial perspective can shed new light on the history of ecological science, and using ecology as a critical site to gain broader insights into the history of the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, p...
From humble beginnings as a small desert laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has evolved into a thriving international center of plant molecular biology that sits today on the campus of Stanford University. This fourth in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution touches on the tangled beginnings of ecology, the baroque complexities of photosynthesis, the great mid-century evolutionary synthesis and the adventurous start of the plant molecular revolution.
"A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert provides the most complete collection of Sonoran Desert natural history information ever compiled and is a perfect introduction to this biologically rich desert of North America."--BOOK JACKET.
Hailed as a model state history thanks to Thomas E. Sheridan's thoughtful analysis and lively interpretation of the people and events shaping the Grand Canyon State, Arizona has become a standard in the field. Now, just in time for Arizona's centennial, Sheridan has revised and expanded this already top-tier state history to incorporate events and changes that have taken place in recent years. Addressing contemporary issues like land use, water rights, dramatic population increases, suburban sprawl, and the US-Mexico border, the new material makes the book more essential than ever. It successfully places the forty-eighth state's history within the context of national and global events. No ot...
The Sonoran Desert is a distinctive biotic region that fascinates scientist, students, and nature lovers. This book offers an accessible introduction to Sonoran Desert ecology. Eight original essays by Sonoran Desert specialists provide an overview of the practice of ecology at landscape, community, and organismal scales. The essays explore the rich diversity of plant life in the Sonoran Desert and the ecological patterns and processes that underlie it. They also reveal the history and scientific legacy of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, which has conducted research on the Sonoran Desert since 1903. Coverage includes diversity and affinities of the flora, physical environments and vegetatio...
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