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This book addresses present-day landscapes, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity as legacies of the past. It implements an interdisciplinary approach to understand how natural or human-impacted ecological systems have changed over time. Historical Ecology combines theory, methods, regional case studies and syntheses to provide a complete up-to-date overview of historical ecology. Beginning with the crucial role of time and inference from observed patterns, the book critically reviews the main methodological approaches, including monitoring of permanent plots, analysis of old maps, repeat photography, remote sensing, soil analysis, charcoal analysis, botanical indicators, and combinations of these methods applied to forest ecosystems. A series of case studies from various biomes shows how historical ecology can help in understanding today’s socio-ecosystems, such as mainland and island forests, orchards, tundra and coastal dunes. The book concludes by showing how historical ecology can answer timely fundamental research questions and provide science-based evidence for landscape and ecosystem management.
This book provides a multi-disciplinary coverage of the broad fields of species, community and landscape conservation. The panel of contributors consider a range of topics in vegetation and biodiversity assessment, planning and management of conservation zones and protected areas, together with historical and social/legal issues of the environment and nature conservation. The book celebrates the life’s work of Professor Franco Pedrotti.
Invasions of introduced species cause varying degrees of harm on the ecosystems in question and it is up to society to deal with the consequences. How can we prevent biological invasions? How can we assess the risk they represent? What can be done to control current invasions? Aware of this problem, the Ministry of Ecology has requested a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines to decipher these questions using biological, sociological and economic approaches. Although the definitive response to the problems raised by invasive species in natural spaces is not provided here, undeniable progress in understanding mechanisms underlying these invasions can shed light on the decisions which have to be taken by environmental managers. Scientists, teachers and students will also find results and thought-processes in this book to supplement their knowledge.
This pioneering encyclopedia illuminates a topic at the forefront of global ecology—biological invasions, or organisms that come to live in the wrong place. Written by leading scientists from around the world, Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions addresses all aspects of this subject at a global level—including invasions by animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria—in succinct, alphabetically arranged articles. Scientifically uncompromising, yet clearly written and free of jargon, the volume encompasses fields of study including biology, demography, geography, ecology, evolution, sociology, and natural history. Featuring many cross-references, suggestions for further reading, illustrations,...
There have been many well-publicized cases of invasive species of plants and animals, often introduced unintentionally but sometimes on purpose, causing widespread ecological havoc. Examples of such alien invasions include pernicious weeds such as Japanese knotweed, an introduced garden ornamental which can grow through concrete, the water hyacinth which has choked tropical waterways, and many introduced animals which have out-competed and displaced local fauna. This book addresses the broader context of invasive and exotic species, in terms of the perceived threats and environmental concerns which surround alien species and ecological invasions. As a result of unprecedented scales of enviro...
This commemorative volume of invited papers in vegetation science covers a full range of topics, objectives, methods and applications, including conservation and management tasks. These require study at different temporal and spatial scales, often simultaneously. Methodology is important in science, since it responds to particular questions and raises others. It is also closely related to the scale of investigation. Chapters in this book illustrate this interdependence, even in basic tasks such as vegetation sampling and description, measurements and mapping. Individual chapters present globally applicable systems, regional syntheses and local analyses and applications, plus conceptual methodologies, including currently debated hot topics. Vegetation types treated include tropical rainforests, temperate forests, dry steppes and scrub and local turf, sedge and moss communities. There are also chapters on re-vegetation, woodlot management, ecology of an invasive species, and trajectory planning in conservation. This book will be useful to both students and practitioners, for its reviews and examples and as a potential textbook suitable for graduate-level courses and seminars.
The originality of this book is to review and characterize the current body of scientific publications that describe the complete causal sequence from reorganization of agricultural production to land use changes (LUC) and the resulting environmental impacts. The chapters examine both the range of territorial reorganizations leading to LUC and the range of associated environmental impacts considered in the literature, including GHG emissions, atmospheric pollution, biodiversity impacts, water resources, and soil quality.
This book contains the papers presented at the conferences of the International Association Vegetation Science of Pirenopolis (2016) on Applied Mapping for Conservation and Management: from Plant and of Palermo (2017) on Vegetation Patterns in relation to multi-scale levels of ecological complexity: from associations to geoseries. The reports refer to general themes (semiological bases of mapping, dynamic-catenal mapping, nature conservation, plant biodiversity, biogeography, and geosynphytosociology) and their application to vegetation in different parts of the world (Andes of Bolivia, California, Kaga Coast in Japan, Southeastern USA, Morocco, Europe: Carpathians mountains, Swiss Alps, Sicily, Southern Portugal, Spain, and French Atlantic coastal). One of the benefits of the book is that it offers the possibility of comparing the different methodologies used in very different types of vegetation in the world (Boreal, Mediterranean, Tropical, Neotropical, etc.). The book is intended for researchers, Ph.D. students, and university professors.
The book is concerned principally with geobotanical mapping. Geobotany is a broad science that deals with the study of species and of vegetation communities in relation to the environment; it includes other, perhaps more familiar sciences, such as plant geography, plant ecology, and chorology, and phytosociology (plant sociology). Geobotanical cartography is a field of thematic cartography that deals with the interpretation and representation, in the form of maps, of those spatial and temporal phenomena that pertain to flora, vegetation, vegetated landscapes, vegetation zones, and phytogeographical units. The production of a geobotanical map represents the last stage in a cognitive process that begins with observations in the field and continues with the collection of sample data, interpretation of the phenomena observed, and their appropriate cartographic representation; geobotanical cartography is closely tied to the concepts and scope of geobotany in general