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This multi-contributor, international volume synthesizes contributions from the world's leading soil scientists and ecologists, describing cutting-edge research that provides a basis for the maintenance of soil health and sustainability. The book covers these advances from a unique perspective of examining the ecosystem services produced by soil biota across different scales - from biotic interactions at microscales to communities functioning at regional and global scales. The book leads the user towards an understanding of how the sustainability of soils, biodiversity, and ecosystem services can be maintained and how humans, other animals, and ecosystems are dependent on living soils and ecosystem services. This is a valuable reference book for academic libraries and professional ecologists worldwide as a statement of progress in the broad field of soil ecology. It will also be of interest to both upper level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in soil ecology, as well as academic researchers and professionals in the field requiring an authoritative, balanced, and up-to-date overview of this fast expanding topic.
Many soil properties have changed and can change as a result of management, historical land use, or even natural factors, such as drought, interacting with land use. National soil survey databases currently include soil property information for the relatively static soil properties, such as texture, and also for properties affected by management, such as soil organic matter. The databases do not, however, distinguish the values of dynamic soil properties (e.g., organic matter, bulk density, infiltration rate) according to their land use, management system, ecological state, or plant community. ?Dynamic soil properties? as defined in this Guide are soil properties that change within the human time scale. Differences that may exist in these properties can affect the performance of the soil. Furthermore, some dynamic soil properties change very little in response to management and disturbances.
World soils contain about 1500 gigatons of organic carbon. This large carbon reserve can increase atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by soil misuse or mismanagement, or it can reverse the 'greenhouse' effect by judicious land use and proper soil management. Soil Processes and the Carbon Cycle describes soil processes and their effects on the global carbon cycle while relating soil properties to soil quality and potential and actual carbon reserves in the soil. In addition, this book deals with modeling the carbon cycle in soil, and with methods of soil carbon determinations.
The Jornada Basin LTER is located in the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest in North America. This region of south central New Mexico has a history of nearly 100 years as the basis for scientific research. This work gives a thorough, encompassing review of the tremendous array of observations resulting from experiments conducted in this ecosystem. Beginning with thorough descriptions of the most salient features of the region, the book then reviews a wide range of archived and active data sets on a diversity of biotic and abiotic features. It next presents a syntheses of important topics including livestock grazing and remediation efforts. A concluding chapter provides a synthesis of the principles that have emerged from this body of work, and how these relate to the broader fields of ecology and natural resource management. It concludes with recommendations for future research directions. The insightful views expressed in this volume should guide management of arid landscapes globally. This is the sixth volume in the Long Term Ecological Network Series.
Ecological and environmental research has increased in scope and complexity in the last few decades, from simple systems with a few managed variables to complex ecosystems with many uncontrolled variables. These issues encompass problems that are inadequately addressed using the types of carefully controlled experiments that dominate past ecological research. Contemporary challenges facing ecologists include whole ecosystem responses to planned restoration activities and ecosystem modifications, as well as unplanned catastrophic events such as biological invasions, natural disasters, and global climate changes. Major perturbations implicated in large-scale ecological alterations share import...
Making Nature Whole is a seminal volume that presents an in-depth history of the field of ecological restoration as it has developed in the United States over the last three decades. The authors draw from both published and unpublished sources, including archival materials and oral histories from early practitioners, to explore the development of the field and its importance to environmental management as well as to the larger environmental movement and our understanding of the world. Considering antecedents as varied as monastic gardens, the Scientific Revolution, and the emerging nature-awareness of nineteenth-century Romantics and Transcendentalists, Jordan and Lubick offer unique insight...