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Why "the balance of nature"? Resilience. Temporal variability and the individual species. The effects of food-web structure. The variability of the environment. Nonlinear dynamics, strange attractors, and chaos. Extinctions. Species differences and community structure as explanations of why introductions fail. Patterns in species composition. Food-web structure and community persistence. Community assembly; or why are there so many kinds of communities? Small-scale experimental removals of species. Food webs and resistance. Changes in total density and species composition. The consequences of introductions and extinctions. Multispecies models and their limitations. Conclusions and caveats.
Take a globe-circling tour of our endangered planet with conservation biologist Stuart Pimmwho is taking stock and keeping score. We use 50 percent of the world's freshwater supply. We consume 42 percent of the world's plant growth. We are liquidating animals and plants 100 times faster than the natural rate of extinction. Such numbers should make it clear that the human impact on our planet has been, and continues to be, extreme and detrimental. Yet even after decades of awareness of our environmental peril, there remains passionate disagreement over what the problems are and how they should be remedied. Much of the impasse stems from the fact that the problems are difficult to quantify. Ho...
Conservation Biology for All provides cutting-edge but basic conservation science to a global readership. A series of authoritative chapters have been written by the top names in conservation biology with the principal aim of disseminating cutting-edge conservation knowledge as widely as possible. Important topics such as balancing conversion and human needs, climate change, conservation planning, designing and analyzing conservation research, ecosystem services, endangered species management, extinctions, fire, habitat loss, and invasive species are covered. Numerous textboxes describing additional relevant material or case studies are also included. The global biodiversity crisis is now un...
Questions why species are becoming extinct, and how we can protect the natural world on which we all depend.
"Highly compelling...page-turning read" — TNC's Cool Green Science We love our pets. Dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, and other species have become an essential part of more families than ever before—in North America today, pets outnumber people. Pet owners are drawn to their animal companions through an innate desire to connect with other species. But there is a dark side to our domestic connection with animal life: the pet industry is contributing to a global conservation crisis for wildlife—often without the knowledge of pet owners. In Unnatural Companions, journalist Peter Christie issues a call to action for pet owners. If we hope to reverse the alarming trend of wildlife decline, pet...
What occurs where (and why) and why do some places harbor more species than others are basic questions for ecologists. Some species simply live in different places: fish live underwater, birds do not. Adaptations follow: most fish have gills; birds have lungs. "A fish out of water" is the expression for a person -- and an animal -- in the wrong place. But not all patterns are trivial. Travel along any gradient -- up a mountain, from forest into desert, from a north-facing slope to a south-facing slope, from low tide to high tide on a shoreline, from Arctic tundra to tropical rain forest -- and the species change. What explains the patterns of these distributions? Some patterns might be as ra...
Considers the evidence for the existence of unifying rules controlling the formation and maintenance of ecological communities.
Terrestrial Mammal Conservation provides a thorough summary of the available scientific evidence of what is known, or not known, about the effectiveness of all of the conservation actions for wild terrestrial mammals across the world (excluding bats and primates, which are covered in separate synopses). Actions are organized into categories based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifications of direct threats and conservation actions. Over the course of fifteen chapters, the authors consider interventions as wide ranging as creating uncultivated margins around fields, prescribed burning, setting hunting quotas and removing non-native mammals. This book is written in a...
This book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the challenges of environmental degradation and learn about the sustainable solutions needed to address these critical issues. Today, the entire globe is suffering from various forms of environmental degradation, resource depletion, and an imbalance of natural phenomena. In this context, one of the major issues is loss of ecosystem services and proper functioning of natural ecosystems. Pollution, ecological invasion, loss of biodiversity, land degradation, and loss of productivity across various ecosystems have become the biggest challenges humankind is faced with. Considering Sustainable Development Goals 2030, the major target is to restore degraded ecosystems and their functionality, which will bring back the valuable ecosystem services of a diverse ecosystem. Ecosystem Management: Climate Change and Sustainability addresses all these issues to teach a global readership the dimensions of ecosystem services and ways toward a future sustainable world.
Resource-management decisions, especially in the area of protecting and maintaining biodiversity, are usually incremental, limited in time by the ability to forecast conditions and human needs, and the result of tradeoffs between conservation and other management goals. The individual decisions may not have a major effect but can have a cumulative major effect. Perspectives on Biodiversity reviews current understanding of the value of biodiversity and the methods that are useful in assessing that value in particular circumstances. It recommends and details a list of components-including diversity of species, genetic variability within and among species, distribution of species across the ecosystem, the aesthetic satisfaction derived from diversity, and the duty to preserve and protect biodiversity. The book also recommends that more information about the role of biodiversity in sustaining natural resources be gathered and summarized in ways useful to managers. Acknowledging that decisions about biodiversity are necessarily qualitative and change over time because of the nonmarket nature of so many of the values, the committee recommends periodic reviews of management decisions.