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This book is a completely revised, substantially extended treatment of the physical and biological factors that drive life in high mountains. The book covers the characteristics of alpine plant life, alpine climate and soils, life under snow, stress tolerance, treeline ecology, plant water, carbon, and nutrient relations, plant growth and productivity, developmental processes, and two largely novel chapters on alpine plant reproduction and global change biology. The book explains why the topography driven exposure of plants to dramatic micro-climatic gradients over very short distances causes alpine biodiversity to be particularly robust against climatic change. Geographically, this book dra...
Plants growing in tropical alpine environments (at altitudes above the closed canopy forest and below the limit of plant life) have evolved distinct forms to cope with a hostile environment characterized by cold, drought and fire. Unlike temperate alpine environments, where there are distinct seasons of favourable and unfavourable conditions for growth, tropical alpine habitats present summer conditions every day and winter conditions every night. Using examples from all over the tropics, this fascinating account reviews, for the first time, the unique form and functional relationships of tropical alpine plants examining both their physiological ecology and population biology. It will appeal to anyone interested in tropical vegetation and plant physiological adaptations to hostile environment, as well as to researchers in biogeography and ecology.
For about 40 years 1 have been engaged in timberline research. Thus, one could suppose that writing this book should not have been too difficult. It was harder, however, than expected, and in the end 1 feIt that more questions had arisen than could be answered within its pages. Perhaps it would have been easier to write the book twenty years aga and then leave the subject to mature. But the late Prof. Heinz Ellenberg convinced me to portray a much needed and complete pieture of what we know of the timberline with special respect to its great physiognomie, structural and ecological variety. The first version of this book was published in the German language (Holt meier, 2000). An extensive summary and translated figure and photo cap tions and table headings were added to enable non-German speaking people to make use of the book as weIl. Nevertheless, 1 was very delighted when Prof. Martin Beniston encouraged me to prepare an English edition for the series "Advances in Global Change Research", which will guarantee a wider circulation.
The book by PRECHT, CHRISTOPHERSEN and HENSEL referred to in the text as the first edition was published in German in 1955 with the title Temperatur und Leben. The present volume is a revised version of this book, constructed along the same lines, but it cannot properly be called the second edition because it is in English. Yet another difference is in the number of contributors, who now include two microbiologists, seven botanists, three zoophysiologists, one biochemist, and three human physiologists. We have again endeavored to treat as many problems as possible but the main theme is still the adaptation of organisms to changing temperatures. What was conceived as a chapter on physical and...
In a world of increasing atmospheric CO2, there is intensified interest in the ecophysiology of photosynthesis and increasing attention is being given to carbon exchange and storage in natural ecosystems. We need to know how much photosynthesis of terrestrial and aquatic vegetation will change as global CO2 increases. Are there major ecosystems, such as the boreal forests, which may become important sinks of CO2 and slow down the effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on climate? Will the composition of the vegetation change as a result of CO2 increase? This volume reviews the progress which has been made in understanding photosynthesis in the past few decades at several levels of integration from the molecular level to canopy, ecosystem and global scales.
Twenty-nine, prominent, international researchers provide contributions which deal with understanding the basic ecophysiological and molecular principles governing the functioning of plant systems in relation to their environment. Divided into two headings: biotic and abiotic; the first consists of abiotic, natural environmental factors--light, ultraviolet radiation, chilling and freezing, high temperatures, drought, flooding, salt and trace metals. The latter half presents anthropogenic aspects including allelochemicals, herbicides, polyamines, air pollutants, carbon dioxide, radioisotopes and fire.
Principles and Measurements in Environmental Biology aims to provide an understanding of some important physical principles and their application in biology. The book also aims to describe how instruments utilizing these principles can be used to measure biological and environmental processes and their interactions. This book covers the effects of the environment on biological organisms; the application of theories of radiation, kinetic theory, gas laws, and diffusion in biology; and water and its properties. The relation of plants with atmosphere near the ground is also discussed. This book also presents sampling techniques; the computation of errors used in the interpretation of data; the use of different devices; and data gathering and its practical applications. This text is for students, researchers, and professionals and experts in biology who wish to understand the mentioned principles in physics, its mathematical aspects, and their applications in the field.
Our knowledge of the functional characteristics of the plants of mediterranean-cl imate regions has increased greatly in the past decade. In recent times the possibility of large-scale util ization of biomass for energy from these regions has been proposed. In order to assess the feasibil ity of these proposals we must consider the productive structure of these plant communities and how they vary through time and space. This symposium was an attempt to examine our recently acquired basic knowledge of the environmental I imitations on the productivity of Mediterranean plant communities in relation to the consequences of the possible util ization of these communities for energy and chemicals. ...
A summary of 33 research projects conducted under the auspices of the International Biological Programme, the most northerly of the eight comprehensive interdisciplinary projects undertaken in Canada.