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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Applied ecology
By the end of the 19th century both beaver species had been extirpated from large portions of their native ranges. The global decline in beaver populations was the direct re sult of exploitation by humans. Now, at the end of the 20th century, protection, manage ment, and reintroduction programs, coupled with a decline in the demand for beaver fur and other products, have allowed beaver populations to increase dramatically. Since bea vers actively modify their local environment their activities can conflict with human land use. Because of this, the beaver, once considered a unique and exotic component of wet lands, is now often considered a nuisance species. The history, as well as the current status, of beaver populations in Europe and North America provide insight into how con servation programs work, and into how humans and wildlife interact. The initial plenary lecture of the Euro-American Mammal Congress (July, 1998) was presented by Dr. Michael L. Rosenzweig, a professor at the University of Arizona. Dr. Rosenzweig discussed how humans have used and continue to use natural resources, in cluding wildlife and wildland. He provided evidence indicating that the current model of reservation conservation could not provide a long-term solution to the human-wild life/wildland conflict. Dr. Rosenzweig emphasized that what is required is a move away from purely exploitive activities (I would call this exploitive ecology) and the develop ment of a reconciliation ecology with wildlife."
'A hymn of love to the world ... A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Development and status of landscape ecology - subject of this book During the last decades, landscape ecology has developed tremendously. It concerns both the theoretical basis and practical application. The roots of landscape ecology are geography and biology. The term "landscape ecology" was first coined by the German scientist Carl Troll in 1939. unce, the devel opment center of landscape ecology was in Central Europe. Recently, also other parts of the world became powernd centers of landscape ecology, es pecially Northern America. American approaches partly differ essentially from the European, because they are focused esp. on biogeography and population dynamics. In Europe, however, the geographical roots of land scape ecology playamajor role. Landscape is defined as a complex of abiotic, biotic and human components. Mainly due to linguistic barriers, the international discussion does not take notice of approaches and experiences from non-anglophone countries in a sufficient manner. Therefore this book considers more the German and European views on landscape ecology than the books which were published before. It tries to bridge the gaps between theory and practice of landscape ecology, as well between the Ger manlEuropean and American approach es. The book gives a fundamental representation of landscape ecology, which proves to be a young, but an interesting and very important transdisci plinary science for the solution of environmental problems. Both the theo retical basis and practical application of landscape ecology are considered."
The world's oceans cover 70% of the earth's surface and are home to a myriad of amazing and beautiful creatures. However, the biodiversity of the oceans is incre- ingly coming under serious threat from many human activities including overfi- ing, use of destructive fishing methods, pollution and commercial aquaculture. In addition, climate change is already having an impact on some marine ecosystems. This book discusses some of the major threats facing marine ecosystems by cons- ering a range of topics, under chapters discussing biodiversity (Chapter 1), fisheries (Chapter 2), aquaculture (Chapter 3), pollution (Chapter 4) and the impacts of increasing greenhouse gas emissions (Chapter 5). It goes on to explore solutions to the problems by discussing equitable and sustainable management of the oceans (Chapter 6) and protecting marine ecosystems using marine reserves (Chapter 7). Presently, 76% of the oceans are fully or over-exploited with respect to fishing, and many species have been severely depleted. It is abundantly clear that, in general, current fisheries management regimes are to blame for much of the widespread degradation of the oceans. Many policy-makers and scientists now agree that we must adopt a radical new approach to managing the seas - one that is precautionary in nature and has protection of the whole marine ecosystem as its primary objective. This 'ecosystem-based approach' is vital if we are to ensure the health of our oceans for future generations.
Developed from the Global Foundation's International Conference on Environment and Nuclear Energy, held in October 1997, this volume examines the impact of nuclear energy on regional and global environmental issues under a variety of scenarios. These include competition in deregulated energy environments, constraints levied upon use of fossil energy, and possible expansion of nuclear power into energy sectors beyond the generation of electricity, process heat, and fuels production. It also assesses the overall role of nuclear energy in meeting future energy needs arising from growing world populations and economic development.
Based on the Lectures given during the Eurocourse on 'Practical Applications of Quantitative Structure-Activity (QSAR) in Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology' held at the Joint Research Centre Ispra, Italy, June 11--15, 1990
This open access book discusses the contribution of sociology and survey research to climate research. The authors address the questions of which behaviors are of climate relevance, who is engaging in these behaviors, in which contexts do these behaviors occur, and which individual perceptions and values are related to them. Utilizing survey research, the book focuses on the measurement of climate-relevant behaviors with population surveys and develops an instrument that allows a valid estimate of an individual's GHG emissions with a few core items. While the development of these instruments was based on surveys and qualitative interviews conducted in Austria, the instruments were subsequently tested in a set of 31 European countries, revealing the international relevance of such research. The book also concludes with a brief consideration of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on environmental attitudes, situating the project globally.
This book is about the role of the mosque in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Disasters give rise to a situation where people from different parts of the world, quite unfamiliar with each other, come into contact to save lives, provide necessities such as food and shelter, rebuild homes and enable community recovery. During these challenging times, community-based religious institutions such as churches, mosques and temples are a practical choice for reaching people living nearby to fulfil their needs. The book shows the contributions of the mosque as a physical, spiritual and social place for improving the knowledge and practice of disaster risk reduction and management including the COVID-19 pandemic. It also illuminates the widening role of religion in development. The book reinforces the case for broader engagement with all community-based religious institutions. The book is of interest to academics in diverse fields including development studies, disaster studies, sociology, anthropology, religion, Asian studies, emergency and disaster management. It will also of interest to the professional staff of disaster management authorities, public sector, bilateral and multilateral aid allocation and implementing agencies and those of humanitarian organizations.
This book focusses on the challenges and changes organizational management faces in an era when the need to develop environmentally aware processes meets high levels of competition. It covers the synergetic effects, how re-use, recycling, waste reduction, and other sustainable production strategies can add value, low costs and time of production. Sustainable business behavior is not only an environmental perspective on management, but more and more contains an organizational perspective. Taking into account these issues, green and lean management appears as the way managers can drive their employees to continuously improve the management processes that add value to the organization and costumers. This book provides information on principles, strategies, models, and applications of green and lean management, and at the same time communicates the latest research activity relating to this scientific field world-wide.
Exploiting powerful techniques from physics and mathematics, this book studies animal movement in ecology, with a focus on epidemic spread. Pulmonary syndrome is not only feared in epidemics of recent times, such as COVID-19, but is also characteristic of epidemics studied earlier such as Hantavirus. The Hantavirus is one of the book's central topics. Correlations between epidemic outbreaks and precipitation events like El Nino are analyzed and spatial reservoirs of infection in off-period of the epidemic, known as refugia, are studied. Predicted traveling waves of infection are successfully compared to field observations. Territoriality in scent-marking animals is presented, with parallels drawn with the theory of melting. The flocking and herding of birds and mammals are described in terms of collective excitations. For scientists interested in movement ecology and epidemic spread, this book provides effective solutions to long-standing problems.
An increasing variety of biological problems involving resource management, conservation and environmental quality have been dealt with using the principles of population biology (defined to include population dynamics, genetics and certain aspects of community ecology). There appears to be a mixed record of successes and failures and almost no critical synthesis or reviews that have attempted to discuss the reasons and ways in which population biology, with its remarkable theoretical as well as experimental advances, could find more useful application in agriculture, forestry, fishery, medicine and resource and environmental management. This book provides examples of state-of-the-art applications by a distinguished group of researchers in several fields. The diversity of topics richly illustrates the scientific and economic breadth of their discussions as well as epistemological and comparative analyses by the authors and editors. Several principles and common themes are emphasized and both strengths and potential sources of uncertainty in applications are discussed. This volume will hopefully stimulate new interdisciplinary avenues of problem-solving research.
In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sounded an alarm: the natural environment is being dangerously degraded because of human activity. Ever since, environmental protection has been a major societal concern. A robust system of environmental laws has emerged in the United States, commercial activities are increasingly scrutinized for their environmental impact, and communities around the world are becoming aware of the environment as a global issue requiring international attention. The most important evidence comes from the environment itself: the planet is warming, water supplies are at risk, ecosystems are under stress, and species are being lost at an unprecedented rate. Environmental Protection: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) provides accessible information that will help readers navigate this complex and highly relevant subject. It gives background information on the origins and development of environmental protection; introductions to the main elements of environmental protection with concrete examples; the context for understanding current issues; definitions of key terms; scientific, legal, and economic underpinnings; and discussion of hot-button current issues from nanopollution to climate change. The reader will gain familiarity with phenomena like biodiversity, the greenhouse effect, fugitive emissions, and algal blooms while learning about the impact of landmark policy initiatives like the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement.
Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders and analyzes legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the field, Rights of Nature: A Re-examination investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone's influential 1972 article "Should Trees Have Standing?," the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy.
Ecotones, or boundary zones between land and inland waters (such as lakes, streams and rivers), are the principal routes for transport of organic matter and nutrients across landscapes via physical and biological vectors. The ecotone is the place of cumulation and transformation of in situ production as well as of allochthonous material from adjacent aquatic and terrestrial systems. The ecotype functions as an important barrier or filter for principal nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, responsible for the eutrophication and degradation of surface waters. Intensive forest cutting, agriculture, pollution and bank regulation, urbanization and hydrotechnical constructions seriously endanger the ecotone systems and damage their protective function. It is vital to develop a scientific understanding of the behaviour of phosphorus and nitrogen in these transitional boundary habitats. Such an understanding is important for the rational protection, management and restoration of ecotones connected with lakes and rivers. The importance of nutrient cycling and retention is discussed from the point of view of ecotone function, management and reconstruction in order to sustain its protective role for water bodies. Various types of land/water transitory zones are discussed: wetlands, lake littoral systems, riparian zones of rivers, streams and brooks, the contact zones between groundwater and surface waters of lakes and rivers, air--water interfaces, and patch/ecotone structures in watersheds.
Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems. Chapters assess the economies, geographies and politics of current and future energy landscapes, exposing how dominant assemblages (composed of technologies, strategies, knowledge and authorities) change our understanding of security and risk, and how they these shared understandings are often enacted uncritically in policy. Contributors address integral relationships across the production and government of material and human energies and the opportunities for sustainable and democratic governance. In addition, the book explores how interest groups advance idealized energy futures and energy imaginaries. The work delves into the role that states, market organizations and civil society play in envisioned energy change. It assesses how risks and security are formulated in relation to economics, politics, ecology, and human health. It concludes by integrating the relationships between alternative energies and governance strategies, including issues of centralization and decentralization, suggesting approaches to engineer democracy into decision-making about energy assemblages.
Key Features: more information on macroalgae detailed description of biotic associations updated description of biomass cultivation systems coverage of different "omic" approaches and tools used in algal investigation an expanded and updated algae utilization chapter.
Unifies separate fields of ecology, physiology, plant science and evolutionary biology in a climate-change-based synthesis Draws on the expertise of a pioneer in stable isotope research Addresses issues of global change from an evolutionary perspective
The idea for this book arose in 1993, after the Free State of Bavaria through its Bayrisches Staatsministerium rur Landesentwicklung und Umweltfragen (Bavarian Ministry of Regional Development and the Environment) decided to discontinue both the Bavarian project management (PBWU) for forest decline research and the multidisciplinary field research on the Wank Mountain in the Alps near Garmisch. Forest decline through the action of ozone and other photooxidants was a main topic of the supported re search in the Alps and will be a topic of new investigations in the Bavarian Forest. Many interesting results were obtained, but the researchers involved have not had sufficient time to allow reliable conclusions to be drawn. It was therefore decided to ask inter national experts for contributions in order to summarize the best available evidence of a possible link between ozone and forest decline - a topic which has been studied in the USA since the late 1950s and in Europe since the early 1980s. The original idea of Waldsterben as an irreversible large-scale dieback of forests in Germany was soon recognized to be wrong (Forschungsbeirat 1989). However, the new criteria used for the official German and European damage inventories (loss or yel lowing of needles or leaves, tree morphology) indicate that per sistently high percentages of damaged spruce and pine remain, and there is an increasing percentage of damaged beech and oak, with a high proportion of biotic disease (Forschungsbeirat 1989; UN-ECE 1995).
Sun, wind and water draining from the land interact with the morphological features of a water body to create the environment experienced by freshwater plants and animals. The result of this interaction can be considered as the freshwater hydro climate and this plays the same role as that of conventional climate in terrestrial ecology. Agriculture, for example, has long been supported by specialist meteorological services which not only provide farmers with a sound interpretation of weather and climate without excessive technicality but which also consider relations between climate and the growth of crops and stock. There is a need for a similar service in freshwater ecology and applied biology. This book is the result of a number of years devoted to developing part of that service. It concentrates on the influence of all forms of water movement on the ecology of fresh waters. Water movement implies interest in both the quantity of water moving through river basins which reflects the climate of the catch ment as well as the nature of the fluid motion within the rivers and lakes of the basin. The book is not so much a review of recent research as an attempt to establish a logic-how knowledge of water movement can contribute to understanding the ecology of fresh waters. Two points follow directly.
Over the last two decades, the field of public administration has witnessed theoretical and practical changes that have innovated the relationships between public administration and performance management. Dealing with the rising complexity of performance regimes in contemporary public administration requires that policy-makers and their organizations are able to face unpredictable problems impacting on a community's quality of life. Complex policy issues - such as immigration, pandemics, societal aging, crime, unemployment, and financial crises - cannot be easily solved by quick fixes that are focused only on a short-term and bounded vision of their causes. They rather require "robust" methods to support policy analysis and to affect sustainable community outcomes in cross-boundary settings. As illustrated in this book, Dynamic Performance Management provides a methodological framework enabling policy-makers to outline the causal relationships among policy outcomes, performance drivers, and related strategic resources. Such a modeling approach helps stakeholders to broaden the investigated system boundaries so to balance short- and long-term performance under different result domains. This approach blends performance management and System Dynamics modeling. Several examples and case studies are discussed to enable scholars and practitioners to appreciate the practical implications related to the use of such an approach.
This book focuses mainly on strategic decision making at a global level, which is rarely considered in approaches to sustainability. This book makes a unique contribution as the work looks at global consequences of mineral exhaustion and steps that can be taken to alleviate the impending problems. This book highlights how sustainability has become one of the most important issues for businesses, governments and society at large. This book explores the topic of sustainability as one that is under much debate as to what it actually is and how it can be achieved, but it is completely evident that the resources of the planet are fixed in quantity, and once used, cannot be reused except through being reused in one form or another. This is particularly true of the mineral resources of the planet. These are finite in quantity, and once fully extracted, extra quantities are no longer available for future use. This book argues and presents evidence that the remaining mineral resources are diminishing significantly and heading towards exhaustion. Once mined and consumed, they are no longer available for future use other than what can be recycled and reused. This book demonstrates that future scarcity means that best use must be made of what exists, as sustainability depends upon this, and best use is defined as utility rather than economic value, which must be considered at a global level rather than a national level. Moreover, sustainability depends upon both availability in the present and in the future, so the use of resources requires attention to the future as well as to the present. This book investigates the alternative methods of achieving the global distribution of these mineral resources and proposes an optimum solution. This book adds to the discourse through the understanding of the importance of the depletion and finiteness of raw materials and their use for the present and the future, in order to achieve and maintain sustainability.
This open access edited volume critically examines a coherence building opportunity between Climate Change Adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas through presenting best practice approaches, and supporting Irish and international case studies. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted existing global inequalities and demonstrated the scope and scale of cascading socio-ecological impacts. The impacts of climate change on our global communities will likely dwarf the disruption brought on by the pandemic, and moreover, these impacts will be more diffuse and pervasive over a longer timeframe. This edited volume considers opportunities to address global challenges in the context of developing resilience as an integrated development continuum instead of through independent and siloed agendas.
This book is a compilation of selected papers from the Fifth International Conference on Natural Resources and Sustainable Environmental Management held in Near East University, November 2021. It provides intellectual guidance and scientific evidence on the challenges of global warming and climate change based on a humanistic and critical thinking approach, promoting research and education to build equality in the global community and more sustainable societies. This book also addresses the current challenges of bridging the gap between government policymakers and providers of science and solutions with innovative ideas and new visions to help resolve the challenges facing us in the area of natural resources (water, energy), and environment.
This book brings together 45 years' worth of experience-derived information about more than 7,000 micro- and macro- species, which form the unique bio-diversity of the world's largest mangrove ecosystem, as it struggles against the natural and anthropogenic threats. Up to 1770, the estimated area of Sundarbans was around 36,000 km2, but has reduced over time to 25,000 km2, due to reclamation. This loss and the related degradation of habitats has caused historical species extinction and population decline. Whereas biodiversity conservation within and beyond the protected areas has been the watchword since the 1990s ("biodiversity, aesthetic values and integrity"), the initial two hundred years of imperial and post-colonial forest management focused primarily on revenue and production forestry, to the detriment of the ecology of the area. It will be of interest to researchers, in zoology, botany, ecology and conservation, as well as professionals, such as foresters, environmentalists, conservationists, resource managers, planners, government agencies, academic institutions, NGOs and naturalists. |
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