The recent progress in analytical methods, aided by bringing in a wide range of other disciplines, opens up the study to a broader field, which means that biogeography now goes far beyond a simple description of the distribution of living species on Earth. Originating with Alexander von Humboldt, biogeography is a discipline in which ecologists and evolutionists aim to understand the way that living species are organized in connection with their environments. Today, as we face major challenges such as global warming, massive species extinction and devastating pandemics, biogeography offers hypotheses and explanations that may help to provide solutions. This book presents as wide an overview as possible of the different fields that biogeography interacts with. Sixteen authors from all over the world offer different approaches based on their specific areas of knowledge and experience; thus, we intend to illustrate the vast number of diverse aspects covered by biogeography.

This study describes the fundamentals of assessing the vulnerability of coral islands, as well as environmental management and resource exploitation. Using seabird subfossils, such as bones, guano, eggshells etc., which have been well preserved on the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea, the author identifies the influences of climate change and human activity on seabird populations and diets. Understanding the past is of great importance for predicting the future, and seabird subfossils provide valuable information, which can be used to study changes in seabird ecology, paleoceanography and palaeoclimate. Furthermore, this study proposes examining the biogeochemical cycling of some elements present in the geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. Dr. Liqiang Xu works at the Hefei University of Technology, China.

This book provides a unique overview of research methods over the past 25 years assessing critical loads and temporal effects of the deposition of air pollutants. It includes critical load methods and applications addressing acidification, eutrophication and heavy metal pollution of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Applications include examples for each air pollution threat, both at local and regional scale, including Europe, Asia, Canada and the US. The book starts with background information on the effects of the deposition of sulphur, nitrogen and heavy metals and geochemical and biological indicators for risk assessments. The use of those indicators is then illustrated in the assessment of critical loads and their exceedances and in the temporal assessment of air pollution risks. It also includes the most recent developments of assessing critical loads and current and future risks of soil and water chemistry and biodiversity under climate change, with a special focus on nitrogen. The book thus provides a complete overview of the knowledge that is currently used for the scientific support of policies in the field of air pollution control to protect ecosystem services.

This study brings together decades of research on the modern natural environment of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, reviews past research on paleoenvironmental change since the Late Pleistocene, and finally presents paleoecological records of changing forest composition and fire over the last 14,000 years. The focus of this study is on the authors' studies of five pollen records from the Olympic Peninsula. Maps and other data graphics are used extensively. Paleoecology can effectively address some of these challenges we face in understanding the biotic response to climate change and other agents of change in ecosystems. First, species responses to climate change are mediated by changing disturbance regimes. Second, biotic hotspots today suggest a long-term maintenance of diversity in an area, and researchers approach the maintenance of diversity from a wide range and angles (CITE). Mountain regions may maintain biodiversity through significant climate change in 'refugia': locations where components of diversity retreat to and expand from during periods of unfavorable climate (Keppel et al., 2012). Paleoecological studies can describe the context for which biodiversity persisted through time climate refugia. Third, the paleoecological approach is especially suited for long-lived organisms. For example, a tree species that may typically reach reproductive sizes only after 50 years and remain fertile for 300 years, will experience only 30 to 200 generations since colonizing a location after Holocene warming about 11,000 years ago. Thus, by summarizing community change through multiple generations and natural disturbance events, paleoecological studies can examine the resilience of ecosystems to disturbances in the past, showing how many ecosystems recover quickly while others may not (Willis et al., 2010).

Warm-temperate deciduous forests are "southern", mainly oak-dominated deciduous forests, as found over the warmer southern parts of the temperate deciduous forest regions of East Asia, Europe and eastern North America. Climatic analysis has shown that these forests extend from typical temperate climates to well into the warm-temperate zone, in areas where winters are a bit too cold for the ‘zonal’ evergreen broad-leaved forests normally expected in that climatic zone. This book is the first to recognize and describe these southern deciduous forests as an alternative to the evergreen forests of the warm-temperate zone. This warm-temperate zone will become more important under global warming, since it represents the contested transition between deciduous and evergreen forests and between tropical and temperate floristic elements. This book is dedicated to the memory of Tatsuō Kira, the imaginative Japanese ecologist who first noticed and described this general zonation exception and who proposed the name warm-temperate deciduous forest.

This book is a collection of scholarly articles presenting the research results of work carried out under the supervision of Prof. Saroj Bhosle, a microbiologist at Goa University, India.The objective of this volume is to document the comprehensive ecological knowledge of eubacteria isolated from diverse coastal ecosystems of Goa, little explored for microbiological studies. These ecosystems need to be properly tapped in order to reveal potential bacteria yet to be exploited. The topics of this book are particularly relevant to researchers and students in the field of microbiology with an interest in the varied aspects of eubacteria. They provide academic insight for scientific communities in Goa and the rest of the world.

This book provides an updated list of the vascular flora of the National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, incorporating the latest nomenclatural and floristic findings. The list of plants was extrapolated from a geographic database including all data from floristic or vegetational references and herbarium specimens concerning the Park area. This data storage tool was obtained from the database of Abruzzo vascular flora (Conti et al. 2010) and adapted to the study area by adding those areas of the Park falling in the regions of Lazio and Molise and their accompanying floristic and vegetational data. Analysis of the data has allowed gaps in the floristic knowledge of the Park, such as comparatively or completely unexplored areas, to be identified, together with those species records that still require confirmation and/or further study. On the basis of these deductions, fieldwork aimed at the collection of new floristic data was carried out. Verification of the correct identification of herbarium specimens collected in the past, as well as a systematic study of critical genera, were also important priorities.

The first volume in this new text book series covers comprehensively relevant aspects related to the appearance and characterisation of fossil matter in the geosphere such as kerogen, oil, shales and coals. As organic geochemistry is a modern scientific subject characterized by a high transdisciplinarity and located at the edge of chemistry, environmental sciences, geology and biology, there clearly is a need for a flexible offer of appropriate academic teaching material on an undergraduat level addressed to the variety of students coming originally from different study disciplines. For such a flexible usage this textbook series' consists of different volumes with clear defined aspects and with manageable length.

Paleontologists and geologists struggle with research questions often complicated by the loss or even absence of key paleobiological and paleoenvironmental information. Insight into this missing data can be gained through direct exploration of analogous living organisms and modern environments. Creative, experimental and interdisciplinary treatments of such ancient-Earth analogs form the basis of Lessons from the Living. This volume unites a diverse range of expert paleontologists, neontologists and geologists presenting case studies that cover a spectrum of topics, including functional morphology, taphonomy, environments and organism-substrate interactions.

This book summarizes major aspects of the evolution of South American metatherians, including their epistemologic, phylogenetic, biogeographic, faunal, tectonic, paleoclimatic, and metabolic contexts. A brief overview of the evolution of each major South American lineage ("Ameridelphia", Sparassodonta, Didelphimorphia, Paucituberculata, Microbiotheria, and Polydolopimorphia) is provided. It is argued that due to physiological constraints, metatherian evolution closely followed the conditions imposed by global temperatures. In general terms, during the Paleocene and the early Eocene multiple radiations of metatherian lineages occurred, with many adaptive types exploiting insectivorous, frugivorous, and omnivorous adaptive zones. In turn, a mixture of generalized and specialized types, the latter mainly exploiting carnivorous and granivorous-folivorous adaptive zones, characterized the second half of the Cenozoic. In both periods, climate was the critical driver of their radiation and turnovers.

This volume explores the emerging and current, cutting-edge theories and methods of modeling, optimization, dynamics and bio economy. It provides an overview of the main issues, results and open questions in these fields as well as covers applications to biology, economy, energy, industry, physics, psychology and finance. The majority of the contributed papers for this volume come from the participants of the International Conference on Modeling, Optimization and Dynamics (ICMOD 2010), a satellite conference of EURO XXIV Lisbon 2010, which took place at Faculty of Sciences of University of Porto, Portugal and from the Berkeley Bio economy Conference 2012, at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

This handbook is a reference guide for selecting and carrying out numerous methods of soil analysis. It is written in accordance with analytical standards and quality control approaches. It covers a large body of technical information including protocols, tables, formulae, spectrum models, chromatograms and additional analytical diagrams. The approaches are diverse, from the simplest tests to the most sophisticated determination methods.

This book provides a representative assessment of the state of the art of research on Paleogene rotaliid larger foraminifera. It gives an overview of the current understanding of systematics of this group and, in particular, of its biostratigraphic importance and palaeobiogeography. The senior author of the work, late Professor Hottinger, a leading scientist in the field, both from a systematic and applied side, presents in this book his most recent advances. The foraminiferal family Rotaliidae is a traditional group used frequently which plays an important role for petroleum exploration in the biostratigraphy and palaeobiogeography of Paleogene shallow water deposits in the Middle East. This book aims to introduce rotaliid representatives as index fossils that can be recognized in random thin-sections of cemented rocks. The book is generously illustrated with an unprecedented degree of accuracy. The selection of taxa is restricted to forms having lived in the Paleocene and the Eocene, where their biostratigraphic significance is much higher than during later epochs. However, some additional rotaliid taxa, from the Late Cretaceous or that do not belong to the family Rotaliidae sensu stricto, are included in this book in order to demonstrate particular roots of rotaliid phylogenetic lineages in the previous community maturation cycle or to delimit the taxon Rotaliidae with more precision. This book can be considered as a reference in the field.

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo - which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire. The advent of land plants since about 420 million years ago ensued in flammable carbon-rich biosphere interfaced with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Born on a flammable Earth surface, under increasingly unstable climates descending from the warmer Pliocene into the deepest ice ages of the Pleistocene, human survival depended on both-biological adaptations and cultural evolution, mastering fire as a necessity. This allowed the genus to increase entropy in nature by orders of magnitude. Gathered around camp fires during long nights for hundreds of thousandth of years, captivated by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, humans developed imagination, insights, cravings, fears, premonitions of death and thereby aspiration for immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the concept of god. Inherent in pantheism was the reverence of the Earth, its rocks and its living creatures, contrasted by the subsequent rise of monotheistic sky-god creeds which regard Earth as but a corridor to heaven. Once the climate stabilized in the early Holocene, since about ~7000 years-ago production of excess food by Neolithic civilization along the Great River Valleys has allowed human imagination and dreams to express themselves through the construction of monuments to immortality. Further to burning large part of the forests, the discovery of combustion and exhumation of carbon from the Earth's hundreds of millions of years-old fossil biospheres set the stage for an anthropogenic oxidation event, affecting an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. The consequent ongoing extinction equals the past five great mass extinctions of species-constituting a geological event horizon in the history of planet Earth.

This book explores the degree to which landscapes have been enriched with palms by human activities and the importance of palms for the lives of people in the region today and historically. Palms are a prominent feature of many landscapes in Amazonia, and they are important culturally, economically, and for a variety of ecological roles they play. Humans have been reorganizing the biological furniture in the region since the first hunters and gatherers arrived over 20,000 years ago.

This book provides an overview, research compendium and an introduction to the science of molecular paleontology, including literature overview for non-geochemists. Analytical methods employed are included as a part of each chapter that underpin this branch of paleontology and indeed geochemistry. The primary usefulness of this volume is for organic geochemists, molecular palaeontologists, and molecular archeologists. Researchers, graduate students and academics interested in astrobiology from a paleontological perspective may also find this to be valuable.

Over the past 4 billion years, microorganisms have contributed to shaping the earth and making it more habitable for higher forms of life. They are remarkable in their metabolic diversity and their ability to harvest energy from oxidation and reduction reactions. Research on these microbiological processes has led to the newly evolving fields of geomicrobiology and biogeochemistry, linking the geosphere and the biosphere. This volume of the Soil Biology series provides an overview of the biogeochemical processes and the microorganisms involved, with an emphasis on the industrial applications. Topics treated include aspects such as bioremediation of contaminated environments, biomining, biotechnological applications of extremophiles, subsurface petroleum microbiology, enhanced oil recovery using microbes and their products, metal extraction from soil, soil elemental cycling and plant nutrition.

Foraminiferal cultures now serve as tools for researching biological, environmental, and geological topics. However, the biological backgrounds, in particular the natural histories of foraminifera, largely remain unclear. It is also true that the different techniques used in different subdisciplines are a setback to fully understanding the subject. Taken together, these factors prevent progress in experimental approaches to foraminiferal studies. This book aims to share and exchange knowledge between researchers from different subdisciplines, and the book should interest not only foraminiferal researchers but also scientists who are working with marine organisms to explore questions in relation to biology, geology, and oceanography.

Here, a diverse group of geologists and paleobiologists focus their attention on the richly fossiliferous Neogene stratigraphic sections of the Dominican Republic. They provide an updated geological framework and a series of novel studies of evolutionary stasis and change among different lineages and associated ecological communities. This collection of studies illustrates the immense potential of collaborative, multidisciplinary, and field-based paleobiological research.

This book presents the multidisciplinary results of an extensive underwater excavation in north Florida. This yielded the most complete results of interactions between early Paleoindians and late Pleistocene megafauna, in a rich environmental context in eastern North America. The data provides fundamental insights into "the Peopling of the Americas" and "The Extinction of the Megafauna". An excellent color photo section expresses the uniqueness of this project.

"Ecosystem Services and Management Strategy in China" is a two-year international cooperation project that culminated from the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development's Task Force on Ecosystem Services and Management. It combines case studies, scenario analysis, and stakeholder consultations that focus on Chinese forest, grassland and wetland ecosystems and assesses the economic and social benefits of sustainable ecosystems management. It also identifies better practices in ecosystem management from Chinese and international experience and recommends a more intensive integration of ecosystem services into decision-making processes. In November 2010, the Task Force presented five strategic policy proposals for the implementation of sustainable management for Chinese ecosystems. These proposals were extremely well-received by senior decision makers and have since been adopted by national government agencies. The book represents a valuable reference work for researchers and professionals working in related areas. Professor Yiyu Chen worked as president at the National Natural Science Foundation of China from 2004 to early 2013 and is Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Beate Jessel works as president at the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Germany. Professor Bojie Fu works at the Research Center of Eco-Environment Sciences, CAS and is Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Xiubo Yu works at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr.Jamie Pittock is a Senior Lecturer at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Australia.

Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) synthesize intracellular nano-sized minerals of magnetite and/or greigite magnetosomes for magnetic orientation. They play important roles in global iron cycling and sedimentary magnetism, and have a broad range of potential applications in both biotechnological and biomedical fields. However, because the majority of MTB in nature remain unculturable, our understanding of these specific bacteria remains fairly limited. This thesis describes the development of a novel approach for effectively collecting, purifying and characterizing uncultivated magnetotactic bacteria. The diversity, genomic information and rock magnetic properties of various uncultivated MTB are investigated and characterized using a combination of biological and geophysical methods. The results will lead to a better understanding of the biogeography and biomineralization mechanisms of MTB in nature, and improve our knowledge of the contributions of MTB to biogeochemical cycles of elements and sedimentary magnetism. Dr. Wei Lin works at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

This book describes the mountain forests of East Asia (Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan), the tree layers of which contain different species of the genus Fagus. The vegetation is primarily deciduous in the northern regions, whereas in South China evergreen trees can also be found: a total of 21 plant communities are described, with data on species composition, dominance, geographical distribution and ecology. A general comparison is provided by synoptic Table 1, which details the frequencies of ca. 1500 species growing in the Fagus forests; biodiversity and evolution are discussed. The book, which is the fruit of a major international collaboration, presents a synthesis of extended original investigations by the authors and hardly accessible specialist literature.

Many historians and political scientists argue that ties between Canada and Latin America have been weak and intermittent because of lack of mutual interest and common objectives. Has this record of diverging paths changed as Canada has attempted to expand its economic and diplomatic ties with the region? Has Canada become an imperialist power? Canada's Past and Future in Latin America investigates the historical origins of and more recent developments in Canadian foreign policy in the region. It offers a detailed evaluation of the Harper and Trudeau governments' approaches to Latin America, touching on political diplomacy, bilateral development cooperation, and civil society initiatives. Leading scholars of Canada-Latin America relations offer insights from unique perspectives on a range of issues, such as the impact of Canadian mining investment, security relations, democracy promotion, and the changing nature of Latin American migration to Canada. Drawing on archival research, field interviews, and primary sources, Canada's Past and Future in Latin America advances our understanding of Canadian engagement with the region and evaluates options for building stronger ties in the future.

This book is about conflicts between different stakeholder groups triggered by protected species that compete with humans for natural resources. It presents key ecological features of typical conflict species and mitigation strategies including technical mitigation and the design of participatory decision strategies involving relevant stakeholders. The book provides a European perspective, but also develops a global framework for the development of action plans.