This book explores microbial symbiosis, with a particular focus on soil microorganisms, highlighting their application in enhancing plant growth and yield. It addresses various types of bacterial and fungal microbes associated with symbiotic phenomena, including rhizobium symbiosis, arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, algal/lichen symbiosis, and Archeal symbiosis. Presenting strategies for employing a diverse range of bacterial and fungal symbioses in nutrient fortification, adaptation of plants in contaminated soils, and mitigating pathogenesis, it investigates ways of integrating diverse approaches to increase crop production under the current conventional agroecosystem. Providing insights into microbial symbioses and the challenges of adopting a plant-microbe synergistic approach towards plant health, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, graduate students and anyone in industry working on bio-fertilizers and their agricultural applications.

The book provides an overview of research on the remarkable diversity, adaptive genetic differentiation, and evolutionary complexity of intertidal macroalgae species. Through incorporating molecular data, ecological niche and model-based phylogeographic inference, this book presents the latest findings and hypotheses on the spatial distribution and evolution of seaweeds in the context of historical climate change (e.g. the Quaternary ice ages), contemporary global warming, and increased anthropogenic influences. The chapters in this book highlight past and current research on seaweed phylogeography and predict the future trends and directions. This book frames a number of research cases to review how biogeographic processes and interactive eco-genetic dynamics shaped the demographic histories of seaweeds, which furthermore enhances our understanding of speciation and diversification in the sea. Dr. Zi-Min Hu is an associate professor at Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China. Dr. Ceridwen Fraser is a senior lecturer at Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

The book , 'An Introduction to Phytoplanktons - Diversity and Ecology' is very useful as it covers wide aspects of phytoplankton study including the general idea about cyanobacteria and algal kingdom. It contains different topics related to very basic idea of phytoplanktons such as, types ,taxonomic description and the key for identification etc. Together with it, very modern aspects of phytoplankton study including different methodologies needed for research students of botany, ecology, limnology and environmental biology are also included. The first chapter is very basic and informative and describes algal and phytoplankton classification, algal pigments, algal bloom and their control, algal toxins, wetlands algae, ecological significance of phytoplanktons etc. A general key for identification of common phytoplankton genera is also included for students who will be able to identify these genera based on the light microscopic characters. In Chapters 2-4, different aspects of phytoplankton research like primary productivity, community pattern analysis and their ecological parameter analysis have been discussed with detailed procedures. Statistical analysis is also discussed in detail. Chapter 5 includes case studies related to review, phytoplankton diversity and dynamics.

In the heart of Africa, a unique lake attracts the attention of scientists since the beginning of the 20th century. At the foot of the Virunga volcano chain, Lake Kivu harbors a vast amount of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane, making this lake the most dangerous lake on Earth. But the lake furnishes also many goods and services for surrounding populations and may soon become the most important energy supplier in the area. At the beginning of gas exploitation, the time has come for gathering the large amount of scientific information acquired during past and present research on Lake Kivu. The eleven chapters cover many aspects of the physics, geochemistry and biology of the lake, with a particular focus on the unique physical and geochemical features of the water column and on the ecological functioning of the surface waters. The impacts of the introduced fish species and the potential impacts of methane exploitation are also summarized. This multi-disciplinary book may also be used as an introduction to the limnology and biogeochemistry of large tropical lakes, as it covers various aspects of the physics, geochemistry, biology and ecology of the African Great Rift lakes. "

This handy reference manual puts a wealth of ready-to-use information, data, and practical procedures within immediate reach of geo-engineers and technicians, whether they be in the field or office. It assembles and organizes the most-needed set of equations, tables, graphs and check-lists on six major subfields of geo-engineering: investigations, testing, properties, hazards, structures and works. This practical reference for the professional and others interested in the subject of ground engineering skips lengthy definitions to highlight best practice and methods proven most effective. While reflecting codes and standards, it also fills the gaps with non-standard approaches when existing ones are skimpy on practical details or agreement. Enhanced by 146 illustrations and 83 tables, the Practical Guide to Geo-Engineering points users to supporting information and data through its extensive reference list. Audience: This book is of interest to everyone involved in practical geo-engineering.

Inland saline waters are threatened worldwide by diversion and pollution of their inflows, introductions of exotic species and economic development of these ecologically valuable habitats. Since 1979 a series of international symposia on inland saline waters has served to strengthen and expand the scope of limnological research on inland saline waters. The seventh conference continued this tradition and the papers derived from the conference focused on the ecology of microbial communities, the influence of habitat geochemistry on biogeography of flora and fauna, physical and geochemical processes, and the conservation of inland saline waters. Of particular note are papers on Walker Lake, Nevada (USA), and the Salton Sea and Mono Lake, California (USA). Continued local, national and international efforts are required to inform the public and decision-makers about the environmental problems faced by saline waters. The papers in this volume will serve this end and should be of interest to aquatic ecologists, limnologists, aquaculturalists, and water resource managers.

Over the past 40 years, the SIP meetings have played a central role in the development of the field of insect-plant relationships, providing both a show-case for current research as well as a forum for the airing and development of influential new ideas. The 10th symposium, held 4-10 July 1998, in Oxford, followed that tradition. The present volume includes a representative selection of fully refereed papers from the meeting, plus a listing of the titles of all presentations. The volume includes reviews of major areas within the subject, along with detailed experimental studies. Topics covered include central neural and chemosensory bases of host plant recognition, integrative studies of insect behaviour, tritrophic interactions, plant defences, insect life histories, plant growth responses, microbial partners in insect-plant associations, and genetic bases of host plant associations. The book provides a key source for students and research workers in the field of insect-plant relationships.

The aim of this first book is to introduce the readers of the series to why Cuatro Cienegas Basin (CCB) is so unique, starting with the reason why astrobiologists became interested in this oasis in the first place; namely, the high diversity and abundance of stromatolites and microbial mats in continental waters to be found in the desert oasis. As NASA has long since discovered, the basin may offer the best analog of early Earth. In essence, CCB is a time machine that can take us far back and forth in time. In the respective chapters, the contributing authors explain the extraordinary microbial diversity of Cuatro Cienegas Basin from various perspectives. In order to do so, they explain their journey as well as the different tools used to unravel the basin's mysteries, such as: Why are there so many species in a place without food? How has life there survived the enormity of tectonic shifts through the ages, maintaining its ancient marine heritage?

This is the first of two volumes that together provide an integrated picture of the Montenegrin Adriatic coast, presenting the natural components of the system as well as the chemical composition and chemical processes in the extended area. This book describes the biology and ecology of the high seas of the Montenegrin coast, with a special focus on their biodiversity, flora and fauna, fisheries, mariculture, marine reptiles and mammals. The data has been collected through national and international projects over the last few decades and provides the reader with models and recommendations for the protection of this vital region of the Adriatic coast, as well as scientific recommendations for the sustainable use of its biological resources. Given the breadth and depth of its coverage, the book offers an invaluable source of information for researchers, students and environmental managers alike.

This book unites a wealth of current information on the ecology, silviculture and restoration of the Longleaf Pine ecosystem. The book includes a discussion of the significant historical, social and political aspects of ecosystem management, making it a valuable resource for students, land managers, ecologists, private landowners, government agencies, consultants and the forest products industry.

The conservation threat represented by invasive species is well-known, but the scientific opportunities are underappreciated. Invasion studies have historically been largely directed at the important job of collecting case studies. Invasion biology has matured to the point of being able to incorporating itself into the heart of ecology, and should be viewed as extensions or critical experiments of ecological theory. In this edited volume, global experts in ecology and evolutionary biology explore how theories in ecology elucidate the invasion processes while also examining how specific invasions informs ecological theory. This reciprocal benefit is highlighted in a number of scales of organization: population, community and biogeographic, while employing example invaders in all major groups of organisms and from a number of regions around the globe.

Since the late 1960s the Indonesian state of East Kalimantan has witnessed a marked increase in the impact of human activities chiefly commercial logging and agricultural exploitation. Located on the island of Borneo, East Kalimantan also was subjected to prolonged droughts and extensive wildfires in 1982-83 and 1997-98 that were linked to the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. The changes in the rainforest ecosystem in East Kalimantan during this 15-year cycle of severe ENSO events are the subject of this book. With an eye toward development of rehabilitation techniques for sustainable forest management, the authors examine possible interactive effects of drought, fire, and human impacts on the flora and fauna of the area.

The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today's urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world's population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto's Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.

This book brings together a selection of 22 original studies submitted to Biodiversity and Conservation that address aspects of methods and practice in biodiversity conservation. The contributions deal with a wide variety of approaches to site selection and management, especially the use of bioindicators, surrogates, and other approaches to site selection. As no complete inventory of all taxa in any one site has yet been achieved, alternative strategies are essential and bioindicators or surrogates come to the fore. The articles included cover a wide range of organisms used in such approaches to in situ conservation: annelids, anurans, arthropods, birds, bryophytes, butterflies, collembolans, flowering pants, a lobster, molluscs, rodents, and turtles. Further, the habitats considered here embrace estuaries, forests, freshwater, grasslands, the marine, mountains, and sand-dunes, and are drawn from a wide range of countries notably Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania, and the U. K.

Cryopreservation, well established for ex situ preservation of bacteria and fungi, is shown here also applied to bryophyte conservation. Finance is always a problem, and the final contribution examines the sources of money available for conservation action in an examplar country, Mexico.

Collectively, the studies presented here provide a snap-shot of the range of methods and practices in use in the conservation of biodiversity today. This makes the volume especially valuable for use in conservation biology and biodiversity management courses.

Reprinted from Biodiversity and Conservation, Volume 18 No 5 (2009)."

In an age of increasing environmental problems, ecology has had to grow up fast from a discipline dealing with relatively simple interactions between species to one that tries to explain changes in global patterns of diversity and richness. The issues are complex. Every species may seem to have its own unique role, but if that is true, then why are there hundreds of species of plankton in an ecosystem with only a handful of niches? The tropics have a high biodiversity, but does anybody know why? And how can a single introduced tree species wreak havoc in Hawaii s rainforests, when it is one of thousands of quietly coexisting tree species in its native continent, South America?
The strength of this book is that it will help digest some of these more complex issues in the ecology of biodiversity. It will do this by zooming out from the local scale to the global scale in a number of steps, marrying community ecology with macroecology, and introducing unexpected nuggets of natural history along the way. The reader will notice that, the larger the scale, the more the familiar niche-concept appears to be overshadowed by exotic fields from fractal and complexity theory. However, scientists differ in opinion on the scale at which niches become irrelevant. These differences of opinion, but also the search for unified ecological theories, will form another force by which the story will be carried along to its conclusion. A conclusion which, surprisingly, seeks to find a glimpse of the globe's future in the traces from its past."

The need for tsunami research and analysis has grown dramatically following the devastating tsunami of December 2004, which affected Southern Asia. This book pursues a detailed theoretical and mathematical analysis of the fundamentals of tsunamis, especially the evolution and dynamics of tsunamis and other great waves. Of course, it includes specific measurement results from the 2004 tsunami, but the emphasis is on the nature of the waves themselves and their links to nonlinear phenomena.

During recent decades, large-scale effects of pollution on marine estuaries and even entire enclosed coastal seas have become apparent. One of the first regions where this was observed is the Baltic Sea, whereby the appearance of anoxic deep basins, extensive algal blooms and elimination of top predators like eagles and seals indicated effects of both increased nutrient inputs and toxic substances.
This book describes the physical, biochemical and ecological processes that govern inputs, distribution and ecological effects of nutrients and toxic substances in the Baltic Sea. Extensive reviews are supplemented by budgets and dynamic simulation models.
This book is highly interdisciplinary and uses a systems approach for analyzing and describing a marine ecosystem. It gives an overview of the Baltic Sea, but is useful for any marine scientist studying large marine ecosystems.

Pollution doesn't make for easy sonnets or flowing, romantic narratives. And that's what this title is about - pollution. Not the everyday sort of pollution that we recognise so easily, the type which piles up into stinking heaps of litter or that clogs the sky with filthy smoke. No, this is a form of pollution which is so subtle and insidious that many people do not realise it is there. Invaded is about biological pollution, the kind that comes in dense hedges of lush greenery, blooming fields of heady petals or gracefully draped creepers. It may spread incognito on the wings of a bird, tug on the end of an angler's line or scurry unnoticed through the undergrowth. These pages explore plants and animals that have traversed the borders and boundaries of their natural habitats and made their way into South Africa over the past 300 years and more. Unhindered by the predators and diseases which once kept their populations in check, many have come to outnumber and out-compete the species they encounter in their adopted homes. Invaded provides an overview of the different species that have arrived in our country during the past three centuries, and the threats they pose (or have the potential to become). Ultimately, the book attempts to quantify how these species have changed systems, disrupted the natural environment and threatened the future of the country's many unique plants, animals and habitats.

This volume provides insights into current research on fungal populations, communities and their interactions with other organisms. It focuses on fungal responses to the physical environment; interactions with bacteria, other fungi, invertebrates and plants; the role of fungi in ecosystem processes such as decomposition and nutrient cycling; and aspects of biogeography and conservation. Since the publication of the second edition of Volume IV in 2007, the massive use of "omics" methods has revolutionized our understanding of fungal lifestyles. Highlighting these advances, the third edition has been completely updated and revised. Several chapters deal with various applications of genomics and transcriptomics in biological pest control, as well as interactions with other living systems. This is an invaluable source of information both for scientists who wish to update their knowledge of current advances and for graduate students interested in obtaining a comprehensive introduction to this field of research.

This volume will lay out the best methods for measuring net primary productivity (NPP) in ecological research. Primary productivity is the rate at which energy is stored in the organic matter of plants per unit area of the earth's surface. NPP is the beginning point of the carbon cycle, so our ability to accurately measure NPP is important. The book includes chapters for each of the critical biome types to offer special techniques that work best in each biome. For example, there are chapters that discuss grassland ecosystems, urban ecosystems, marine pelagic ecosystems, forest ecosystems, and salt marsh ecosystems, among others. All 26 LTER sites will be expected to collect and report data using these methods, but ecologists more generally should also find these methods useful and authoritative. Currently no standard methods or standards exist. Measuring NPP is fundamental to many ecosystem studies at thousands of sites, and having identified standards and methods would be extremely useful for comparing measurements among sites and for compiling a broad scale understanding of the environmental, biological, and nutrition controls on NPP. This book would resemble the Standard Soil Measurement volume in the LTER series in that it reaches well beyond any single LTER site to apply to any ecosystem. It should be rather more widely used than the soil measurements volume, in that measuring productivity is so fundamental to any ecological analyses as well as agronomy, forestry, fisheries, limnology and oceanography.

Arising from the third Cary Conference held in 1989, Comparative Analyses of Ecosystems investigates the utility and limitations of cross-system comparisons in ecology. The contributors, all well-known in their field, support their conclusions on the use and meaning of such comparisons by presenting novel analyses of data utilizing a variety of cross-system approaches in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial systems.

This book presents an evolutionary biogeographic analysis of the Mexican Transition Zone, which is situated in the overlap of the Nearctic and Neotropical regions. It includes a comprehensive review of previous track, cladistic and molecular biogeographic analyses and is illustrated with full color maps and vegetation photographs of the respective areas covered. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to students and researchers whose work involves systematic and biogeographic analyses of plant and animal taxa of the Mexican Transition Zone or other transition zones of the world, and to ecologists working in biodiversity conservation, who will be able to appreciate the evolutionary relevance of the Mexican Transition Zone for establishing conservation areas..

The boreal forest is the northern-most woodland biome, whose natural history is rooted in the influence of low temperature and high-latitude. Alaska's boreal forest is now warming as rapidly as the rest of Earth, providing an unprecedented look at how this cold-adapted, fire-prone forest adjusts to change.
This volume synthesizes current understanding of the ecology of Alaska's boreal forests and describes their unique features in the context of circumpolar and global patterns. It tells how fire and climate contributed to the biome's current dynamics. As climate warms and permafrost (permanently frozen ground) thaws, the boreal forest may be on the cusp of a major change in state. The editors have gathered a remarkable set of contributors to discuss this swift environmental and biotic transformation. Their chapters cover the properties of the forest, the changes it is undergoing, and the challenges these alterations present to boreal forest managers.
In the first section, the reader can absorb the geographic and historical context for understanding the boreal forest. The book then delves into the dynamics of plant and animal communities inhabiting this forest, and the biogeochemical processes that link these organisms. In the last section the authors explore landscape phenomena that operate at larger temporal and spatial scales and integrates the processes described in earlier sections. Much of the research on which this book is based results from the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research Program. Here is a synthesis of the substantial literature on Alaska's boreal forest that should be accessible to professional ecologists, students, and the interested public.

Tropical rain forests are increasingly expected to serve for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation amid global climate change and increasing human demands for land. Natural production forests that are legally designated to produce timber occur widely in the Southeast Asian tropics. Synergizing timber production, climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in such tropical production forests is one of the most realistic means to resolve these contemporary global problems. Next-generation sustainable forest management is being practiced in the natural tropical rain forest of a model site in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, while earlier sustainable management practices have generally failed, leading to extensive deforestation and forest degradation elsewhere in the tropics. Ecologists have examined co-benefits of sustainable forestry in the model forest in terms of forest regeneration, carbon sequestration and biodiversity in comparison to a forest managed by destructive conventional methods. Taxonomic groups studied have included trees, decomposers, soil microbes, insects and mammals. A wide array of field methods and technology has been used including count plots, sensor cameras, and satellite remote-sensing. This book is a compilation of the results of those thorough ecological investigations and elucidates ecological processes of tropical rain forests after logging. The book furnishes useful information for foresters and conservation NGOs, and it also provides baseline information for biologists and ecologists. A further aim is to examine the environmental effects of a forest certification scheme as the model forest has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Taken as a whole, this book proves that the desired synergy is possible.