Peter A. McCue examines intriguing reports of people experiencing uncanny events in Britain's woods and forests, from mysterious lights and strange animal encounters to ghostly experiences. Much of the reported witness testimony was obtained first-hand by McCue or other researchers. While he draws sceptical conclusions about some of the alleged incidents, he takes others seriously and considers possible explanations. Fully illustrated and written in McCue's inimitable style, Britain's Paranormal Forests will make you think again about your next walk in the woods.

In today's world of specialization, people are attempting to protect the Earth's fragile state by swapping limousines for hybrids and pesticide-laced foods for organic produce. At other times, environmental awareness is translated into public relations gimmicks or trendy commodities. Moreover, simplistic policies, like single-species protection or planting ten trees for every tree cut down, are touted as bureaucratic or industrial panaceas. Because today's decisions are tomorrow's consequences, every small effort makes a difference, but a broader understanding of our environmental problems is necessary to the development of sustainable ecosystem policies. In Trees, Truffles, and Beasts, Chris Maser, Andrew W. Claridge, and James M. Trappe make a compelling case that we must first understand the complexity and interdependency of species and habitats from the microscopic level to the gigantic. Comparing forests in the Pacific Northwestern United States and Southeastern mainland of Australia, the authors show how easily observable species, trees and mammals are part of a complicated infrastructure that includes fungi, lichens, and organisms invisible to the naked eye, such as microbes. Eminently readable, this important book shows that forests are far more complicated than most of us might think, which means simplistic policies will not save them. Understanding the biophysical intricacies of our life-support systems just might.  

Canada's Forests provides an overall description of Canada's forests, their historical uses, and their current condition. The ten forest regions of Canada are examined, looking at how the human use of these forests has changed from the end of the last glacial period (10,000 years ago) to the present. detailing the rise of the late 19th-century conservation movement and its subsequent decline after World War I, the interplay between industry and government in the development of policy, the adoption of sustained yield policies after World War II, and the recent adoption of sustainable forest management in response to environmental concerns. Drushka argues that, despite the centuries of use, the Canadian forest retains a good deal of its vitality and integrity. Written in accessible language and aimed at a general readership, Canada's Forests is for anyone interested in the debate about the current and future uses of this precious natural resource.

Recent decades have seen unprecedented growth in the scale and intensity of industrial forestry. Directly and indirectly, it has degraded the wildlife and ecological integrity of these tropical forests, prompting a need to evaluate the impact of current forest management practices and reconsider how best to preserve the integrity of the biosphere.

Synthesizing the body of knowledge of leading scientists and professionals in tropical forest ecology and management, this book's thirty chapters examine in detail the interplay between timber harvesting and wildlife, from hunted and protected habitats to invertebrates and large mammal species.

Collectively, the contributors suggest that better management is pivotal to the maintenance of the tropics' valuable biodiversity, arguing that we must realize that tropical forests harbor the majority (perhaps 70 to 80 percent) of the world's animal species. Further, they suggest modifications to existing practices that can ensure a better future for our valuable resources.

The Amazon forest is one of the world's most complex, unknown and threatened ecosystems that holds a considerable part of biodiverse species in different groups. This ecosystem needs greater scientific attention so that we can better understand the features of the fauna, flora and microbiota to conserve species before they disappear. Thus, this book addresses issues about resources of the largest rainforest of the world. Microbiota, fauna and flora are investigated differently, providing information of ecological interest, pharmaceutical and/or economic importance. Specialists and scientists that work in Amazonia can access new information about the species that inhabit this region with unprecedented advances on ecological and behavioral aspects of apple snails, meat yield and nutritive potential of crustacean species, tadpole knowledge, mitefaun in agroecosystems, pharmaceutical potential of plant species, computational models for flora cultivation, and reviews of microbiota composition of Amazonia. Scientists will acquire knowledge about aromatic plants from the Amazon and their applications, which include uses in perfumes, fragrances, cosmetics, phytopharmaceuticals, insecticides, fungicides, bactericides, larvicides and others. Regarding the microbiota of different Amazonian environments, the book is intended to present information about applications related to mycorrhizal fungi and endophytic microorganisms.

Forests possess many components and processes that provide an array of ecosystem goods and services: timber, energy and water savings, pollution reduction, livestock forage, habitat for plants and animals, recreation opportunities, aesthetic landscapes, and biodiversity that enhance people's quality of life. Forest resources also support local and regional economies through jobs and income generated from forestry, agriculture, tourism, and locational decisions of businesses, retirees, and others. The capability of a forest to provide these and many other ecosystem services and to maintain the quality of those ecosystem services depends on its health. A healthy forest is an essential component of a healthy ecosystem -- a natural system that is capable of self-renewal, resilient in its response to disturbances (such as pest, fire, and other non-human and human-caused disturbances), and able to sustain the integrity of the natural and cultural benefits derived from it. This book updates the literature review and synthesis of economic valuation studies on the impacts of forest insect pests by Rosenberger and Smith. This book also discusses the concept of ecosystem services; identifies key elements of each study; examines areas of future research; and includes appendices that further explain non-market valuation methods, a narrative of each study, and tables that summarise each study.

This is the first book to describe the forests of the entire tropical Asian region, from Sind to New Guinea. Based on Peter Ashton's working field experience of over 55 years in every country, Burma and Laos excepted. Following a chapter on physical geography and geological history, seven chapters address forest and tree structure and dynamics, floristics, mountain forests, the other organisms on which the forests and trees depend, as well as genetics, evolutionary history, species diversity, and past and present human impact. A final chapter covers future policy and practice options for the sustainment of what remains.

Set in the rich natural, cultural, and political landscape of Haida Gwaii, Islands’ Spirit Rising examines the long-term conflict over the islands’ ancient forests and recent events that unfolded in the context of collaborative land-use planning. In response to threats posed by a century of logging, a local Indigenous-environmental-community movement built enough momentum to challenge the multinational forest industry and the political structures enabling it. This book traces the evolution of this dynamic force, from the early days of Haida resistance to the modern context of alliances, legal battles, and evolving forms of governance.

"This book is a remarkably personal report of the authors' trans-tropical experiences with forest dwellers. The experience was extensive, sometimes spanning years, and the report is the work of professional reporters, experienced at reaching to the core of critical issues of life and survival. The story is not a pretty one, and the prognosis is not good. But in their eyes the key lies in restoring and defending the rights of forest dwellers and encouraging in every way their age-old interest in preserving the integrity of forest lands. The authors are familiar with the international agencies and their programs, their successes and failures. Roger Stone was intimately involved in the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development and draws heavily on that experience. The book will strengthen the conclusions of that Commission to the effect that the world's future lies heavily entangled with the continuity of forests globally, and that continuity hinges on respect for local interests."--George M. Woodwell, Director, Woods Hole Research Center

"For twenty years, we have watched TV specials on the destruction of tropical forests -- an acre a second lost, every second for twenty years. This beautifully written book takes you right to the middle of the current international debate about what to do about it. It pulls no punches and proposes its own provocative solution. It offers a perspective that cannot be ignored and an answer that needs to be tried."--James Gustave Speth, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science

"For more than a century, the conservation movement has dedicated its energy to protecting the Earth's biodiversity. WWF has built its conservation philosophyand foundation for over forty years on principles of sound science, effective public policy, and recognition of the fundamental role local people bring to achieving tangible conservation results on the ground. Roger Stone and Claudia D'Andrea take us on a tour of the tropical forested regions of the world and capture important lessons about the merits of local control over forest resources. Their wide-ranging portrayal of community-based forest management arrangements, set within the global context of deforestation and loss of biodiversity, provides compelling testimony to the wisdom of empowering local people and nurturing their spirit as effective forest stewards."--Kathryn S. Fuller, President, World Wildlife Fund

In 1950, the biggest firestorm documented in North America-one fire alone burned 3,500,000 acres of boreal forest in northern Alberta and British Columbia-created the world's largest smoke layer in the atmosphere. The smoke travelled half way around the northern hemisphere and made the moon and sun appear blue. The Chinchaga Firestorm is an historical study of the effects of fire on the ecological process. Using technical explanations and archival discoveries, the author shows the beneficial yet destructive effects of many forest fires, including the 2011 devastation of Slave Lake, Alberta. Cordy Tymstra tells the stories of communities and individuals as their lives intersected with the path of the Chinchaga River Fire-stories that demonstrate people's spirit, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and their persistence in the struggle against nature's immense power. The 1950 event changed the way these fires are fought in Alberta and elsewhere. The Chinchaga Firestorm will appeal to wildland fire scientists, foresters, forest ecologists and policy makers, as well as those who are interested in western Canadian history and ecology.

The highland forests of southwestern Virginia were a sacred land to Native Americans and one they relied upon for sustenance. After European contact, this beautiful country drew successive waves of settlers and visitors, and for a brief yet intense period, industrialists rapaciously exploited its timber resources, particularly in the higher elevations where the woodlands had survived the nearby valleys' generations of agricultural use. This is the story of how various peoples have regarded this land over the centuries and how, starting in the early twentieth century, the federal government acquired 700,000 acres of it to create what is now the Jefferson National Forest (JNF). Will Sarvis's in-depth history explores the area's significance to such native tribes as the Cherokee and Shawnee, for whom it functioned as a buffer zone in late prehistory, and its attraction for nineteenth-century romantics who, arriving in stagecoaches, became the area's first tourists. Aggressive commercial logging gave way to the arrival of the U.S. Forest Service, which patched the JNF together through successive purchases of privately owned land and instituted a more regulated harvesting of various timber resources. Public support for Forest Service policy during the Depression and World War II was followed by controversies, including the use of eminent domain. In presenting this history, Sarvis probes the many complexities of land stewardship and, in analysis that is sure to spark debate, discusses how and why the JNF could abandon clear-cutting and return to traditional selective tree management. An ongoing experiment in democratic land use, the JNF contains many lessons about our relationship with the natural environment. This book delineates those lessons in a clear and compelling narrative that will be of great interest to policy makers, activists, and indeed anyone drawn to American environmental history and Appalachian studies.

Ages 8 to 10 years. The "Environment Series" deals with various subjects. Reading the encyclopaedias will make young readers more responsible towards the planet Earth.

Forest ecology includes within its scope the components and functions of forest ecosystems -- a community of organisms interacting with each other and with their physical environment. Forest ecosystems, which consist of bacteria, plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, soil, water and air, differ from other ecosystems in that they are dominated by trees and other woody vegetation. Each of these components plays an important role in the function and health of the forest. This book presents important research in the field.

Centuries of human use and natural processes have shaped forest habitats and their wildlife populations in New England. Conditions are never static. Forest and nonforest habitats for a shifting mosaic of New England fauna were once continuously provided by wind, fire, blowdowns, forest regrowth, and other disturbances. This is no longer the case: development of historically open habitats, fire control, and the decline of agriculture have transformed the landscape. Wildlife associated with forests and woodlots--fisher and pileated woodpecker, for example--have become common. Species associated with old fields, brushlands, and young forests--field sparrows, eastern towhees, and New England cottontails, among many others--have declined precipitously as their habitats have been developed or have reverted to forest. Today in much of the region, forests are mature and largely unmanaged, and most are privately owned. This volume is the essential compilation of forest management practices now crucial for creating a range of forest habitat conditions to maintain or enhance forest wildlife diversity in New England.
Inspired by the ground-breaking earlier works of these four distinguished biologists, foresters, and their colleagues, Forest Wildlife Habitat Management in New England presents silvicultural options for aspen-birch, northern hardwoods, swamp hardwoods, spruce-fir, hemlock, and oak-pine forests, and a wealth of information on both upland and wetland nonforested habitats. Implementing the prescribed practices will create forest conditions that will enhance wildlife diversity by providing habitats for amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In conjunction with the authors'companion books, New England Wildlife and Landowner's Guide to Wildlife Habitat, this comprehensive new professional guide will encourage and facilitate cooperative active land management by landowners and professionals united in their mission to preserve New England's precious wildlife heritage. This indispensable volume is written for professional foresters, wildlife biologists, and other natural resource managers.

The last traces of Australia's tropical rainforest, where the southeasterly winds bring rain to the coastal mountains, contain a unique assemblage of plants and animals, some primitive, many that are found nowhere else on earth. And fifteen years ago, they also contained Bill Laurance, a budding ecologist seduced by the nature of the landscape in north Queensland. Laurance isn't your typical scientist: he wears cut-offs instead of white coats, enjoys the occasional food fight, and isn't afraid to speak his mind, even if it gets him into trouble, as it often did in the Australian rainforest and as he recounts in his marvelous Queensland journal "Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles,"
As Laurance writes in the preface, the book is "not a typical account about scientific research--at least I hope not, for my colleagues' sake. Rather, it is a story about the joys and agonies of fieldwork, about zany characters and a wild clash of cultures." Laurance did his fieldwork and encountered these characters and cultures in a tiny town of loggers and farmers, a place where conservation issues have a direct impact on individual lives. He found himself at the center of a bitter battle over conservation strategies and became not only the subject of small-town gossip but also the object of many residents' hatred. Keeping ahead of his high-spirited young volunteers, hounded by the drug-sniffing local policeman, and all the while trying to further his own research amid natural and unnatural obstacles, Laurance offers us a personal and hilarious account of fieldwork and life in the Australian outpost of Millaa Millaa. "Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles" is a biology lesson, a conservation primer, and anutterly energetic story about an impressionable young man who wound up at the epicenter of an issue that tore a small town apart.

The indigenous people of the Amazon Basin known as the Huaorani are one of the world's most intriguing peoples. The community of just under four thousand in Ecuador has been known to the public primarily for their historical identity as a violent society. But Laura Rival reveals the Huaorani in all their humanity and creativity through a longitudinal ethnography, bringing a deeper perspective beyond the stereotype. Rival's intimate knowledge of Huaorani culture spans twenty-five years. Here in a collection of broad-ranging essays, she offers a fascinating and provocative study. The first section, "Among Forest Beings," shows that the Huaorani have long adapted to life in the tropical rain forest with minimal reliance on horticulture, yet have developed a complex relationship with plants. In "In the Longhouse," the second section, Rival focuses on the intimate relations that create human persons and enact kinship relations. She also discusses women's lives and perspectives. The third section, "In the Midst of Enemies," considers how Huaorani society fits in larger political and economic contexts, illustrating how native values shape their encounters with oil companies, the state, and other external forces. Rival carefully analyzes insider/outsider dialectics wherein Huaorani people re-create meaningful and valued worlds in the face of alien projects, such as petroleum development, carbon trading, or intercultural education. Capitalizing on the author's decades-long study and interactions in the community, Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador brings new insights to the Huaorani's unique way of relating to humans, to other-than-humans, and to the forest landscape they have inhabited for centuries.

Nestled within our green and pleasant land lies pockets of emerald trees. Their roots search deep into the ground and the branches reach high towards the sun. For centuries some of these have stood watching and listening to the human creatures living among them, hearing their stories and remembering. What mysteries could these woodlands tell if the trees could speak? Stories of brave deeds and foolish, star-crossed lovers, of monsters, giants and witches, hobs and kings. Discover the secrets of our forests in this engaging collection of folk tales.

2011 Outstanding Title, University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award Before Forks, a small town on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, became famous as the location for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book series, it was the self-proclaimed "Logging Capital of the World" and ground zero in a regional conflict over the fate of old-growth forests. Since Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Dietrich first published The Final Forest in 1992, logging in Forks has given way to tourism, but even with its new fame, Forks is still a home to loggers and others who make their living from the surrounding forests. The new edition recounts how forest policy and practices have changed since the early 1990s and also tells us what has happened in Forks and where the actors who were so important to the timber wars are now. For more information on the author to to: http://williamdietrich.com/

A close associate of Chico Mendes, Gomercindo Rodrigues witnessed the struggle between Brazil's rubber tappers and local ranchers--a struggle that led to the murder of Mendes. Rodrigues's memoir of his years with Mendes has never before been translated into English from the Portuguese. Now, Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes makes this important work available to new audiences, capturing the events and trends that shaped the lives of both men and the fragile system of public security and justice within which they lived and worked.

In a rare primary account of the celebrated labor organizer, Rodrigues chronicles Mendes's innovative proposals as the Amazon faced wholesale deforestation. As a labor unionist and an environmentalist, Mendes believed that rain forests could be preserved without ruining the lives of workers, and that destroying forests to make way for cattle pastures threatened humanity in the long run. Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes also brings to light the unexplained and uninvestigated events surrounding Mendes's murder.

Although many historians have written about the plantation systems of nineteenth-century Brazil, few eyewitnesses have captured the rich rural history of the twentieth century with such an intricate knowledge of history and folklore as Rodrigues.

Tropical Forest Insect Pests, first published in 2007, promotes a better theoretical understanding of pest population dynamics, and causes of forest insect outbreaks in the tropics. Covering pests of both natural forests and plantations, it examines the diversity of tropical forest insects; their ecological functions; the concept of pests; and the incidence of pests in natural forests, plantations, and stored timber. General issues on which foresters and forest entomologists hold strong traditional views, such as the severity of pest incidence in plantations vs. natural forests, in plantations of exotics vs. indigenous tree species, and in monocultures vs. mixed plantations are discussed. The final section looks in detail at specific insect pests of the common plantation tree species across the tropics, with recommendations for their control. This is a comprehensive resource suitable for graduate students and researchers in forestry and tropical forest entomology, and for forest plantation managers in the tropics.

Part armchair travelogue, part guide book, this projected three-volume series - divided into the western, central, and eastern United States - will introduce readers to all 155 national forests across the country. "This Land" is the only comprehensive field guide that describes the natural features, wildernesses, scenic drives, campgrounds, and hiking trails of our national forests, many of which - while little known and sparsely visited - boast features as spectacular as those found in our national parks and monuments. Each entry includes logistical information about size and location, facilities, attractions, and associated wilderness areas. For about half of the forests, Robert H. Mohlenbrock has provided sidebars on the biological or geological highlights, drawn from the 'This Land' column that he has written for "Natural History" magazine since 1984. Superbly illustrated with color photographs, botanical drawings, and maps, this book is loaded with information, clearly written, and easy to use. This volume covers national forests in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, California, Utah, Idaho, and Washington.