Stretching along 156 miles of Florida's East Coast, the Indian River Lagoon contains the St. Lucie estuary, the Mosquito Lagoon, Banana River Lagoon, and the Indian River. Nineteen canals and five man-made inlets have dramatically reshaped the region in the past two centuries, challenging the most biologically diverse estuarine system in the United States. Indian River Lagoon traces the winding story of the waterway, showing how humans have altered the area to fit their needs and also how the lagoon has influenced the cultures along its shores. Now stuck in transition between a place of labor and a place of recreation, the lagoon has become a chief focus of public concern. This book provides a much-needed bigger picture as debates continue over how best to restore this natural resource.

FEROX AND CHAR IN THE LOCHS OF SCOTLAND AN INQUIRY BY R. P. HARDIE PART II The publication of these notes is perhaps justified by a long and fairly extensive experience of lochs in Scotland.

Part travelogue, part history, and part environmental treatise, "Mekong - The Occluding River" is above all else an urgent warning that factors such as pollution, ecological devastation, and the depletion of natural resources are threatening the very existence of the Mekong River. Author Ngo The Vinh combines his vivid travel notes and collection of photographs with a meticulously researched history of the environmental degradation of the Mekong River. Translated from Vietnamese, the best-selling treatise outlines the myriad threats facing the river today. From oil shipments feeding the industrial cities of southwestern China to gigantic hydroelectric dams known as the Mekong Cascades in Yunnan province, China is the worst environmental offender, though the other nations along Mekong's banks behave no better. From Thailand to Laos to Vietnam, hydroelectric dams that threaten the Mekong and its inhabitants are being built at an alarming rate. To save the Mekong, Ngo The Vinh calls upon all the nations that benefit from its life-giving water to observe the "Spirit of the Mekong" in the implementation of all future development projects. To achieve this end, there must be a concerted and sustained commitment to cooperation and sustainability. At this critical cross-roads, we should remind ourselves of the mantra from Sea World San Diego: "Extinction is forever. Endangered means we still have time."

Delphus E. Carpenter (1877-1951) was Colorado's commissioner of interstate streams during a time when water rights were a legal battleground for western states. A complex, unassuming man as rare and cunning in politics and law as the elusive silver fox of the Rocky Mountain West, Carpenter boldly relied on negotiation instead of endless litigation to forge agreements among states first, before federal intervention. In Silver Fox of the Rockies, Daniel Tyler tells Carpenter's story and that of the great interstate water compacts he helped create. Those compacts, produced in the early twentieth century, have guided not only agricultural use but urban growth and development throughout much of the American West to this day. In Carpenter's time, most western states relied on the doctrine of prior appropriation--first in time, first in right--which granted exclusive use of resources to those who claimed them first, regardless of common needs. Carpenter feared that population growth and rapid agricultural development in states sharing the same river basins would rob Colorado of its right to a fair share of water. To avoid that eventuality, Carpenter invoked the compact clause of the U.S. Constitution, a clause previously used to settle boundary disputes, and applied it to interstate water rights. The result was a mechanism by which complex issues involving interstate water rights could be settled through negotiation without litigating them before the U.S. Supreme Court. Carpenter believed in the preservation of states' rights in order to preserve the constitutionally mandated balance between state and federal authority. Today, water remains critically important to the American West, and thegreat interstate water compacts Carpenter helped engineer constitute his most enduring legacy. Of particular significance is the Colorado River Compact of 1922, without which Hoover Dam could never have been built.

Collected here in this omnibus edition are Henry David Thoreau's most important works including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau, including Civil Disobedience; and of course, Walden. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is both a remembrance of an intensely spiritual moment in Henry David Thoreau's life and a memoriam to his older brother who accompanied him on the trip shortly before his death. Full of fascinating literary musings and philosophical speculations, this book is a true precursor to Walden. The Selected Essays contains nineteen essays (including Civil Disobedience). Thoreau was one of America's best known and most influential writers. His work has helped shape the American Discourse and had a lasting effect on the environmental movement in America. Walden is one of the best-known non-fiction books ever written by an American. It details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden was written with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendentalist philosophy. This book is full of fascinating musings and reflections. As pertinent and relevant today as it was when it was first written.

The study of coelenterates is now one of the most active fields of invertebrate zoology. There are many reasons for this, and not everyone would agree on them, but certain facts stand out fairly clearly. One of them is that many of the people who study coelenterates do so simply because they are interested in the animals for their own sake. This, however, would be true for other invertebrate groups and cannot by itself explain the current boom in coelenterate work. The main reasons for all this activity seem to lie in the considerable concentration of research effort and funding into three broad, general areas of biology: marine ecology, cellular-developmental biology and neurobiology, in all of which coelenterates have a key role to play. They are the dominant organisms, or are involved in an important way, in a variety of marine habitats, of which coral reefs are only one, and this automatically ensures their claims on the attention of ecologists and marine scientists. Secondly, the convenience of hydra and some other hydroids as experimental animals has long made them a natural choice for a variety of studies on growth, nutrition, symbiosis, morphogenesis and sundry aspects of cell biology. Finally, the phylogenetic position of the coelenterates as the lowest metazoans having a nervous system makes them uniquely interesting to those neurobiologists and behaviorists who hope to gain insights into the functioning of higher nervous systems by working up from the lowest level.

This book describes the basic elements in the theory of animal breeding and inheritance of quantitative economic traits and the way in which this technology can be implemented in selective breeding programs for aquaculture species. The role and the implementation of molecular genetics in modern selective breeding programs is also addressed. The booka (TM)s main objective is to stimulate development of efficient selective breeding programs in aquaculture, the worlda (TM)s fastest growing industry for animal protein production.

Considerable genetic gain from selection has been demonstrated for several aquatic species in traits like growth rate and survival. AKVAFORSK and allied institutions have demonstrated the value of selection in Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, Nile tilapia, rohu carp and the shrimp Penaeus vannamei. Presently, however, less than 10 % of total world aquaculture production is based on genetically improved animals. The urgent challenge to the industry is to implement and start selective breeding programs in order to make the aquaculture industry more competitive and sustainable, through improving the utilization of feed, land and water resources.

The text has been written by scientists at AKVAFORSK, Akvaforsk Genetics Center and co-workers in order to summarise present knowledge in the field, and to encourage implementation of selective breeding programs for economically important fish and shellfish species around the world.

Blending memoir, travelogue and history, The Seine is a love letter to Paris and the river that determined its destiny. Master storyteller and The New York Times foreign correspondent Elaine Sciolino explores the Seine through its lively characters-a bargewoman, a riverbank book- seller, a houseboat dweller, a famous cinematographer-and follows it from the remote plateaus of Burgundy, through Paris and to the sea. The Seine is a vivid, enchanting portrait of the world's most irresistible river.

In a powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution's roots in interstate river navigation, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west. Through his own travels and his encounters with experts all over the country-a Mississippi River tugboat captain, an Erie Canal lock operator, a project manager buying water rights for farms along the Colorado River-Doyle reveals the central role rivers have played in American history and how vital they are to its future.

Several cyanobacterial species can produce powerful toxins that provide a serious threat for water quality, other aquatic organisms, and human health. These harmful cyanobacteria are especially prominent in freshwater ecosystems, and are a major concern for water managers.The purpose of this work is to provide an up-to-date overview of the advances in our knowledge of harmful cyanobacteria. The work is directed towards graduate students and scientists in aquatic microbiology, aquatic ecology, environmental toxicology, and water management, and academic professionals in water management and environmental policy.