We've reached an environmental crisis point with plastic, and it's time to take action. But is it possible to make positive changes without radically changing your lifestyle? Absolutely! This practical book suggests eco-friendly alternatives to plastic, including budget options, high-street substitutes and DIY ideas to help you drastically reduce your plastic consumption. With 101 simple ways to use less plastic, you'll find it easy to take the first step and make a difference.

Get cutting-edge agroforestry research and data Deforestation and the rampant use of fossil fuels are major contributors to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and are enormous influences on global warming. Agroforestry systems and tree plantations can help mitigate the resulting climate change and degradation of biodiversity and accelerating climate change. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses these global concerns with an essential collection of presentations on biodiversity and climate change from the First World Congress in Agroforestry (Orlando, Florida, 2004). Respected experts discuss the latest research and data on how agroforestry systems can help solve environmental problems through carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. Years ago, agroforestry's environmental benefits were mainly seen as being soil amelioration, erosion control, microclimate control, and the alleviation of the effects of drought in semiarid areas. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems goes beyond the regional considerations of years past to focus on the challenges of today's most pressing global environmental concerns. The contributors describe the latest research and concepts in agroforestry systems, reforestation efforts, soils, vegetation, and agriculture while reviewing their economic aspects. Incentives for reforestation and agroforestry are explored in detail. Each chapter is carefully referenced and includes tables to clarify ideas and data. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses: advantages of mixed-species plantations tropical pasture and silvo-pastoral systems tropical forest ecosystem management research on the economic feasibility of various land-use systems socio-economic considerations of coffee-growing ecosystems agroforestry systems in Costa Rica Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems is essential reading for researchers and scientists, as well as professionals in agroforestry, forestry, soils, global change, climate change, and environmental studies, educators, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Get back to nature and explore sites unspoilt by humankind with the latest addition to the Inspired Traveller's Guide series. We humans don't just love wild places. We need them; we need their scale, their breath, their drama and enigma. Wild places can be a balm and a solace; an escape or a returning; a best friend; an inner cleanse. And they can remind us of our unimportance in the world. Travel writer Sarah Baxter presents 25 untameable natural wonders that reveal the curious story of our wild planet and why we need to protect it. Despite all the advances of human civilisation, we've yet to come up with anything to rival the majesty of Lapland's snow-capped mountain summits, the haunting song of humpback whales in a Namibian paradise or the epic sculptural forms of Utah's vast Canyonlands. Escape to each of these unforgettable sites and more with Wild Places, an insightful and stunningly illustrated guide to all Mother Nature has to offer. Discover spectacular and little-known gems with visits to... Great Dismal Swamp, USA Canyonlands, USA Great Bear Rainforest, Canada Cenotes, Mexico Galapagos Islands, Ecuador Kaieteur Falls, Guyana South Georgia, Atlantic Ocean Ennerdale, England Strumble Head, Wales St Kilda, Scotland Camargue, France Sapmi, Lapland, Sweden Green Belt, Germany Wadden Sea, Netherlands Stromboli, Italy Las Medulas, Spain Coa Valley, Portugal Skeleton Coast, Namibia Erg Chigaga, Morocco Kinabatangan, Malaysia Mount Siguniang, China Raja Ampat, Indonesia Gangkar Puensum, Bhutan Wilpena Pound, Australia Wahipounamu, New Zealand This is the perfect title for anyone who is fascinated by the marvels of the natural world. For more wanderlust-filled adventures, discover and collect the complete Inspired Traveller's Guide series: Artistic Places, Spiritual Places, Literary Places, Hidden Places and Mystical Places.

The book is the only technical volume that explains how equivalency analysis methods mentioned in Annex II of the European Environmental Liability Directive should be implemented. It uses case studies to illustrate real-world application of the methods, which are based on the experience in the USA and in the European Union and have been tested in three years of training programs funded by the European Commission. Academically rigorous and technically comprehensive, the book is intended for technical experts wanting to assess damage and remediation options as well as for decision-makers wishing to commission such assessments and judge their quality. These include competent authorities, operators, financial security providers, academics, consultants and NGOs.

This book provides a multi-disciplinary coverage of the broad fields of species, community and landscape conservation. The panel of contributors consider a range of topics in vegetation and biodiversity assessment, planning and management of conservation zones and protected areas, together with historical and social/legal issues of the environment and nature conservation. The book celebrates the life 's work of Professor Franco Pedrotti.

This collection of essays and design case studies explores a range of ideas and best practices for adapting to dynamic waterfront conditions while incorporating nature conservation in urbanized coastal areas. The editors have curated a selection of works contributed by leading practitioners in the fields of coastal science, community resilience, habitat restoration, sustainable landscape architecture and floodplain management. By highlighting ocean-friendly innovations and strategies being applied in coastal cities today, this book illustrates ways to cohabit with many other species who share the waterfront with us, feed in salt marshes, bury their eggs on sandy beaches, fly south over cities along the Atlantic Flyway, or attach themselves to an oyster reef. This book responds to the need for inventive, practical, and straightforward ways to weather a changing climate while being responsible shoreline stewards.

Although all living beings modify their environment, human beings have acquired the ability to do so on a superlative space-time scale. As a result of industrialization and the use of new technologies, the anthropogenic impact has been increasing in the last centuries, causing reductions in the sizes or the extinction of numerous wild populations. In this sense, from the field of conservation genetics, various efforts have been made in recent decades to provide new knowledge that contributes to the conservation of populations, species, and habitats. In this book, we summarize the concrete contributions of researchers to the conservation of the Neotropical mammals using Molecular Ecology techniques. The book is divided into three major sections. The first section provides an up-to-date review of the conservation status of Neotropical mammals, the applications of the molecular markers in its conservation, and the use of non-invasive and forensic genetic techniques. The second and third sections present, respectively, a series of case studies in various species or taxonomic groups of Neotropical mammals.

The Little Book of Going Green aims to shed light on the ways humans are harming the environment, from pollution and deforestation to industrial production and farming methods. Filled with facts, theories and tips on how we can do our bit for the planet, this is your one-stop guide to making every aspect of your life earth-friendly.

The question of how environmental awareness originated and developed has been subject to sharply contesting points of view. Recently the debate has been expressed epistemologically in constructivist versus materialist approaches. In this book, Mark Luccarelli pushes past unproductive mind/body debates by rooting the rise of environmental awareness in the political and geographical history of the US. Considering history in terms of the categorical development of space - social, territorial and conceptual - the book examines the forces that drove people to ignore their surroundings by distancing culture from place and by assiduously advancing the dissolution of social bonds. Thus beneath the question of the surround, and the key to its renewal today, is the quest to re-engage the common. The latter is still a part of the approach to space, its arrangement and disposition, and has a necessary environmental dimension.Concepts of urbanism, place identity, picturesque landscape and nature are part of a larger Western intellectual and cultural context but, by examining the imaging of cities and landscape, Luccarelli links particular American geographic settings - as well as the political ideals and practices of the republic - to the application and aesthetic reading of these ideas. The advocates of these various perspectives shared an aesthetic orientation as a means of redefining or recovering the common. The book looks at various American urban and regional contexts, as well as the work of artists, writers and public figures, including painter and engraver William Birch, Thomas Jefferson, engraver John Hill, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Law Olmsted. Luccarelli embeds his environmental study in the works of these men and in the course of American history between the planting of the city of Philadelphia and the establishment of Olmsted's major urban parks.

Although she held an important position of educational leadership for eighteen years, Sarah Raymond Fitzwilliam's story has been largely overlooked. This historical biography of Fitzwilliam examines her abolitionist roots growing up on a stop of the Underground Railroad, her training at a "normal school," her tenure as a teacher, principal and the nation's first city school superintendent (Bloomington, Illinois 1874-1892). In the process, Noraian also chronicles American society during the Gilded and Progressive ages.

This volume from the Policy Studies Organization provides critical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives on international organizations, the policy implications of these organizations, and the possible roles such agencies can play in international environmental policy. With contributions from a wide range of scholars, the work takes up such topical issues as the Rio Agenda of 1992 and its implementation; the role the European Union might play in environmental policy; the place of environmentalism in the development strategies and tactics of organizations such as the World Bank; and the development of international environmental law.

The Earth's ecosystems are in the midst of an unprecedented period of change as a result of human action. Many habitats have been completely destroyed or divided into tiny fragments, others have been transformed through the introduction of new species, or the extinction of native plants and animals, while anthropogenic climate change now threatens to completely redraw the geographic map of life on this planet. The urgent need to understand and prescribe solutions to this complicated and interlinked set of pressing conservation issues has lead to the transformation of the venerable academic discipline of biogeography - the study of the geographic distribution of animals and plants. The newly emerged sub-discipline of conservation biogeography uses the conceptual tools and methods of biogeography to address real world conservation problems and to provide predictions about the fate of key species and ecosystems over the next century. This book provides the first comprehensive review of the field in a series of closely interlinked chapters addressing the central issues within this exciting and important subject.

View www.wiley.com/go/ladle/biogeography yo access the figures from the book.

For centuries, bird guano has played a pivotal role in the agricultural and economic development of Latin America, East Asia, and Oceania. As their populations ballooned during the Industrial Revolution, North American and European powers came to depend on this unique resource as well, helping them meet their ever-increasing farming needs. This book explores how the production and commodification of guano has shaped the modern Pacific Basin and the world's relationship to the region. Marrying traditional methods of historical analysis with a broad interdisciplinary approach, Gregory T. Cushman casts this once little-known commodity as an engine of Western industrialization, offering new insight into uniquely modern developments such as environmental consciousness and conservation movements; the ascendance of science, technology, and expertise; international relations; and world war.

This book provides syntheses of ecological theories and overarching patterns of urban bird ecology that have only recently become available. The numerous habitats represented in this book ranges from rows of trees in wooded alleys, to wastelands and remnants of natural habitats encapsulated in the urban matrix. Authored by leading scientists in this emergent field, the chapters explore how the characteristics of the habitat in urban environments influence bird communities and populations at multiple levels of ecological organization and at different spatial and temporal scales, and how this information should be incorporated in urban planning to achieve an effective conservation of bird fauna in urban environments. Birds are among the most conspicuous and fascinating residents of urban neighborhoods and provide urban citizens with everyday wildlife contact all over the world. However, present urbanization trends are rapidly depleting their habitats, and thus knowledge of urban bird ecology is urgently needed if birds are to thrive in cities. The book is unique in its inclusion of examples from all continents (except Antarctica) in an effort to arrive at a more holistic perspective. Among other issues, the individual chapters address the censusing of birds in urban green spaces; the relationship between bird communities and the structure of urban green spaces; the role of exotic plant species as food sources for urban bird fauna; the influence of artificial light and pollutants on bird fauna; trends in long-term urban bird research, and transdisciplinary studies on bird sounds and their effects on humans. Several chapters investigate how our current knowledge of the ecology of urban bird fauna should be applied in order to achieve better management of urban habitats so as to achieve conservation of species or even increase species diversity. The book also provides a forward-looking summary on potential research directions. As such, it provides a valuable resource for urban ecologists, urban ecology students, landscape architects, city planners, decision makers and anyone with an interest in urban ornithology and bird conservation. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive overview for researchers in the fields of ecology and conservation of urban bird fauna.

An accessible and impartial survey of the positions of the Republican and Democratic parties on the most pressing environmental issues of our time, from climate change and wilderness preservation to air and water pollution. Today's Environmental Issues: Democrats and Republicans presents a unique perspective on party politics—one that impartially identifies similarities and differences regarding an array of topics ranging from fracking, sustainability, and pesticides to logging and noise pollution. Essays provide both historical information and up-to-date coverage of partisan opinions on today's environmental concerns. Written for upper level high school students, undergraduates, and general audiences interested in environmental issues and partisan viewpoints, this book enables readers to better understand the origins, details, differences, and commonalities of partisan opinions surrounding today's environmental concerns. Each environmental issue is unique with its own set of concerns and impacts, particularly when viewed from a party perspective. By examining a breadth of issues from the party viewpoint, readers can understand how the parties could work together or in opposition, depending on the environmental issue—and that the parties may not always be polar opposites on every issue, a characterization that is often portrayed in the media. Each essay includes a sidebar that presents a quick look at the party line, individuals who have shaped opinion or policy, or key court decisions.

The seventh volume in the series "Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Marine Mammals" describes aspects of the often-complex relationship between humans and marine mammals. From a primeval condition of occasional predators, during the last century humans have become a major factor negatively affecting the status of most marine mammals through over-hunting, habitat encroachment and environmental degradation. This has led to the extirpation of many marine mammal populations and even to the extinction of species. However, in parallel to this destructive drive, since antiquity humanity has been influenced by a strong fascination for marine mammals, which contributes today to an increased human appreciation of the natural world admixed with widespread concern for its degrading condition. The special status occupied by marine mammals in human imagination and affection stands in stark contrast with the current predicament of many populations still threatened by the doings of Homo sapiens: a condition emblematic of the relationship of humanity with nature, and key to understanding where humanity is heading.

The Anthropocene is the "age of human influence", an epoch well known for its urban impact. More than half of all people already live in cities, and this proportion is expected to rise to almost 70 percent by 2050. Like other species in urban areas, bats must contend with the pressures of profound and irreversible land cover change and overcome certain unique challenges, such as the high density of roads, lights, glass, and free-ranging domestic animals. Research on urban bats in recent decades indicates that when it comes to urban life, some bats are synanthropes. In other words, although most species of bats are negatively impacted by urbanisation, many appear to not only succeed, but also thrive in cities and towns. This observation has inspired interesting questions about bats in relation to urbanisation. Which traits and behaviours equip bats for urban success? What features of urban areas increase the likelihood that bats will successfully persist there or even colonize new areas? And how does the success of urban bats affect co-habiting humans? Our book explores the interactions between bats and urban environments through case studies and reviews. Understanding how different species interact with urban environments can reveal potential opportunities to mitigate urban threats to bats and threats posed by bats to other urban organisms, including humans. With this book, we thus aspire to provide a knowledge base to help guide current and future efforts to conserve bats.

The Ural river, the third longest river in Europe, is a unique ecosystem. Unlike other large European rivers the river has not been regulated and the natural hydrological regime is still intact. Thanks to that it has the only remaining spawning habitats in the entire Caspian basin for all sturgeon species. Nevertheless, this fact is not well known to the broader scientific and environmental communities.

The Ural river is also an interesting place due to its rich history of sustainable use of aquatic resources in general and sturgeons in particular. The traditional life style of the local communities, Ural Cossacks, was focused on the preservation and rational use of sturgeon species. This interesting experience of sustainable river-related management is not adequately reported in literature.

To secure further Ural sturgeon preservation the river basin ecosystem and human activities in the region must be managed in an integrated sustainable manner. The sturgeon species can be used as a natural indicator and an incentive for such transboundary IWRM cooperation taking into account all three components of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. To secure basin IWRM and sturgeon stock restoration the International Ural Sturgeon Park should be established. The role of the Park will be to secure the natural reproduction in the Ural as the primary strategy for the sturgeon stock replenishment. The Ural River Basin Project, which aims at the creation of such a Park, was launched in 2007. This volume is devoted to the uniqueness, history and problems of the Ural river basin, its sturgeons and perspectives of their conservation.

The Arctic is a special world. The Arctic Ocean is covered by white sea ice, and its margins are surrounded by bare terrestrial regions, known as tundra. Tundra is a cold and dry environment without trees, but even in the absence of trees, tundra plants such as dwarf shrubs, grasses, herbs and moss support the harsh environment by providing sustenance and shelter. This book introduces representative arctic plants and their function in Svalbard, revealing the unique tundra ecosystem, and discussing the direct and indirect effects of climate change in the Arctic.

Overall, this is an appealing work for students and professionals, and is certain to remain as one of the key works in natural resource analysis.
"--Mathematical Reviews"

Biological renewable resources, essential to the survival of mankind, are increasingly overexploited by individuals and corporations that often sacrifice long-term economic health and sustainability for short-term gains. "Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Mathematics of Conservation, Third Edition" analyzes the economic forces underlying these misuses of renewable resources and discusses more effective methods of resource management. Promoting a complete understanding of general principles, the book allows readers to discover how rigorous mathematical models that incorporate both economic and biological factors should replace intuitive arguments for conservation and sustainability.

This "Third Edition" continues to combine methodologies from the fields of economics, biology, and mathematics to explain how analytic models are essential for developing a complete understanding of complex resource systems. The book has been updated to address the need for incorporating individual economic incentives, the value of diversity, and the overriding importance of uncertainty in mathematical models. Coverage of game theory, overcapacity, uncertainty, and risk analysis has been added as well a expanded treatment of topics such as: Models of individual harvest behavior and economic incentivesResponse of individual harvester to various types of harvesting regulationsReasons underlying excess harvesting capacityExternalities in resource harvesting industriesDecision analysis in biological resource management

Fundamental concepts of population dynamics and economics are utilized throughout the book while mathematical techniques are incorporated in an accessible manner. Relevant data from current research sheds light on the presented material, and exercises provide readers with an opportunity to test comprehension of discussed mathematical methods and techniques.

Continuing to provide a complete and modernized presentation of the fundamental principles of the topic, "Mathematical Bioeconomics, Third Edition" is an excellent book for courses on applied mathematics, resource management, and environmental studies at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It also serves as an insightful reference for resource managers, ecologists, biologists, and other professionals who work to improve the management of renewable resources and develop sustainable practices in the environmental sciences.