This edited book, composed of chapters written by scholars of the geomatics-based, environmental and biological sciences, examines selected topics from the intersecting fields of geomatics (including remote sensing, geographical information science (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), mapping and field survey methods) and conservation biology (including ecology and conservation policy), with case studies from West Africa, Canada, India and Malaysia. The focus is on some of the more important issues that dominate current intersections between developments in geomatics technology and those of conservation biology. Chapter One examines the history and themes of geomatics and applications to conservation biology research. Chapter Two presents a case study of geomatics-based research on the vital issue of vulture ecology, extinction and conservation in Central India. Chapter Three examines the relationship between people and elephants in the Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary and its surroundings in India, and it creates habitat suitability models from geomatics techniques to assess and predict elephant presence and potential human-elephant conflicts. Chapter Four examines the history and status of remote sensing as an aspect of geomatics, focusing mainly on satellite imagery. Chapter Five looks at development in GIS and takes an example of multidirectional landcover change from the West African savanna. Chapter Six looks at developments in GPS technology, especially concerning applications to the micro-habitats of bird presence and applications to mammal behavior. Chapter Seven looks at the subfield of animal geography, which looks at the subjective behavior of individual animals and the technology used to measure these detailed phenomena. Chapter Eight takes a case study of bird migration and habitat utilization in the swamps of coastal Malaysia. Chapter Nine looks at the utility of dated aerial photographs and supporting field methods in the evaluation of historical landcover change, covering periods before the development of modern imaging techniques and using an example from the West African savanna. This book makes an important contribution to the intersections of geomatics and conservation biology.

This practical manual of freshwater ecology and conservation provides a state-of-the-art review of the approaches and techniques used to measure, monitor, and conserve freshwater ecosystems. It offers a single, comprehensive, and accessible synthesis of the vast amount of literature for freshwater ecology and conservation that is currently dispersed in manuals, toolkits, journals, handbooks, 'grey' literature, and websites. Successful conservation outcomes are ultimately built on a sound ecological framework in which every species must be assessed and understood at the individual, community, catchment and landscape level of interaction. For example, freshwater ecologists need to understand hydrochemical storages and fluxes, the physical systems influencing freshwaters at the catchment and landscape scale, and the spatial and temporal processes that maintain species assemblages and their dynamics. A thorough understanding of all these varied processes, and the techniques for studying them, is essential for the effective conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems.

Ponds and pools are a common feature of our landscape – there are at least ten times as many ponds as lakes in the UK – and they are also important wildlife habitats. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed account of these freshwater habitats. The first chapter discusses what ponds, pools and puddles are, how they differ from rivers and lakes, their origin – natural or man-made, the different types of ponds and their abundance and distribution in Britain. A second chapter looks at ponds as ancient natural habitats that have existed for millennia on the earth’s surface. Ancient pond communities, as preserved in inter- and post-glacial sediments, are compared with modern pond communities. This chapter also examines the physical and chemical environment of ponds, covering aspects such as size, shape and depth, hydrology, oxygen and temperature. Ponds, pools and puddles are important wildlife habitats; they are as rich in species as rivers, and support rare and uncommon taxa including about half of Britain’s Red Data Book wetland plant and animal species. The authors give a comprehensive survey of the variety of plant and animal life for which ponds, pools and puddles are a habitat, with a chapter each on plants, invertebrates, amphibians, and fish, birds and mammals. The book discusses the importance of ponds to each of these groups and the ways in which the organisms exploit ponds, describing their habitats and major variations in life cycles. The pond ecosystem and colonisation and succession are discussed in two further chapters, before the final chapter, which is devoted to the subject of conservation and how best to protect and manage ponds and pond wildlife in Britain today. In spite of their evident importance, ponds have been largely ignored by freshwater biologists during this century. Ponds, Pools and Puddles makes an invaluable contribution to raising awareness of these popular, yet frequently underrated freshwater habitats, giving them the attention they rightly deserve.

Bees play a vital and irreplaceable role in pollinating our flowers, fruits and vegetables. The more bees in your garden the healthier, more productive and more pleasant a place it will be. Yet bees are declining rapidly and many people, even if they do not wish to keep bees themselves, are asking what can be done on an individual basis to help the bee. This book is a response to that request. It will demonstrate in one accessible volume how each of us can play our part in providing a bee-friendly environment, no matter how much gardening space and/or time we may have. It includes: * How bees forage, what bees you can expect to find in your garden and what plants are best for them. * Why honey bees are so important; what they need to thrive and how they detect and access those requirements; and what varieties of plants are best suited to provide those needs. * How the gardener can offer and maintain a bee-friendly garden, followed by a season-by-season account of what beefriendly plants are in flower and when, and what jobs the gardener can be doing during these times to help bees thrive. * A gazetteer of selected bee-friendly plants, arranged by type of plant in seasonal sub-sections. * Illustrative, practical planting plans, including a culinary herb garden, a potager, a wild flower garden, and a 3 seasons traditional border.

A land cover map of the National Park Service northwest Alaska management area was produced using digitally processed Landsat data. These and other environmental data were incorporated into a geographic information system to provide baseline information about the nature and extent of resources present in this northwest Alaskan environment. This report details the methodology, depicts vegetation profiles of the surrounding landscape, and describes the different vegetation types mapped. Portions of nine Landsat satellite (multispectral scanner and thematic mapper) scenes were used to produce a land cover map of the Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Noatak National Preserve and to update an existing land cover map of Kobuk Valley National Park Valley National Park. A Bayesian multivariate classifier was applied to the multispectral data sets, followed by the application of ancillary data (elevation, slope, aspect, soils, watersheds, and geology) to enhance the spectral separation of classes into more meaningful vegetation types. The resulting land cover map contains six major land cover categories (forest, shrub, herbaceous, sparse/barren, water, other) and 19 subclasses encompassing 7 million hectares. General narratives of the distribution of the subclasses throughout the project area are given along with vegetation profiles showing common relationships between topographic gradients and vegetation communities.

In the winter of 1996–97, state and federal authorities shot or shipped to slaughter more than 1,100 Yellowstone National Park bison. Since that time, thousands more have been killed or hazed back into the park, as wildlife managers struggle to accommodate an animal that does not recognize man-made borders. Tensions over the hunting and preservation of the bison, an animal sacred to many Native Americans and an icon of the American West, are at least as old as the nation's first national park. Established in 1872, in part “to protect against the wanton destruction of the fish and game,” Yellowstone has from the first been dedicated to preserving wildlife along with the park’s other natural wonders. The Smithsonian Institution, itself founded in 1848, viewed the park’s resources as critical to its own mission, looking to Yellowstone for specimens to augment its natural history collections, and later to stock the National Zoo. How this relationship developed around the conservation and display of American wildlife, with these two distinct organizations coming to mirror one another, is the little-known story Diane Smith tells in Yellowstone and the Smithsonian. Even before its founding as a national park, and well before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, the Yellowstone region served as a source of specimens for scientists centered in Washington, D.C. Tracing the Yellowstone-Washington reciprocity to the earliest government-sponsored exploration of the region, Smith provides background and context for many of the practices, such as animal transfers and captive breeding, pursued a century later by a new generation of conservation biologists. She shows how Yellowstone, through its relationship with the Smithsonian, the National Museum, and ultimately the National Zoo, helped elevate the iconic nature of representative wildlife of the American West, particularly bison. Her book helps all of us, not least of all historians and biologists, to better understand the wildlife management and conservation policies that followed.

Long-term trends in deer abundance provide one measure of assessing their potential as a problem for a park. Documenting long-term patterns in deer numbers allows one to evaluate correlations with changes in vegetation (e.g., through restoration of the cultural landscape). With this information resource managers can more effectively identify and potentially mitigate damage caused to vegetation communities and endangered plant populations by deer. Monitoring data also helps managers assess safety risks from collisions and disease transmission. Long-term monitoring of deer numbers is critical in evaluating any population control measures a park may implement.

The newly acquired, nearly complete coverage of ARCN by high-resolution satellite imagery has allowed the NPS to make a comprehensive survey of erosion features caused by permafrost thaw in the Noatak National Preserve (NOAT). The author combined automated mapping methods with visual recognition of geomorphic features to make a comprehensive map of ALD and RTS in NOAT. The purpose of this report is to present the results of mapping in NOAT. Mapping in three other NPS units (Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (BELA), Cape Krusenstern National Monument (CAKR), and Kobuk Valley National Park (KOVA) was reported previously.

The Arctic Network Inventory and Monitoring program (ARCN) encompasses five park units including Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (GAAR) and Noatak National Preserve (NOAT). The landbirds assemblage (passerines, near-passerines, raptors and galliformes) was chosen by the ARCN for long-term monitoring because it includes many species that spend the majority of their lives in terrestrial environments. Specific objectives of the ARCN landbird monitoring program are to: 1) determine annual longterm trends in density and frequency of occurrence of 5-10 of the most commonly detected landbird species along selected river corridors across ARCN during the breeding season (June); 2) determine annual long-term trends in landbird species composition and distribution in selected sites across ARCN during the breeding season (June); and 3) improve understanding of breeding bird-habitat relationships and the effects of invasive plants and climatic changes on bird populations.