This is the first book which deals with cyanobacterial nitrogen metabolism exclusively. It combines both environmental and biotechnological aspects. The chapters are contributed by leading researchers of the subject area.

In this book, plant biology is considered from the perspective of plants and their surrounding environment, including both biotic and abiotic interactions. The intended audience is undergraduate students in the middle or final phases of their programs of study. Topics are developed to provide a rudimentary understanding of how plant-environment interactions span multiple spatiotemporal scales, and how this rudimentary knowledge can be applied to understand the causes of ecosystem vulnerabilities in the face of global climate change and expansion of natural resource use by human societies. In all chapters connections are made from smaller to larger scales of ecological organization, providing a foundation for understanding plant ecology. Where relevant, environmental threats to ecological systems are identified and future research needs are discussed. As future generations take on the responsibility for managing ecosystem goods and services, one of the most effective resources that can be passed on is accumulated knowledge of how organisms, populations, species, communities and ecosystems function and interact across scales of organization. This book is intended to provide some of that knowledge, and hopefully provide those generations with the ability to avoid some of the catastrophic environmental mistakes that prior generations have made.

"We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground." Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and is full of original recipes that celebrate healthy eating, sustainability and the pleasures of good food.

This book presents some results on selected taxa in the Himalayan region (mainly Nepal), pinpoints the threats to their survival and suggests ways how to avoid their extinction. Most chapters are based on graduate research projects - relatively long-term field studies. The data presented here can be a good source of updated information on the subject and will prove to be a very useful reference in future studies of Himalayan biodiversity. They also tend to pinpoint the existing gaps in our knowledge of this region. All the chapters are based on recent trends of biodiversity and conservation vision, so the book can be a potential alternative to the existing relatively older books with outdated vision and information. Its main goal, however, is to disseminate the information about biodiversity conservation problems in the Himalayan region among the people in the developed world.

As stated many times before the purpose of Orchid Biology, Reviews and Perspectives (OB) is to present reviews on all aspects of orchids. The aim is not to balance every volume, but to make a balanced and wide ranging presentation of orchids in the series as a whole. The chapters in this, the last volume of the series, range over a number of topics which were not covered before. Singapore is justly famed for its orchids. They can be seen on arrival (or dep- ture) in its modern, highly efficient and comfortable Changi Airport and on the way from it to town. Vanda Miss Joaquim, the first hybrid to come from Singapore became its National Flower. This natural hybrid can be seen on its currency, stamps, and public and private decorations. Many excellent breeders, starting with Prof. Eric Holttum who bred the first man made hybrid (Spathoglottis Primrose), produced numerous magnificent hybrids and won countless awards in Singapore and elsewhere. These hybrids served to enrich the country's orchid mystique. In the opening chapter of this volume Dr. Teoh Eng Soon (Western style: Eng Soon Teoh), himself a prize winning orchid breeder, grower and author writes about some of the breeders who contributed to the Singapore orchid fame. Prof. Hans Fitting was one of the best known plant physiologists of his time. As a young man he studied the effects of pollen on orchid flowers.

Global warming is expected to change fire regimes, likely increasing the severity and extent of wildfires in many ecosystems around the world. What will be the landscape-scale effects of these altered fire regimes? Within what theoretical contexts can we accurately assess these effects? We explore the possible effects of altered fire regimes on landscape patch dynamics, dominant species (tree, shrub, or herbaceous) and succession, sensitive and invasive plant and animal species and communities, and ecosystem function. Ultimately, we must consider the human dimension: what are the policy and management implications of increased fire disturbance, and what are the implications for human communities?

The only comprehensive photographic guide to the ferns, clubmosses, quillworts and horsetails of Britain This is a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated and user-friendly photographic identification guide to the fifty-seven ferns and seventeen other pteridophytes that occur in Britain. It is the perfect companion for botanists, naturalists, professional ecologists and anyone else with an interest in this fascinating group of non-flowering vascular plants. Designed to appeal to beginners and experts alike, this authoritative book includes novel identification keys and comparison tables that have been carefully devised to present only essential, easily understood technical terms and descriptions, avoiding jargon as much as possible. Cross-referenced throughout to facilitate the comparison of similar species, this definitive field guide is the go-to source for identifying these species with confidence. Features hundreds of stunning colour photographs Comprehensive coverage of Britain's 57 species of ferns, 6 clubmosses, 3 quillworts and 8 horsetails Includes novel, easy-to-use, jargon-free identification keys and comparison tables Beautifully designed, user-friendly and accessible

The state of the art in the area of security related civil science and technology concerning energetic materials and munitions is of pressing importance at the present time, because 10 years after the end of the cold war, in many countries in east and west, huge stockpiles of munitions still await destruction. The safety behavior of munitions and their energetic material is the determining factor for all precautionary measures for the protection of environment and population. The probability of a catastrophic reaction of munitions and their energetic components will be so more likely, the closer the munitions are to the end of their life time. Residues and undetected ordnance, recycling, destruction of ammunition and depletion or reuse of energetic materials will either cause more or less damage to environment. Scientific research and development have the aim to increase performance of munitions on one side and to improve safety in relation to unpredictable events on the other side. The impact on the environment by the production and normal use of munitions and their residues after use will acquire an increasing importance in environmental awareness. The excellent technical presentations were classified in five Groups, according to the technical programme. The "Introduction to the subject; Methods, tests and application; Insensitive and "green" munitions; Storage and transportation; and Demilitarisation and recycling" sessions, were closed by a final and general interesting discussion among participants.

This book gathers together a wide range of contributions addressing diverse aspects of front-line human involvement in biodiversity exploitation and conservation. As such they collectively provide a snap-shot of on-going action and state-of-the-art research, rather than a series of necessarily more superficial overviews. As such it is envisaged that it will be of particular interest to courses including biodiversity and/or conservation issues, and to advanced students and researchers working in related fields. The scope of these embraces cases involving birds, crop plants, invertebrates, land use changes, livestock, mammals, marine organisms, and medicinal plants and issues related to the importance of gardens, hedges and green lanes, housing developments, hunting, invasive species, local community involvement, sacred groves, socio-economic factors, and trade.

Plants growing in tropical alpine environments (at altitudes above the closed canopy forest and below the limit of plant life) have evolved distinct forms to cope with a hostile environment characterized by cold, drought and fire. Unlike temperate alpine environments, where there are distinct seasons of favourable and unfavourable conditions for growth, tropical alpine habitats present summer conditions every day and winter conditions every night. Using examples from all over the tropics, this fascinating account reviews, for the first time, the unique form and functional relationships of tropical alpine plants examining both their physiological ecology and population biology. It will appeal to anyone interested in tropical vegetation and plant physiological adaptations to hostile environment, as well as to researchers in biogeography and ecology.

Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium?
Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affected the earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resulting structural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes.
The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change such as urbanization.

This book is an interdisciplinary, multi-author work, based upon a recently completed international study by Brazilian and British experts and will prove a valuable reference to all those working in this field.

Presented in this document is a class of deterministic models describing the dynamics of two plant species whose characteristics are common to the majority of annual plants that have a seedbank. Formulated in terms of elementary dynamical systems, these models were developed in response to four major questions on the long-term outcomes of binary mixtures of plant species: Is ultimate coexistence possible? If not, which strain will win? Does the mixture approach an equilibrium? If so, how long does the mixture take to attain it? The book gives a detailed account of model construction, analysis and application to field data obtained from long-term trials. In the particular case study modelled, the species involved are two pastural strains whose dynamics have critical agricultural and economic implications for the areas in which they are found, including North America, the Mediterranean region and Australia. This study will be valuable to researchers and students in mathematical biology and to agronomists and botanists interested in population dynamics.

Pollination is one of the most important processes in plant reproduction. It directly influences reproductive success and fitness and the genetic structure of the plant population. Methods exist to infer the pattern and distance of pollen dispersal, but direct observation of the movements of individual pollen grains during pollination is not feasible owing to their small size. Single-pollen genotyping is a novel technique for genotyping a single pollen grain. In this book, the principles, the experimental protocol, and several applications of this method in studies of plant ecology, reproductive biology, and evolutionary genetics have been described. More specifically, the information is useful for the analysis of linkage disequilibrium, intraspecific genetic variation, chromosome mapping, and the origins of polyploidy. It is also essential for achieving sustainable and optimal crop yield and is vital to agriculture and forestry. Written by pioneer researchers, the book provides novel research approaches that are proving useful in a growing number of fields. This volume is intended to encourage new and continued applications of single-pollen genotyping" "among" "many disciplines in the future.

The science of botany underwent a dramatic change in the late nineteenth century. A reform movement originating in Germany took the traditionally destructive approach to the study of plant structure and physiology and transformed it into a study of plant adaptation. The young scientists who initiated this approach were influenced by factors both scientific and political. Darwin's natural selection theory and the German Reich's interest in colonial expansion provided the background for a new botanical methodology, which treated Nature as the Laboratory. The work of these botanists, including Gottlieb Haberlandt, Georg Volkens, A. F. W. Schimper, and Ernst Stahl, influenced the subsequent development of botanical science in the twentieth century and contributed significantly to the emergence of the new science of ecology. In this 1990 book, Eugene Cittadino describes in detail their early careers, their zeal for Darwinian selection theory, and their sometimes hazardous expeditions into exotic environments from Africa to the East Indies.

Mangroves are a fascinating group of plants that occur on tropical and subtropical shorelines of all continents, where they are exposed to saltwater inundation, low oxygen levels around their roots, high light and temperature conditions, and periodic tropical storms. Despite these harsh conditions, mangroves may form luxuriant forests which are of significant economic and environmental value throughout the world - they provide coastal protection and underpin fisheries and forestry operations, as well as a range of other human activities.

This book provides an up-to-date account of mangrove plants from around the world, together with silvicultural and restoration techniques, and the management requirements of these communities to ensure their sustainability and conservation.
All aspects of mangroves and their conservation are critically re-examined. Those activities which threaten their ongoing survival are identified and suggestions are offered to minimise their effects on these significant plant communities.

This synthesis of the growing body of information from research on epiphytes and their relations with other tropical biota provides a comprehensive overview of basic functions, life history, evolution, and the place of epiphytes in complex tropical communities. Epiphytes comprise more than one-third of the tropical vascular flora in some tropical forests. Growing within tropical forest canopies, epiphytes are subject to severe environmental constraints, and their diverse adaptations make them a rich resource for studies of water balance, nutrition, reproduction and evolution.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of plant stresses caused by salt, drought, extreme temperatures, oxygen and toxic compounds, which are responsible for huge losses in crop yields. It discusses the latest research on the impact of salinity and global environment changes, and examines the advances in the identification and characterization of the mechanisms that allow plants to tolerate biotic and abiotic stresses. Further it presents our current understanding of metabolic fluxes and the various transporters that collectively open the possibility of applying in vitro technology and genetic engineering to improve stress tolerance. Exploring advanced methods that augment traditional plant tissue culture and breeding techniques toward the development of new crop varieties that can tolerate biotic and abiotic stresses to achieve sustainable food production, this book is a valuable resource for plant scientists and researchers.

The frontier images of America embrace endless horizons, majestic herds of native ungulates, and romanticized life-styles of nomadie peoples. The images were mere reflections of vertebrates living in harmony in an ecosystem driven by the unpre dictable local and regional effects of drought, frre, and grazing. Those effects, often referred to as ecological "disturbanees," are rather the driving forces on which species depended to create the spatial and temporal heterogeneity that favored ecological prerequisites for survival. Alandscape viewed by European descendants as monotony interrupted only by extremes in weather and commonly referred to as the "Great American Desert," this country was to be rushed through and cursed, a barrier that hindered access to the deep soils of the Oregon country, the rich minerals of California and Colorado, and the religious freedom sought in Utah. Those who stayed (for lack of resources or stamina) spent a century trying to moderate the ecological dynamics of Great Plains prairies by suppressing fires, planting trees and exotic grasses, poisoning rodents, diverting waters, and homogenizing the dynamies of grazing with endless fences-all creating bound an otherwise boundless vista. aries in Historically, travelers and settlers referred to the area of tallgrasses along the western edge of the deciduous forest and extending midway across Kansas as the "True Prairie. " The grasses thlnned and became shorter to the west, an area known then as the Great Plains."

The book provides information essential for anyone interested in the ecology of the American Southwest, including land managers, environmental planners, conservationists, ecologists and students. It is unique in its coverage of the hows and whys of dynamics (changes) in the major types of vegetation occurring on southwestern mountains and plateaus. It explains the drivers and processes of change, describes historical changes and provides conceptual models that diagrammatically illustrate past, present, and potential future changes. All major types of vegetation are covered: spruce-fir, mixed conifer, and ponderosa pine forests, pinyon-juniper vegetation, subalpine-montane grassland, and Gambel oak and interior chaparral shrublands. The focus is on vegetation that is relatively undisturbed, i.e., in natural and near-natural condition, and how it responds to natural disturbances such as fire and drought, as well as to anthropogenic disturbances such as fire exclusion and invasive species

Over the last decade, the field of plant ecology has significantly developed and expanded, especially in research concerning the herb layer and ground vegetation of forests. This revised second edition of The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America accounts for that growth, presenting research that approaches the ecology of the herb layer of forests from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. The book synthesizes the research of top ecologists and biologists on herbaceous layer structure, composition, and dynamics of a variety of forest ecosystem types in eastern North America. The 2003 first edition of The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America was praised for containing the most extensive listing of herb-layer literature in existence. This second edition brings this material up to date, revised to include current research and data. The book incorporates quantitative data to support analyses that was previously unavailable during the publication of the first edition. Also featured are six entirely new chapters, focused on the response of the herbaceous layer to a wide variety of natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Building on the over 1,200 references and sources of the first edition, the second edition of The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America is an invaluable resource for plant ecologists, forest ecologists, and conservationists.

This book provides insight into the biology and genomics of the genus Boswellia (family Burseraceae), a natural resource used for the production of frankincense, an oleo-gum resin. The Boswellia species are ecologically, medicinally, commercially and culturally important. Significantly contributing to the paucity of comprehensive literature on this genus, this volume provides a detailed discussion on the genomics, physiology and ecology of Boswellia. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including taxonomy, distribution, genetic diversity and microbiology. The production process of frankincense and its impact on the species are presented as well. In light of the recent decline of various Boswellia populations, species propagation and conservation are discussed. Plant scholars, ecologists and conservation biologists will find this book to be an important and informative reference.

European ecosystems and species remain under pressure from intensive agriculture and forestry, fishing, pollution, urban sprawl, invasive species and climate change. This book provides a detailed description and critical analysis of nature conservation responses, achievements and failures, motivated by the concerning state of nature and missed biodiversity targets. It summarises Europe's nature and the impact of human activities, and then gives an overview of relevant international biodiversity treaties and the EU nature conservation policy and legislative framework. The core of the book comprises chapters written by national experts, which cover the UK and twenty-five EU Member States, providing comparative case studies from which valuable lessons are drawn. Covering wide-ranging topics such as biodiversity pressures, legislation and governance, biodiversity strategies, species protection, protected areas, habitat management, and funding, this book is of interest to a wide audience, including academics and professionals involved in nature conservation and related environmental fields.

Ecology of the Shortgrass Steppe: A Long-Term Perspective summarizes and synthesizes more than 60 years of research that has been conducted throughout the shortgrass region. The shortgrass steppe was an important focus of the International Biological Programme's Grassland Biome project that ran from the late 1960s until the mid 1970s. The work conducted by the Grassland Biome project was preceded by almost 40 years of research by U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers - primarily from the Agricultural Research Service - and followed to the present by the Shortgrass Steppe Long Term Ecological Research project. Ecology of the Shortgrass Steppe is an enormously rich source of data and insight into the structure and function of a semiarid grassland.

Global change threatens ecosystems worldwide, and tropical systems with their high diversity and rapid development are of special concern. We can mitigate the impacts of change if we understand how tropical ecosystems respond to disturbance. For tropical forests and streams in Puerto Rico this book describes the impacts of, and recovery from, hurricanes, landslides, floods, droughts, and human disturbances in the Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico. These ecosystems recover quickly after natural disturbances, having been shaped over thousands of years by such events. Human disturbance, however, has longer-lasting impacts. Chapters are by authors with many years of experience in Puerto Rico and other tropical areas and cover the history of research in these mountains, a framework for understanding disturbance and response, the environmental setting, the disturbance regime, response to disturbance, biotic mechanisms of response, management implications, and future directions. The text provides a strong perspective on tropical ecosystem dynamics over multiple scales of time and space.