Designed as both a reference work and a year-round field manual, this volume contains more than 2,400 range maps and 995 line drawings, designed to clarify descriptions used in the keys. For botanists, naturalists, and students interested in an up-to-date treatment of the vascular flora of greater New England, it has proved to be an invaluable resource. The geographic scope of the work extends from the Canadian border south through Long Island and west to the Hudson River. The ""General Keys"" section contains fourteen keys that include such groups as aquatic plants, vines, and woody plants in winter condition. For both woody and herbaceous families, the keys cover flowering as well as fruiting conditions and rely heavily on the use of vegetative features to extend the utility of the book beyond the reproductive period. The ""Descriptive Flora"" section includes keys to all of the genera and species, descriptions of the families and genera, and accounts of the individual species. The latter incorporates information on wetland site index, rare status, wildlife food value, food and medicinal value for humans, and poisonous or hallucinogenic properties. This revised edition includes an updating of plant scientific names that changed since the first edition and an alphabetized list of plant families with page numbers on the inside front cover for easy reference. This edition also includes a new CD-ROM with a multiple-entry identification guide, hundreds of accompanying photographic images of genera, an illustrated glossary, and page reference numbers to genus descriptions in the manual. Presenting a wealth of scientifically accurate information in a precise and clear format, this volume serves as a reference work, as a textbook for classes in plant identification, and as a field manual.

In this conservation classic, originally published fifty-five years ago, Fred Bodsworth tells the story of a solitary Eskimo curlew's perilous migration and search for a mate. The lone survivor comes to stand for the entirety of a species on the brink of extinction, and for all in nature that is endangered. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and an afterword by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

While the story of the big has often been told, the story of the small has not yet even been outlined. With "Dust," Joseph Amato enthralls the reader with the first history of the small and the invisible. "Dust" is a poetic meditation on how dust has been experienced and the small has been imagined across the ages. Examining a thousand years of Western civilization--from the naturalism of medieval philosophy, to the artistry of the Renaissance, to the scientific and industrial revolutions, to the modern worlds of nanotechnology and viral diseases--"Dust" offers a savvy story of the genesis of the microcosm.
Dust, which fills the deepest recesses of space, pervades all earthly things. Throughout the ages it has been the smallest yet the most common element of everyday life. Of all small things, dust has been the most minute particulate the eye sees and the hand touches. Indeed, until this century, dust was simply accepted as a fundamental condition of life; like darkness, it marked the boundary between the seen and the unseen.
With the full advent of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and social control, dust has been partitioned, dissected, manipulated, and even invented. In place of traditional and generic dust, a highly diverse particulate has been discovered and examined. Like so much else that was once considered minute, dust has been magnified by the twentieth-century transformations of our conception of the small. These transformations--which took form in the laboratory through images of atoms, molecules, cells, and microbes--defined anew not only dust and the physical world but also the human body and mind. Amato dazzles the reader with his account of how thispowerful microcosm challenges the imagination to grasp the magnitude of the small, and the infinity of the finite.
"Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000"