WETLANDS The definitive guide to wetlands for students and professionals alike Wetlands rank among the most productive but also the most vulnerable ecosystems. They break down toxins and help maintain aquatic ecosystems, provide both permanent and temporary homes for key species, and contribute enormously to biodiversity and global ecological health. In recent years the importance of wetlands has been increasingly well understood, and their management and restoration has become a particular focus of environmental research. Wetlands provides a thorough and comprehensive overview of wetlands, updated to reflect the latest research findings and methodological approaches, as it has done for more than a generation. The new edition has been optimized for classroom use, breaking down the topic into four parts: introduction to wetlands, the wetland environment, wetland ecosystems, and wetland management. Readers of the sixth edition of Wetlands will also find: A detailed discussion of the role of wetlands in improving water quality, protection from storm damage, and other ecosystem services The latest approaches and examples of wetland creation and restoration A thorough discussion of the impacts of climate change on wetlands, and how to mitigate them Wetlands is essential reading for students and professionals in ecology, environmental engineering, and water resource management.

This book documents a carefully planned missionary exposition marketed by church leaders as the "Centenary Celebration of American Methodist Missions." The three-week event attracted over one million visitors, each paying fifty cents to enter the Columbus fairgrounds complex to investigate ways in which American Methodists were positioning themselves to convert the world to Christ. The Centenary celebration pointed Methodists toward the future by challenging fair goers to imagine what Methodist missions at home and throughout the world might look like in the months and years following the completion of the exposition. This book is a product of the 1919 Methodist missionary fair. The speeches and addresses found within this edited collection function as textual sound bites to help readers better understand the ideas, language, and motives of early twentieth century American Methodists.

Anderson, Zelle, and their contributors provide in-depth analyses of electoral trends in Germany--the one country in which an electorate that had maintained stable democracy after World War II was enlarged by compatriots who had experienced decades of socialist rule.

Most of the essays in this book first focus on long-term developments known to affect electoral change in industrial societies such as: societal transformations, changes in ideological thinking, and value change. After establishing if and how these developments have been taking place in the old Lander, they investigate whether similar trends can be observed in the eastern electorate or if the patterns are different. Then, present state and future prospects of electoral politics in the united Germany are assessed. In addition, some chapters concentrate on phenomena visible only in the eastern section in order to investigate causes and effects of these peculiarities. The editors elaborate on common themes and assess the findings in light of the author's guiding questions offered in introductory and concluding chapters. This is a major resource for students and scholars concerned with German politics.

A large body of electoral studies and political party research argues that the institutional context defines incentives that shape citizen participation and voting choice. With the unique resources of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, this book provides the first systematic evaluation of this topic. A distinguished international team of electoral scholars finds that the institutional context has only a modest impact on citizen political choices compared to individual level factors. Furthermore, the formal institutional characteristics of electoral systems that have been most emphasized by electoral studies researchers have less impact than characteristics of the party system that are separate from formal institutions. Advanced multi-level analyses demonstrate that contextual effects are more often indirect and interactive, and thus their effects are typically not apparent in single nation election studies. The results have the potential to reshape our understanding of how the institutional framework and context of election matters, and the limits of institutional design in shaping citizen electoral behavior.

Democratic elections are designed to create unequal outcomes: for some to win, others have to lose. This book examines the consequences of this inequality for the legitimacy of democratic political institutions and systems. Using survey data collected in democracies around the globe, the authors argue that losing generates ambivalent attitudes towards political authorities. Because the efficacy and ultimately the survival of democratic regimes can be seriously threatened if the losers do not consent to their loss, the central themes of this book focus on losing: how losers respond to their loss and how institutions shape losing. While there tends to be a gap in support for the political system between winners and losers, it is not ubiquitous. The book paints a picture of losers' consent that portrays losers as political actors whose experience and whose incentives to accept defeat are shaped both by who they are as individuals as well as the political environment in which loss is given meaning. Given that the winner-loser gap in legitimacy is a persistent feature of democratic politics, the findings presented in this book contain crucial implications for our understanding of the functioning and stability of democracies.