Throughout the world, freshwater ecosystems are considered to be among the most vulnerable systems. In the isolated Pacific islands there are a relatively small number of native freshwater species, which are mainly endemic to these locations (found nowhere else in the world). These species are characterized by an amphidromous lifecycle; reproducing in the stream, with larvae drifting to the ocean and eventually returning to a stream as juveniles and spending the remainder of their lifecycle there. Throughout the region, native flora and fauna face significant threats from species introductions and habitat destruction. The National Parks in the Pacific Island Network (PACN) protect some of the last relatively pristine stream systems. Monitoring based on this protocol: Pacific Islands Stream Monitoring: Fish, Shrimp, Snails and Habitat Characterization, will provide park managers with some of the information necessary to understand status and trends in biotic integrity within park stream systems.

Seriously Silly is a book of silly poems that are fun and engaging enough for children (10 and up), but are just as fun and meaningful to "kids" of all ages. Some are just ridiculous, while others have a little something more. There's a little something for everyone in here.

While growing up on the streets of Philadelphia, Theodore King learned how to manipulate people through violence and fear, and now he controls the city. After learning that one of his men, Aaron Howell, has been working with the authorities, King brutally murders him and displays his mutilated body as an example of what happens when someone betrays Philadelphia's most feared and powerful man. But with his last breath, Aaron put a curse on King that drags his younger brother Samuel into a dangerous situation. Philadelphia is called, "the city of brotherly love," but the death of a man's other brother brings out nothing but violence, hate, and something much darker.

"Offers the most plausible way to renovate our political and policy thinking to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century."--Joe Klein, "Time"

America is at a crossroads. The global economic downturn that began in 2008 has laid bare the structural weakness of our economy, putting the country through its most severe test since the Great Depression. Yet our political and business leaders have failed to prepare us because they are in the grip of a set of "dead ideas" about how a modern economy should work. Even the proponents of "change" in the Obama administration remain tentative in pushing the boundaries of the conventional wisdom.

But as Matt Miller shows in this provocative and influential analysis, the American economy will turn the corner only if we move beyond these outdated ways of thinking and recognize the ascendance of a new set of "destined ideas" that will reinvigorate our economy, our politics, and our day-to-day lives. And in a new preface, Miller shows how today's financial crisis has finally stripped these dead ideas of their power, offering hope for a durable recovery.

Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind America’s most celebrated collection of poems. In the first book-length study of Walt Whitman’s journals and manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass), Whitman—who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a play—was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all. Collage of Myself details Whitman’s discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as “Song of Myself� and “The Sleepers.� Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to “cut and paste� his lines into ever-evolving forms based on what he called “spinal ideas.� This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the technique later known as collage, an observation with significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artists and writers. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art. Using the Walt Whitman Archive’s collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of this great American literary icon.