Up to 20 percent of species may be extinct by 2030. Vividly presented through full-colour maps and graphics, this fully revised and updated atlas profiles species lost, threatened and surviving today. It examines different ecosystems, the major threats to their inhabitants and steps being taken towards conservation. Fully revised and updated, containing new maps covering environmental impacts of human development including climate change and damage caused by deep-sea trawling and mining Updated maps and data on birds, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates and fish and of the increasing area of wetlands covered by the Ramsar Convention The latest information on endangered mammal species such as the panda, the Arabian oryx and the bonobo

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Melbourne's Little Lonsdale Street - locally known as 'Little Lon' - was notorious as a foul slum and brothel district, occupied by the itinerant and the criminal. The stereotype of 'slumdom' defined 'Little Lon' in the minds of Melbournians, and became entrenched in Australian literature and popular culture.The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne tells a different story. This groundbreaking book reports on almost three decades of excavations conducted on the Commonwealth Block - the area of central Melbourne bordered by Little Lonsdale, Lonsdale, Exhibition and Spring streets. Since the 1980s, archaeologists and historians have pieced together the rich and complex history of this area, revealing a working-class and immigrant community that was much more than just a slum. The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne delves into the complex social, cultural and economic history of this forgotten community.

The search for a "patient zero" popularly understood to be the first infected case in an epidemic has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas and fears about contagion and social disorder. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaetan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.