Ecological Challenges and Conservation Conundrums PDF Download

Author: John A. Wiens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118895088
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Short, compelling, but mostly thought-provoking essys that encompass many of the central issues shaping ecology and conservation in the changing world Collected essays from one of the best known ecologists and conservationists in the world Includes all issues at the cutting edge of the interface between ecology and conservation Attractive to a broad audience of ecologists, conservationists, natural resource managers, policy makers, and naturalists

Author: Michael L. Morrison
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439190
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A major advancement in understanding the factors underlying wildlife-habitat relationships, Foundations for Advancing Animal Ecology will be an invaluable resource to professionals and practitioners in natural resource management in public and private sectors, including state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and environmental consultants.

Author: J. Michael Scott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421822
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
With stories about species on the brink, this book explores the causes and consequences of conservation reliance and its implications.

Author: Oswald J. Schmitz
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597265985
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Meeting today’s environmental challenges requires a new way of thinking about the intricate dependencies between humans and nature. Ecology and Ecosystem Conservation provides students and other readers with a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of ecological science and their applications, offering an essential overview of the way ecology can be used to devise strategies to conserve the health and functioning of ecosystems. The book begins by exploring the need for ecological science in understanding current environmental issues and briefly discussing what ecology is and isn’t. Subsequent chapters address critical issues in conservation and show how ecological science can be applied to them. The book explores questions such as: • What is the role of ecological science in decision making? • What factors govern the assembly of ecosystems and determine their response to various stressors? • How does Earth’s climate system function and determine the distribution of life on Earth? • What factors control the size of populations? • How does fragmentation of the landscape affect the persistence of species on the landscape? • How does biological diversity influence ecosystem processes? The book closes with a final chapter that addresses the need not only to understand ecological science, but to put that science into an ecosystem conservation ethics perspective.

Author: Mark Elbroch
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 161091998X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The relationship between humans and mountain lions has always been uneasy. A century ago, mountain lions were vilified as a threat to livestock and hunted to the verge of extinction. In recent years, this keystone predator has made a remarkable comeback, but today humans and mountain lions appear destined for a collision course. Its recovery has led to an unexpected conundrum: Do more mountain lions mean they’re a threat to humans and domestic animals? Or, are mountain lions still in need of our help and protection as their habitat dwindles and they’re forced into the edges and crevices of communities to survive? Mountain lion biologist and expert Mark Elbroch welcomes these tough questions. He dismisses long-held myths about mountain lions and uses groundbreaking science to uncover important new information about their social habits. Elbroch argues that humans and mountain lions can peacefully coexist in close proximity if we ignore uninformed hype and instead arm ourselves with knowledge and common sense. He walks us through the realities of human safety in the presence of mountain lions, livestock safety, competition with hunters for deer and elk, and threats to rare species, dispelling the paranoia with facts and logic. In the last few chapters, he touches on human impacts on mountain lions and the need for a sensible management strategy. The result, he argues, is a win-win for humans, mountain lions, and the ecosystems that depend on keystone predators to keep them in healthy balance. The Cougar Conundrum delivers a clear-eyed assessment of a modern wildlife challenge, offering practical advice for wildlife managers, conservationists, hunters, and those in the wildland-urban interface who share their habitat with large predators.

Author: Michael L. Morrison
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421440725
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Practical guidance for wildlife professionals working to improve study design, data analysis, and the application of results to habitat and population management. Winner of the Wildlife Society Publications Book Award by The Wildlife Society Despite major advances in sampling techniques and analytical methods, many animal ecologists conduct research that is primarily relevant to a specific time and place. They also tend to focus more on the statistical analyses and nuances of modeling than actual study design. Arguing that studies of animal ecology should always begin with a focus on the behaviors and characteristics of individual organisms, including how they form into distinct biological populations, Applications for Advancing Animal Ecology takes a fresh and critical look at the field. Building from its companion volume, Foundations for Advancing Animal Ecology, this practical book presents readers with the principal methods used to observe animal behavior. Teaching them to assess resource abundance categories of species-environmental relationships models, it also explores • major aspects of measuring animal habitat: what to measure and how to measure it; • common sampling and estimation methods to assess population parameters; • when to measure and how to analyze data; • problems that will confront ecologists in the coming years—and how to gather information to adequately address them; and • how the experimental approach can be used to advance the science of animal ecology. Throughout the book, the authors stress the importance of speaking a common and well-defined language. Avoiding vague and misleading terminology, they assert, will help ecologists translate science into meaningful and lasting actions in the environment. Taking the perspective of the organism of interest in developing concepts and applications, the authors always keep the potentially biased human perspective in focus. They also provide a selection of suggested research projects, cautions, and caveats. A major advancement in understanding the factors underlying wildlife–habitat relationships, Applications for Advancing Animal Ecology will be an invaluable resource to natural resource management professionals and practitioners, including state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and environmental consultants.

Author: Ian Cook
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811512590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book is the first book that looks at both the politics of maintaining the trajectory toward humanity’s final hundred years and the politics of those final hundred years. It is the first book to take up theoretical and practical aspects with respect to both the movement toward and events during these final hundred years. As a result, it is the first book that attempts to provide a more complete picture of the politics of catastrophic human-caused environment change. The fact that the book provides a way into the variety of policy problems that catastrophic human-caused environment change is creating means that it is also important to those in Public Policy. The book also raises a series of philosophical and ethical questions associated with human rights, which are significant to those who study Political Philosophy (and some of those who study Law), international action to mitigate the effects of climate change, the nature of science and the limitations of political institutions.

Author: Rafe Sagarin
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610912306
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The need to understand and address large-scale environmental problems that are difficult to study in controlled environments—issues ranging from climate change to overfishing to invasive species—is driving the field of ecology in new and important directions. Observation and Ecology documents that transformation, exploring how scientists and researchers are expanding their methodological toolbox to incorporate an array of new and reexamined observational approaches—from traditional ecological knowledge to animal-borne sensors to genomic and remote-sensing technologies—to track, study, and understand current environmental problems and their implications. The authors paint a clear picture of what observational approaches to ecology are and where they fit in the context of ecological science. They consider the full range of observational abilities we have available to us and explore the challenges and practical difficulties of using a primarily observational approach to achieve scientific understanding. They also show how observations can be a bridge from ecological science to education, environmental policy, and resource management. Observations in ecology can play a key role in understanding our changing planet and the consequences of human activities on ecological processes. This book will serve as an important resource for future scientists and conservation leaders who are seeking a more holistic and applicable approach to ecological science.

Author: Khalid Rehman Hakeem
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030399788
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Agriculture is considered as a backbone of developing nations as it caters the needs of the people, directly or indirectly. The global agriculture currently faces enormous challenges like land degradation and reduced soil fertility, shrinking of land, low production yield, water accessibility and a dearth of labor due to evacuation of individuals from farming. Besides, the global population increases at an exponential rate and it is predicted that the global population will be 9 billion by 2050 that in turn leads to food crisis in near future. Although, green revolution revolutionizes the agriculture sector by enhancing the yield but it was not considered as a sustainable approach. Exorbitant use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to boost the crop yield is definitely not a convenient approach for agriculture sustainability in the light of the fact that these chemical fertilizers are considered as double-edged sword, which on one hand enhance the crop yield but at the same time possess deleterious effect on the soil microflora and thus declines its fertility. Besides, it cause irreversible damage to the soil texture and disrupts the equilibrium in the food chain across ecosystem, which might in turn lead to genetic mutations in future generations of consumers. Thus, the increased dependence on fabricated agricultural additives during and post green revolution has generated serious issues pertaining to sustainability, environmental impact and health hazards. Therefore, nano-biotechnology has emerged as a promising tool to tackle the above problems especially in the agriculture sector. Nano-agribusiness is an emerged field to enhance crop yield, rejuvenate soil health, provide precision farming and stimulate plant growth. Nano-biotechnology is an essential tool in modern agriculture and is considered as a primary economic driver in near future. It is evaluated that joining of cutting edge nanotechnology in agribusiness would push the worldwide monetary development to approximately US$ 3.4 trillion by 2020 which clearly indicates that how agri-nanobiotechnology plays a pivotal role in the agricultural sector, without any negative impact on the environment and other regulatory issues of biosafety. Agri-nanobiotechnology is an innovative green technology, which provides the solution to global food security, sustainability and climate change. The current book is presenting the role of nano-biotechnology in modern agriculture and how it plays a pivotal role to boost the agri-business.

Author: Tim Caro
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 159726959X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The vast scope of conservation problems has forced biologists and managers to rely on "surrogate" species to serve as shortcuts to guide their decision making. These species-known by a host of different terms, including indicator, umbrella, and flagship species-act as proxies to represent larger conservation issues, such as the location of biodiversity hotspots or general ecosystem health. Synthesizing an immense body of literature, conservation biologist and field researcher Tim Caro offers systematic definitions of surrogate species concepts, explores biological theories that underlie them, considers how surrogate species are chosen, critically examines evidence for and against their utility, and makes recommendations for their continued use. The book clarifies terminology and contrasts how different terms are used in the real world considers the ecological, taxonomic, and political underpinnings of these shortcuts identifies criteria that make for good surrogate species outlines the circumstances where the application of the surrogate species concept shows promise Conservation by Proxy is a benchmark reference that provides clear definitions and common understanding of the evidence and theory behind surrogate species. It is the first book to review and bring together literature on more than fifteen types of surrogate species, enabling us to assess their role in conservation and offering guidelines on how they can be used most effectively.