Biology

Societies must choose how they wish to deal with climate change. Not doing anything or pursuing ‘business as usual’ is likely to lead down a path that will have devastating consequences for many people, especially the world’s poor. Using a focal lens of coral reef fisheries, upon which millions of people depend on for their livelihood, this book provides a tool box of options for confronting the consequences of climate change through building local-scale adaptive capacity in societies and improving the condition of the natural resources. Building adaptive capacity will require strengthening appropriate aspects of a society’s flexibility, assets, learning and social organizations. They ways of doing this are diverse and will, of course, depend on existing local capacities and needs. Improving the condition of resources tends to require restricting or limiting society’s actions. These two broad concepts, of building social capacities and limiting certain types of resource use, interact in complicated ways, requiring coupled actions. One of the central themes of this book is that adaptation solutions are context dependent, determined in part by aspects of local resource conditions, adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change impacts, but also by people’s history, culture, and aspirations. This book develops a framework to help provide governments, scientists, managers, and donors with critical information about the local context and develop nuanced actions that reflect these local conditions. This information can help to identify key opportunities and narrow the range of potential adaptation options that may be suitable for a particular location.

Allee effects are broadly defined as a decline in individual fitness at low population size or density, that can result in critical population thresholds below which populations crash to extinction. As such, they are very relevant to many conservation programmes, where scientists and managers are often working with populations that have been reduced to low densities or small numbers. There are a variety of mechanisms that can create Allee effects, including mating systems, predation, environmental modification, and social interactions among others. The abrupt and unpredicted collapses of many exploited populations is just one illustration of the need to bring Allee effects to the forefront of conservation and management strategies. This book provides an overview of the topic, collating and integrating a widely dispersed literature from various fields: marine and terrestrial, plant and animal, theoretical and empirical, academic and applied.

As people have spread around the world, they have taken with them a broad range of other species to satisfy a variety of human needs. Some of these species went on to establish wild populations well outside their native ranges. These biological invaders are a major component of current global change, and often represent threats to the maintenance of global biodiversity, human health, and the success of human economic enterprises. The continuing globalization of our society ensures that the need to understand the process of biological invasion will only increase in the future. There is also a growing recognition that the study of biological invaders provides significant insight into basic questions in ecology and evolution. Exotic birds provide a particularly good opportunity to study the causes and consequences of biological invasions. By combining good historical records of bird introductions with the detailed information available on many other aspects of avian biology, this book advances understanding of the invasion process while also exploring avian conservation biology, and basic principles of ecology and evolution. Chapters cover causes of non-randomness in which species get transported and released into novel environments, the stochastic (relating to numbers released) and deterministic (relating to species and location) effects that influence establishment success, patterns and processes in range expansion, and the ecology, genetics, and evolution of exotic birds in their new environment.

America's great epic of exploration — the journey of Lewis and Clark — was also one of the most successful scientific expeditions in history. In notebooks filled with vivid and remarkably accurate descriptions of rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, Native Americans, and wildlife, Lewis and Clark gave the world an image of wild country that has rarely been equaled. This book, which features more than one hundred photographs and maps, traces the footsteps of the two explorers as they journeyed from St. Louis, through the breathtaking vistas of the tall-grass prairie and Big Sky country, over the arduous Bitterroot Mountains on the ancient Lolo Trail, to arrive finally at the Pacific coast and its the rugged, rainy, and darkly wooded landscape. As we travel westward, the book introduces us to the natural wonders recorded by Lewis and Clark — still fresh portraits of a pristine land — and recounts their many dangerous, challenging, and sometimes strange adventures. The book describes the same sites today, providing unique insights about America's changes to the land. For instance, the book recounts Lewis and Clark's travels through the great tall-grass prairie, vast plains that stretched to the horizon in every direction, stunningly beautiful land that with the eye of a concerned ecologist, has virtually disappeared today beneath the steel plow.

The beautiful tropical dry forest of northwest Costa Rica, with its highly seasonal rainfall and diversely vegetated landscape, is disappearing even more rapidly than Costa Rica's better-known rain forest, primarily because it has been easier to convert to agriculture. This book offers a comprehensive look at the ecology, biodiversity, and conservation status of this endangered and fragile region. The chapters examine the major plant and animal groups living in the dry forest and present the first technical evaluation of Costa Rica's conservation efforts. As they assess the status of each area of specialty in the dry forest, the chapters also look beyond this particular region to show how its plants and animals are ecologically and evolutionarily connected to other geographic areas in Costa Rica and Central America. These chapters cover topics such as watershed and coastal management, plant phenology, pollination, insects, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. They also consider the socioeconomic, policy, legal, and political aspects of biodiversity conservation. The book concludes with an important synthesis of the chapter's recommendations on future directions, policies, and actions that will better conserve biodiversity in Costa Rica and other neotropical forests as well.

How will biodiversity loss affect ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing? In an age of accelerating biodiversity loss, this volume summarizes recent advances in biodiversity‐ecosystem functioning research and explores the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The first section summarizes the development of the basic science and provides a meta-analysis that quantitatively tests several biodiversity and ecosystem functioning hypotheses. The second section describes the natural science foundations of biodiversity‐ecosystem functioning research, including: quantifying functional diversity, the development of the field into a predictive science, effects of stability and complexity, methods to quantify mechanisms by which diversity affects functioning, the importance of trophic structure, microbial ecology, and spatial dynamics. The third section takes research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning further than it has ever gone into the human dimension. The first six chapters cover the most pressing environmental challenges humanity faces, including effects of diversity on: climate change mitigation, restoration of degraded habitats, managed ecosystems, pollination, disease, and biological invasions. The remaining chapters of section three that consider the economic perspective, including: a synthesis of the economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the options open to policy-makers to address the failure of markets to account for the loss of ecosystem services; an examination of the challenges of valuing ecosystem services and, hence, to understanding the human consequences of decisions that neglect these services; and an examination of the ways in which economists are currently incorporating biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research into decision models for the conservation and management of biodiversity. The final section describes new advances in ecoinformatics that will help transform this field into a globally predictive science, and finally, summarizes the advancements and future directions of the field. The book's ultimate conclusion is that biodiversity is an essential element of any strategy for sustainable development.

Bioinvasions and Globalization synthesises our current knowledge of the ecology and economics of biological invasions, providing an in-depth evaluation of the science and its implications for managing the causes and consequences of one of the most pressing environmental issues facing humanity today. Emergent zoonotic diseases such as HIV and SARS have already imposed major costs in terms of human health, whilst plant and animal pathogens have had similar effects on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. The introduction of pests, predators, and competitors into many ecosystems has disrupted the benefits they provide to people, in many cases leading to the extirpation or even extinction of native species. This book analyzes the main drivers of bioinvasions — the growth of world trade, global transport and travel, habitat conversion and land-use intensification, and climate change — and their consequences for ecosystem functioning. It shows how bioinvasions impose disproportionately high costs on countries where a large proportion of people depend heavily on the exploitation of natural resources. It considers the options for improving assessment and management of invasive species risks, and especially for achieving the international cooperation needed to address bioinvasions as a negative externality of international trade.

Coral reefs represent the most spectacular and diverse marine ecosystem on the planet as well as a critical source of protein and income for many millions of people. However, the combined effects of human activities have led to a rapid decline in the health of reefs worldwide, with many now facing complete destruction. This book provides an integrated overview of the function, physiology, ecology, and behaviour of coral reef organisms. Each chapter is enriched with a selection of ‘boxes’ on specific aspects written by internationally recognised experts. The emphasis in this book is on the organisms that dominate this marine environment although pollution, conservation, climate change, and experimental aspects are also included. Indeed, particular emphasis is placed on conservation and management due to the habitat's critically endangered status. A global range of examples is employed which gives the book international relevance.

This book outlines the main methods and techniques available to ornithologists. A general shortage of information about available techniques is greatly hindering progress in avian ecology and conservation. Currently this sort of information is disparate and difficult to locate with much of it widely dispersed in books, journals and grey literature. This book is a practical handbook describing the methods used in ornithological studies. Many of the chapters describe field methods, but there are also chapters devoted to laboratory techniques and the assessment of ill or dead birds. Two chapters focus on conservation methods: one describes habitat management techniques, and the other considers field manipulations.