Biodiversity / Conservation Biology

The overexploitation of wildlife is a key concern for conservationists worldwide. Indeed, wildlife conservation and sustainable use have recently become centrepieces in conservation and development research. Assessment, interpretation, and ultimate action in a scientific study of exploited species must consider numerous factors: from the biology, habitat requirements, and population dynamics of the species in question, to the relationships that people have with their environment and the species within it. Any long-term management plan must ensure that people and wildlife can coexist — otherwise it is doomed to failure. This book provides a practical and integrated approach to carrying out research on the conservation of exploited species. It is relevant to both tropical and temperate biomes, and is applicable to all exploited species. It describes both the practical (field) and theoretical (modelling) techniques for obtaining and interpreting information, integrating biological, social, economic, and institutional analyses. It also demonstrates how to translate information into effective action through appropriate interventions, from legislation to changing people's attitudes.

This book provides cutting-edge but basic conservation science for the inhabitants of both developing as well as developed countries. Authoritative chapters are written by top names in conservation biology. Important topics such as balancing conversion and human needs, climate change, conservation planning, designing and analyzing conservation research, ecosystem services, endangered species management, extinctions, fire, habitat loss, and invasive species are covered. Numerous textboxes describing additional relevant material or case studies are also included. The book is written for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scientists, managers, and personnel in governmental and non-governmental organizations. The book has all the necessary topics to become a required reading for various undergraduate and graduate conservation-related courses. English is kept at a level comprehensible to people with English as a second language. Overall, this book represents a project that the conservation community has deemed worthy of support by donations of time and effort.

This book presents the theory and practice for creating effective education and outreach programs for conserving biodiversity, addressing a variety of environmental issues, and living sustainably. It describes an exciting array of techniques for enhancing school resources, marketing environmental messages, using mass media, developing partnerships for conservation, and designing on-site programs for natural areas and community centers. Vivid case studies from around the world illustrate techniques and describe planning, implementation, and evaluation procedures, enabling readers to implement their own new ideas effectively.

This book explores the connections between two of the most transformative processes of the 21st century, namely global environmental change and globalization. It presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the interactions between these two processes, and illustrates, through case studies, how these interactions create situations of “double exposure.” Drawing upon case studies largely related to climate change, the book shows how prominent recent and current environmental events — recurring droughts in India, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the melting of the Arctic ice sheet — demonstrate different pathways of interaction between globalization and global environmental change. Each of these pathways shows how broader human security concerns, including increasing inequality, growing vulnerability, and unsustainable rates of development, are integrally connected to both processes of global change. The double exposure framework not only sheds light on the dangers associated with these two global processes, but also reveals possibilities for using the interactions to generate opportunities for positive action. The book ultimately challenges the ways that global environmental change and globalization are viewed and addressed. By drawing attention to double exposure, the book shows how integrated responses to global environmental change and globalization can create new types of synergies that promote sustainability and enhance human security.

Conservation genetics focuses on understanding the role and requirement of genetic variation for population persistence. However, considerable debate now surrounds the role of genetic factors (as opposed to non-genetic factors such as habitat destruction, etc.) in population extinction, and a synthesis is now timely. Can extinction be explained by habitat destruction alone or is lack of genetic variation a part of the explanation? The book reviews the arguments for a role of genetics in the present biodiversity crisis. It describes the methods used to study genetic variation in endangered species and examines the influence of genetic variation in the extinction of species. To date, conservation genetics has predominantly utilized neutral genetic markers, e.g., microsatellites. However, with the recent advances in molecular genetics and genomics it will soon be possible to study ‘direct gene action’, following the fate of genetic variation at the level of DNA, through expression, to proteins in order to determine how such phenotypes fare in populations of free living organisms. This book explores these exciting avenues of future research potential, integrating ecological quantitative genetics with the new genome science. It is now more important than ever that we ask relevant questions about the evolutionary fate of endangered populations throughout the globe and incorporate our knowledge of evolutionary processes and the distribution of genetic diversity into effective conservation planning and action.

This book reviews and analyzes the period (roughly from the 1950s to the present) when the “environment” became an issue as important as economic growth, or war and peace. The aim is to assess the current situation, and begin planning for the challenges that lie ahead. Most people are aware of both the environmental destruction taking place around the world and of the specter of climate change. The devastation of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina illustrates the potential for disaster when climate change is combined with the mismanaged environmental policy. How did we get to this point? What has been done and what can be done to avoid future environmental disasters? Thirty-two contributing authors (among them, one of the principal drafters of the National Environmental Policy Act, Chief of the African Environment Division and the World Bank, Vice President of the Center for Conservation Innovation at the World Wildlife Fund, President of the Zoological Society of London, former President of the Ecological Society of America) use their unique, authoritative perspective to review the evolution of environmental science and policy in the past half century.

Habitat management is commonly used to maintain and enhance the biological interest of many areas of semi-natural habitat, where natural processes no longer create suitable conditions for desired species. Habitat restoration and creation is increasingly being used to increase the extent of ecologically important habitats in order to mitigate the impacts of human development. The modification of past management techniques and the introduction of new ones can provide additional benefits. This book describes the range of techniques used to manage land for biodiversity conservation. The opening sections discuss the general principles of habitat management, including decision-making, mitigating damaging effects of climate change, and monitoring the success of management. These are followed by a series of chapters which describe how to manage specific habitats: grasslands, dwarf-shrub vegetation and shrublands, forests, woodlands and scrub, freshwater wetlands, coastal habitats, arable land, and gardens, backyards, and urban areas. For each of these habitats the book discusses the main factors influencing their value for wildlife, highlights the key decisions that need to be made, and describes and compares the effects of individual management techniques.

Global environmental change, which includes climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, and intensive exploitation of natural resources, is having significant impacts on the world's oceans. This book advances knowledge of the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems, and their past, present, and future responses to physical and anthropogenic forcing. The book illustrates how climate and humans impact marine ecosystems by a comprehensive review of the physical and ecological processes that structure marine ecosystems and the observation, experimentation, and modelling approaches required for their study. Recognizing the interactive roles played by humans in using marine resources and in responding to global changes in marine systems, the book includes chapters on the human dimensions of marine ecosystem changes and on effective management approaches in the era of change. Part IV reviews the state of the art in predicting the responses of marine ecosystems to future global change scenarios. The book provides a synthesis of the work conducted under the auspices of the Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (GLOBEC) project over the last two decades, as the largest, multi-disciplinary, international effort focused on understanding the impacts of external forcing on the structure and dynamics of global marine ecosystems.

This book describes one of our closest relatives, the orangutan, and the only extant great ape in Asia. It is increasingly clear that orangutan populations show extensive variation in behavioral ecology, morphology, life history, and genes. Indeed, on the strength of the latest genetic and morphological evidence, it has been proposed that orangutans actually constitute two species which diverged more than a million years ago — one on the island of Sumatra the other on Borneo, with the latter comprising three subspecies. This book has two main aims. The first is to carefully compare data from every orangutan research site, examining the differences and similarities between orangutan species, subspecies and populations. The second is to develop a theoretical framework in which these differences and similarities can be explained. To achieve these goals the book synthesizes and compares the data, quantify the similarities or differences, and seeks to explain them.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was commissioned in 1804 by Thomas Jefferson and lasted twenty-eight months. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began in St. Louis and navigated up the Missouri River, through the prairies, enduring a winter with the Mandan Indians in North Dakota. They reached the summit of the Rocky Mountains and then followed the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Trained in natural history and in methods of collecting plant and animal samples, Lewis and Clark meticulously recorded the conditions of the rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, and wildlife of pre-industrial America. This book, written by a botanist and naturalist, re-creates Lewis and Clark's journey. By retracing their steps, the book outlines what this western landscape looked like and how much it has been changed by modern civilization and technology.