Download or read book Ecological Understanding written by Steward T.A. Pickett and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecology is an historical science in which theories can be as difficult to test as they are to devise. This volume, intended for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, reviews ecological theories, and how they are generated, evaluated, and categorized. Synthesizing a vast and sometimes labyrinthine literature, this book is a useful entry into the scientific philosophy of ecology and natural history. The need for integration of the contributions to theory made by different disciplines is a central theme of this book. The authors demonstrate that only through such integration will advances in ecological theory be possible. Ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and other serious students of natural history will want this book.
Download or read book Ecological Understanding written by Steward T.A. Pickett and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 1994-07-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecology is an historical science in which theories can be as difficult to test as they are to devise. This volume, intended for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, reviews ecological theories, and how they are generated, evaluated, and categorized. Synthesizing a vast and sometimes labyrinthine literature, this book is a useful entry into the scientific philosophy of ecology and natural history. The need for integration of the contributions to theory made by different disciplines is a central theme of this book. The authors demonstrate that only through such integration will advances in ecological theory be possible. Ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and other serious students of natural history will want this book.
Download or read book Foundations of Ecological Resilience written by Lance H. Gunderson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-07-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. Ecologists have developed resilience theory over the past three decades in an effort to explain surprising and nonlinear dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is especially important to environmental scientists for its role in underpinning adaptive management approaches to ecosystem and resource management. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience—those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers. The book’s three sections cover articles that have shaped or defined the concepts and theories of resilience, including key papers that broke new conceptual ground and contributed novel ideas to the field; examples that demonstrate ecological resilience in a range of ecosystems; and articles that present practical methods for understanding and managing nonlinear ecosystem dynamics. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is an important contribution to our collective understanding of resilience and an invaluable resource for students and scholars in ecology, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental science, public policy, and related fields.
Download or read book The Ecology of Place written by Ian Billick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecologists can spend a lifetime researching a small patch of the earth, studying the interactions between organisms and the environment, and exploring the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change. With so few ecologists and so many systems to study, generalizations are essential. But how do you extrapolate knowledge about a well-studied area and apply it elsewhere? Through a range of original essays written by eminent ecologists and naturalists, The Ecology of Place explores how place-focused research yields exportable general knowledge as well as practical local knowledge, and how society can facilitate ecological understanding by investing in field sites, place-centered databases, interdisciplinary collaborations, and field-oriented education programs that emphasize natural history. This unique patchwork of case-study narratives, philosophical musings, and historical analyses is tied together with commentaries from editors Ian Billick and Mary Price that develop and synthesize common threads. The result is a unique volume rich with all-too-rare insights into how science is actually done, as told by scientists themselves.
Download or read book A Recursive Vision written by Peter Harries-Jones and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory Bateson was one of the most original social scientists of this century. He is widely known as author of key ideas used in family therapy - including the well-known condition called 'double bind' . He was also one of the most influential figures in cultural anthropology. In the decade before his death in 1980 Bateson turned toward a consideration of ecology. Standard ecology concentrates on an ecosystem's biomass and on energy budgets supporting life. Bateson came to the conclusion that understanding ecological organization requires a complete switch in scientific perspective. He reasoned that ecological phenomena must be explained primarily through patterns of information and that only through perceiving these informational patterns will we uncover the elusive unity, or integration, of ecosystems. Bateson believed that relying upon the materialist framework of knowledge dominant in ecological science will deepen errors of interpretation and, in the end, promote eco-crisis. He saw recursive patterns of communication as the basis of order in both natural and human domains. He conducted his investigation first in small-scale social settings; then among octopus, otters, and dolphins. Later he took these investigations to the broader setting of evolutionary analysis and developed a framework of thinking he called 'an ecology of mind.' Finally, his inquiry included an ecology of mind in ecological settings - a recursive epistemology. This is the first study of the whole range of Bateson's ecological thought - a comprehensive presentaionof Bateson's matrix of ideas. Drawing on unpublished letters and papers, Harries-Jones clarifies themes scattered throughout Bateson's own writings, revealing the conceptual consistency inherent in Bateson's position, and elaborating ways in which he pioneered aspects of late twentieth-century thought.
Download or read book Lessons from a Multispecies Studio written by Julie Andreyev and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of nonfiction, first-person writings about creative collaborations with local animals and ecologies. In this highly original book, Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms--companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities--to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions.
Download or read book The Theory of Ecology written by Samuel M. Scheiner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite claims to the contrary, the science of ecology has a long history of building theories. Many ecological theories are mathematical, computational, or statistical, though, and rarely have attempts been made to organize or extrapolate these models into broader theories. The Theory of Ecology brings together some of the most respected and creative theoretical ecologists of this era to advance a comprehensive, conceptual articulation of ecological theories. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, from ecological niche theory to population dynamic theory to island biogeography theory. Collectively, the chapters ably demonstrate how theory in ecology accounts for observations about the natural world and how models provide predictive understandings. It organizes these models into constitutive domains that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of ecological understanding. This book is a milestone in ecological theory and is certain to motivate future empirical and theoretical work in one of the most exciting and active domains of the life sciences.
Download or read book Sustainable Living with Environmental Risks written by Nobuhiro Kaneko and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are not free from environmental risks that accompany the development of human societies. Modern economic development has accelerated environmental pollution, caused loss of natural habitats, and modified landscapes. These environmental changes have impacted natural systems: water and heat circulation, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. These changes in natural systems degrade ecosystem services and subsequently increase environmental risks for humans. Environmental risks, therefore, are not only human health risks by pollution, climatic anomalies and natural disasters, but also degradation of ecosystem services on which most people are relying for their lives. We cannot entirely eliminate the risks, because it is not possible to attain zero impact on the environment, but we need to find a mechanism that minimizes environmental risks for human sustainably. This is the idea of the interdisciplinary framework of “environmental risk management” theory, which advocates harmony between economic development and environmental conservation. Based on this theory, the Sustainable Living with Environmental Risk (SLER) programme, adopted by the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) as one of its strategic programmes, has been training graduate students at the Yokohama National University, Japan, from 2009 to 2013 to become future environmental leaders who will take the initiative in reducing the level of environmental risks and in protecting natural resources in the developing nations of Asia and Africa. This book provides students and teachers of this new academic field with a comprehensive coverage of case studies of environmental risks and their practical management technologies not only in Japan but also in developing nations in Asia and Africa.
Download or read book Ecological Informatics written by Friedrich Recknagel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-05-21 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecological Informatics promotes interdisciplinary research between ecology and computer science on elucidation of principles of information processing in ecosystems, ecological sustainability by informed decision making, and bio-inspired computation. The 2nd edition of the book consolidates the scope, concepts, and techniques of this newly emerging discipline by a new preface and additional chapters on cellular automata, qualitative reasoning, hybrid evolutionary algorithms and artificial neural networks. It illustrates numerous applications of Ecological Informatics for aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, image recognition at micro- and macro-scale as well as computer hardware design. Case studies focus on applications of artificial neural networks, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, adaptive agents, fuzzy logic as well as qualitative reasoning. The 2nd edition of the book includes an index with novel evolutionary algorithms for the discovery of multiple nonlinear functions and rule sets as well as parameter optimisation in complex ecological data.
Download or read book A New Approach to Ecological Education written by Gillian Judson and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Part of the Peter Lang Education list"--P. facing t.p.
Download or read book Being Ecological written by Timothy Morton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book about ecology without information dumping, guilt inducing, or preaching to the choir. Don't care about ecology? You think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you. Ecology books can be confusing information dumps that are out of date by the time they hit you. Slapping you upside the head to make you feel bad. Grabbing you by the lapels while yelling disturbing facts. Handwringing in agony about “What are we going to do?” This book has none of that. Being Ecological doesn't preach to the eco-choir. It's for you—even, Timothy Morton explains, if you're not in the choir, even if you have no idea what choirs are. You might already be ecological. After establishing the approach of the book (no facts allowed!), Morton draws on Kant and Heidegger to help us understand living in an age of mass extinction caused by global warming. He considers the object of ecological awareness and ecological thinking: the biosphere and its interconnections. He discusses what sorts of actions count as ecological—starting a revolution? going to the garden center to smell the plants? And finally, in “Not a Grand Tour of Ecological Thought,” he explores a variety of current styles of being ecological—a range of overlapping orientations rather than preformatted self-labeling. Caught up in the us-versus-them (or you-versus-everything else) urgency of ecological crisis, Morton suggests, it's easy to forget that you are a symbiotic being entangled with other symbiotic beings. Isn't that being ecological?
Download or read book Traditional Ecological Knowledge written by Melissa K. Nelson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an overview of Native American philosophies, practices, and case studies and demonstrates how Traditional Ecological Knowledge provides insights into the sustainability movement.
Download or read book Ecological Complexity and Agroecology written by John Vandermeer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text reflects the immense current growth in interest in agroecology and changing approaches to it. While it is acknowledged that the science of ecology should be the basis of agroecological planning, many analysts have out-of-date ideas about contemporary ecology. Ecology has come a long way since the old days of "the balance of nature" and other romantic notions of how ecological systems function. In this context, the new science of complexity has become extremely important in the modern science of ecology. The problem is that it tends to be too mathematical and technical and thus off-putting for the average student of agroecology, especially those new to the subject. Therefore this book seeks to present ideas about ecological complexity with a minimum of formal mathematics. The book’s organization consists of an introductory chapter, and a second chapter providing some of the background to basic ecological topics as they are relevant to agroecosystrems (e.g., soil biology and pest control). The core of the book consists of seven chapters on key intersecting themes of ecological complexity, including issues such as spatial patterns, network theory and tipping points, illustrated by examples from agroecology and agricultural systems from around the world.
Download or read book The Theory of Ecological Communities MPB 57 written by Mark Vellend and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.
Download or read book Social Ecology written by David Wright and published by Hawthorn Press. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social ecology provides a holistic framework for change, based on the interrelationships between the personal, social, environmental and 'spiritual'. It helps understand how we got here, and how to realise more sustainable, caring futures. Students from all disciplines can use this valuable resource to help to enrich their learning with insights and principles from social ecology.
Download or read book Understanding People in Context written by Ellen P. Cook and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional book emphasizes uniquely designed interventions for individual counseling, group work, and community counseling that consider clients as individuals within the contexts of families, cultural groups, workplaces, and communities. Part I describes the theoretical research base and major tenets of the ecological perspective and its applications to counseling practice. In Part II, experts who have used the ecological perspective in their work discuss its usefulness in various applications, including counseling diverse clients with specific life challenges; assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning; and in schools, substance abuse programs, faith-based communities, and counselor training programs. *Requests for digital versions from the ACA can be found on wiley.com. *To request print copies, please visit the ACA website here. *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected].
Download or read book Ecological Research and Surveys written by United States. Congress. Senate. Interior and Insular Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
