Bücher der Reihe Ecological Studies

This volume explores major wetland ecosystem services, such as climate cooling and water quality improvement, and discusses the recent wetland conservation and restoration activities in China and neighboring countries.

Domestic and wild large mammalian herbivores occur on every continent except Antarctica. Through their browsing and grazing, they affect the structure and distribution not only of vegetation, but also of associated fauna. Consequently, the interactions between management practices and herbivore populations influence the biodiversity, structure and dynamics of ecosystems across vast expanses around the globe: signs of human activity that will be detectable for epochs to come.As a follow-up work to The Ecology of Browsing and Grazing, published in 2008, this new volume presents cutting-edge research on the behaviour, distribution, movement, and direct and indirect impacts of domestic and wild herbivores on terrestrial ecosystems. The respective chapters highlight strategic and applied research on cross-cutting issues in palaeontology and ecology, and provide concrete recommendations on the management of large herbivores to integrate production andconservation in terrestrial systems. Given its scope, the book will appeal to students, researchers and anyone interested in understanding these fascinating wild animals and how they shape the natural world.

This book discusses the water and carbon cycle system in the permafrost region of eastern Siberia, Providing vitalin sights into how climate change has affected the permafrost environment in recent decades.

Douglas then explores the impacts caused by logging, the extreme pulses of sedimentation and the effects of log removal and logging road construction, examining the effects of major storms in the 20 years after tree harvesting.

This study brings together decades of research on the modern natural environment of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, reviews past research on paleoenvironmental change since the Late Pleistocene, and finally presents paleoecological records of changing forest composition and fire over the last 14,000 years. The focus of this study is on the authors' studies of five pollen records from the Olympic Peninsula. Maps and other data graphics are used extensively. Paleoecology can effectively address some of these challenges we face in understanding the biotic response to climate change and other agents of change in ecosystems.  First, species responses to climate change are mediated by changing disturbance regimes.  Second, biotic hotspots today suggest a long-term maintenance of diversity in an area, and researchers approach the maintenance of diversity from a wide range and angles (CITE).  Mountain regions may maintain biodiversity through significant climate change in 'refugia': locations where components of diversity retreat to and expand from during periods of unfavorable climate (Keppel et al., 2012).  Paleoecological studies can describe the context for which biodiversity persisted through time climate refugia.  Third, the paleoecological approach is especially suited for long-lived organisms.  For example, a tree species that may typically reach reproductive sizes only after 50 years and remain fertile for 300 years, will experience only 30 to 200 generations since colonizing a location after Holocene warming about 11,000 years ago.  Thus, by summarizing community change through multiple generations and natural disturbance events, paleoecological studies can examine the resilience of ecosystems to disturbances in the past, showing how many ecosystems recover quickly while others may not (Willis et al., 2010).

This edited volume summarizes multidisciplinary work on wildlife conservation in the Tarangire Ecosystem of northern Tanzania. By drawing together human-centered, wildlife-centered, and interdisciplinary research, this book contributes to furthering our understanding of the often complex mechanisms underlying human-wildlife interactions in dynamic landscapes. By synthesizing the wealth of knowledge generated by anthropologists, ecologists, conservationists, entrepreneurs, geographers, sociologists, and zoologists over the last decades, this book also highlights practicable and locally adapted solutions for shaping human-wildlife interactions towards coexistence.Readers will discover the reciprocal and often unexpected direct and indirect dynamics between people and wildlife. While boundaries (e.g. between people and wildlife, between protected and un-protected areas, and between different groups of people) are a common theme throughout the different chapters, this book stresses the commonalities, links, and synergies between seemingly disparate disciplines, opinions, and conservation approaches. The chapters are divided into clear sections, such as the human dimension, the wildlife dimension  and  human-wildlife interactions,  representing a detailed summary of anthropological, ecological, and interdisciplinary research projects that have been conducted in the Tarangire Ecosystem over the last decades. Beyond, this work contributes to the debate about land-sharing versus land-sparing and provides an in-depth case study for understanding the complexities associated with human-wildlife coexistence in one of the few remaining ecosystems that supports migratory populations of large mammals.The topic of this book is particularly relevant for students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in reconciling the needs of human populations with those of the environment in general and large mammal populations in particular.    

The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, spawned a multitude of pro- grammes aimed at assessing, managing and conserving the earth's biological diversity. One important issue addressed at the conference was the mountain environment. A specific feature of high mountains is the so-called alpine zone, i. e. the treeless regions at the uppermost reaches. Though covering only a very small proportion of the land surface, the alpine zone contains a rela- tively large number of plants, animals, fungi and microbes which are specifi- cally adapted to cold environments. This zone contributes fundamentally to the planet's biodiversity and provides many resources for mountain dwelling as well as lowland people. However, rapid and largely man-made changes are affecting mountain ecosystems, such as soil erosion, losses of habitat and genetic diversity, and climate change, all of which have to be addressed. As stated in the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, "e;the global scale of biodiversity reduction or losses and the interdependence of different species and ecosystems across national borders demands concerted international action"e;. Managing biodiversity in a rational and sustainable way needs basic knowledge on its qualitative and quantitative aspects at local, regional and global scales. This is particularly true for mountains, which are distributed throughout the world and are indeed hot spots of biodiversity in absolute terms as well as relative to the surrounding lowlands.

Human-driven greenhouse emissions are increasing the velocity of climate change and the frequency and intensity of climate extremes far above historical levels. These changes, along with other human-perturbations, are setting the conditions for more rapid and abrupt ecosystem dynamics and collapse.This book presents new evidence on the rapid emergence of ecosystem collapse in response to the progression of anthropogenic climate change dynamics that are expected to intensify as the climate continues to warm. Discussing implications for biodiversity conservation, the chapters provide examples of such dynamics globally covering polar and boreal ecosystems, temperate and semi-arid ecosystems, as well as tropical and temperate coastal ecosystems.Given its scope, the volume appeals to scientists in the fields of general ecology, terrestrial and coastal ecology, climate change impacts, and biodiversity conservation.

This book covers the wider aspects of the microbiology of hot desert soil ecosystems, compiling disparate information from a range of relevant desert soil microbial fields.The reader learns about microbial ecology of the more dominant and possibly most important desert habitats, detailing the phylogenetic and functional diversity of these different habitats as well as their potential role in desert ecosystem ecology. Particular attention is also given to microbial stress adaptation in hot desert soils. Furthermore, it is the first volume in this particular field to cover modern metagenomics technologies that can be applied to studies of all aspects of desert microbial communities. Additionally, the book explores viruses and viral communities, which are among the least studied (and little understood) components of desert soil microbial communities. Particular attention is also given to the roles of desert microbial communities in biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Through this book the reader discovers how desert microbiology has been at the forefront of Astrobiology and how it may be used conceptually in future terraforming strategies. Desert ecosystems are increasingly coming into focus given the impacts of climate change and desertification trends, making this volume particularly timely. Each of the chapters is authored by leading international researchers and is a must-read for microbial ecologists. 

Climate change is one of the most severe dangers for mankind worldwide. Beside the temperature increase, the sea level will rise and flood wide coastal areas, which is already remarkable today. The effects will be dramatic, in particular, at coasts with low elevation gradients such as at the German coasts of the North and Baltic Sea. The impact will be not only severe for coastal people, but still more for the unique coastal ecosystems, which harbors many plant and animal species that are already endangered today.This book focuses on the coastal terrestrial ecosystems of the German North and Baltic Sea. It describes the reactions of plants and animals (i.e. spiders, carabid beetles, bees and nematodes) on the future temperature and sea level increase. The combination of field and experimental studies is unique for Europe and for many parts of the world. It not only studies the actual elevation gradients and the climatic and saline gradients fromWest to East, but also the historical changes to document processes at coastal ecosystems that were already passed. In contrast to many books that studied the marine processes with similar backgrounds, this book concerns the terrestrial coastal ecosystems that were overall rarely studied and, in particular, never studied under this specific viewpoint.

Theory and early empirical work posed that herbivore pressure should be lower on islands than on the mainland owing to lower herbivore abundance and diversity in insular systems. Consequently, plant taxa found on islands are expected to be less protected or even to have lost their defences completely. While early observational studies supported the prediction of lower herbivory and plant defences on islands, recent island-mainland comparisons have yielded mixed results, with some studies finding no differences between islands and mainlands or, surprisingly, higher herbivory and plant defences on islands. In this book, the authors aim to re-assess current theory and initiate a new generation of work on insularity effects on plant-herbivore interactions. This book aims to fill the research gaps by integrating the research that has been done to date and by compiling and summarising new research on insularity effects on plant-herbivore interactions. It provides a critical examinationof the patterns in light of classical theory and identifies potential mechanisms or underlying processes. It also aims to raise new questions that will form the basis for a revised and more robust research programme.