Bücher der Reihe Monographiae Biologicae

The increasing world population is already causing intensive pressure on the most productive areas of the earth's surface. In this respect, the arid and semi-arid regions of the world, occupying about 11,000 million acres or 4,500 million hectares, roughly one third of the tota11and surface, pose a constant challenge to man's technological skill.

However, Por (1995) suggested that the area extending into Bolivia and Paraguay has not been satisfactorily 2 surveyed, leading him to accept the figure of 200,000 km as the area of the entire Pantanal, ineluding all of its extensions.

Proceedings of the conference held in Bandar Seri Begawan, April 1993

An increasing variety of biological problems involving resource management, conservation and environmental quality have been dealt with using the principles of population biology (defined to include population dynamics, genetics and certain aspects of community ecology).

Maritime canals dissolve natural barriers to the dispersal of marine organisms, providing novel opportunities for natural dispersal, as well as for shipping-mediated transport. This book is the first to assess the impacts of the world's three principal maritime canals - the Kiel, the Panama, the Suez - as invasion corridors for alien biota.

Since the limnological research on the man-made Brokopondo Reservoir in the 1960s, numerous data has been collected on the ecology of Surinam rivers and swamps. This book is a compilation of this data; it is a survey of the aquatic ecology of one of the peripheral areas of Amazonia.

These demonstrated a clear correspondence between the biological quality and fisheries of streams in the catchment and aspects of stream chemistry, par ticularly pH, aluminium and calcium on the one hand, and catchment land use on the other.

Our understanding of the ecology of running waters has come a long way during the past few years. From being a largely descriptive subject, with a few under­ tones concerned with such things as fisheries, pollution or control of blackflies, it has evolved into a discipline with hypotheses, such as the River Continuum Concept (Vannote et a/. 1980), and even a book suggesting that it offers opportunity for the testing of ecological theory (Barnes & Minshall 1983). However, perusal of the literature reveals that, although some of the very early studies were concerned with large rivers (references in Hynes 1970), the great mass of the work that has been done on running water has been on streams and small rivers, and information on larger rivers is either on such limited topics as fisheries or plankton, scattered among the journals, or not available to the general limnologist. The only exceptions are a few books in this series of publications, such as those on the Nile (Rz6ska 1976), the Volga (Morduckai­ Boltovskoi 1979) and the Amazon {Sioli 1984), and the recent compendium by Whitton (1984) on European rivers, among which there are a few that rate as large.

Since then a lot of research has been done on this and related topics. This book provides an overview of the main research results, and focuses on plant communities, vertebrate communities and evolutionary ecology, frugivory and seed dispersal, and forest dynamics and recruitment.

The idea for this book was born at the June 1996 meeting of the IDEAL Steering Committee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. IDEAL, an International Decade for the East African Lakes, had ended one round of field investigations, many of which had been centered on Lake Victoria.

There is a paradox in hypertension: whereas the pathophysiological mechanisms of the disease have been related principally to a constriction of small arteries, most of the complications refer to damage of the large arteries, particularly at the site of the brain, the kidney and the heart. In the past, large arteries were poorly investigated in hypertension mainly in terms of change in blood flow. Recent studies clearly show that the large arteries are largely involved in the mechanisms of hypertension not only through changes in mean blood flow, but rather through changes in stiffness of the arterial wall. This aspect may be a key-point for the development of hypertensive complications. Subsequently, the goal of treatment may be not only blood pressure reduction but also improvement of structural and functional abnormalities of the large vessels. These therapeutic aspects are analyzed in detail in the present book.

Presents a broad treatment of the Pantanal, ranging from geology to flora, fauna, and the human presence.