Spatializing The History Of Ecology

Throughout its history, the discipline of ecology has always been profoundly entangled with the history of space and place. On the one hand, ecology is a field science that has thrived on the study of concrete spatial entities, such as islands, forests or rivers. These spaces are the workplaces in which ecological phenomena are identified, observed and experimented on. They provide both epistemic opportunities and constraints that structure the agenda and the analytical sensibilities of ecological researchers. On the other hand, ecological knowledge and practices have become important resources through which spaces and places are classified, delineated, explained, experienced and managed. The impact of these activities reaches far beyond the realms of the ecological discipline. Many ecological concepts such as "biotopes," "ecosystems" and "the biosphere" have become entities that widely resonate in public life and policy making. This book explores the mutual entanglement between space and knowledge-making in the history of ecology. Its first goal is to explore to which extent a spatial perspective can shed new light on the history of ecological science. Second, it uses ecology as a critical site to gain broader insights into the history of the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Via a series of case studies – discussing topics that range from ecological field stations in the early-twentieth century Caribbean over wisent breeding in Nazi Germany to computer modelling in North American deserts – the book offers a tour through the changing landscapes of modern ecology.

This book describes the emergence of landscape ecology, its current status as a new integrative science, and how distinguished scholars in the field of landscape ecology view the future regarding new challenges and career opportunities. Over the past thirty years, landscape ecology has utilized development in technology and methodology (e.g., satellites, GIS, and systems technologists) to monitor large temporal-spatial scale events and phenomena. These events include changes in vegetative cover and composition due to both natural disturbance and human cause—changes that have academic, economic, political, and social manifestations. There is little doubt, due to the temporal-spatial scale of this integrative science, that scholars in fields of study ranging from anthropology to urban ecology will desire to compare their fields with landscape ecology during this intellectually and technologically fertile time. History of Landscape Ecology in the United States brings to light the vital role that landscape ecologists will play in the future as the human population continues to increase and fragment the natural environment. Landscape ecology is known as a synthesized intersection of disciplines; but new theories, concepts, and principles have emerged that form the foundation of a new transdiscipline.

Nowadays, ecologists worldwide recognize the use of spatial analysis as essential. However, because of the fast-growing range of methods available, even an expert might occasionally find it challenging to choose the most appropriate one. Providing the ecological and statistical foundations needed to make the right decision, this second edition builds and expands upon the previous one by: • Encompassing the basic methods for spatial analysis, for both complete census and sample data • Investigating updated treatments of spatial autocorrelation and spatio-temporal analysis • Introducing detailed explanations of currently developing approaches, including spatial and spatio-temporal graph theory, scan statistics, fibre process analysis, and Hierarchical Bayesian analysis • Offering practical advice for specific circumstances, such as how to analyze forest Permanent Sample Plot data and how to proceed with transect data when portions of the data series are missing. Written for graduates, researchers and professionals, this book will be a valuable source of reference for years to come.

Today, the environment seems omnipresent in European policy within and beyond the European Union. The idea of a shared European environment, however, has come a long way and is still being contested. Greening Europe focuses on the many ways people have interacted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. The authors ask how notions of Europe mattered in these activities and they expose the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect and network, and to exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies that exceeded their national horizons. Moving beyond human agency, the handbook also highlights the eminent role nature played in both "greening" Europe and making Europe a shared environment.

Ecology and Empire forged a historical partnership of great power -- and one which, particularly in the last 500 years, radically changed human and natural history across the globe. This book scrutinizes European expansion from the perspectives of the so-called colonized peripheries, the settler societies. It begins with Australia as a prism through which to consider the relations between settlers and their lands, but moves well beyond this to a range of lands of empire. It uses their distinctive ecologies and histories to shed new light on both the imperial and the settler environmental experience. Ecology and Empire also explores the way in which the science of ecology itself was an artifact of empire, drawing together the fields of imperial history and the history of science.

"Spatial Ecology" elucidates processes and mechanisms which structure dynamics of real world systems; these include lakes, ponds, forests and rivers. Readers are introduced to contemporary models in ecological literature based on the author's research experience. The e-book starts by presenting an introduction to basic mechanisms of ecological processes. This is followed by chapters explaining these processes responsible for generating observed spatial patterns in detail. The e-book concludes with a chapter on water quality management and its relevance to the spatial setting in a wetland area. This text in spatial ecology is a welcome resource for readers interested in models, methods and methodologies best suited for the study of advanced ecology courses and topics related to ecosystem structure, function and habitat fragmentation. CONTENTS: 1) Introduction 2) Basic Interactions: Processes in Time 3) Ecosystems in the 'Bottle': Microcosm Experiments 4) Principles of Ecological Dynamics 5) Role of Space 6) Dynamics and Patterns 7) Issues in Spatial Ecology

Nature’s Diplomats explores the development of science-based and internationally conceived nature protection in its foundational years before the 1960s, the decade when it launched from obscurity onto the global stage. Raf De Bont studies a movement while it was still in the making and its groups were still rather small, revealing the geographies of the early international preservationist groups, their social composition, self-perception, ethos, and predilections, their ideals and strategies, and the natures they sought to preserve. By examining international efforts to protect migratory birds, the threatened European bison, and the mountain gorilla in the interior of the Belgian Congo, Nature’s Diplomats sheds new light on the launch of major international organizations for nature protection in the aftermath of World War II. Additionally, it covers how the rise of ecological science, the advent of the Cold War, and looming decolonization forced a rethinking of approach and rhetoric; and how old ideas and practices lingered on. It provides much-needed historical context for present-day convictions about and approaches to the preservation of species and the conservation of natural resources, the involvement of local communities in conservation projects, the fate of extinct species and vanished habitats, and the management of global nature.

Environmental change is one of the most pressing problems facing the world community. In this volume, the authors take a critical step toward establishing a new environmental science by deconstructing the traditional culture/nature dichotomy and placing human/environmental interaction at the center of any new attempts to deal with global environmental change. Topics include the theorization of ecology, evolutionary theory, evaluating the nature/culture binary in practice, global climate and regional diversity, historical transformations in the landscapes of eastern Africa, extinction in Greenland, ecology in ancient Egypt, ecological aspects of encounters between agropastoral and agricultural peoples, archaeology and environmentalism, and the role of history in ecological research.

An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species. Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology. Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be. In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an overview of historical knowledge on a variety of topics related to the land. It does so through a distinctly activity-centric and genuinely European perspective. Rather than comparing different national approaches to living with the land, the different chapters focus on particular activities – from measuring to settling the land, from producing and selling food to improving agronomic knowledge, from organizing rural life to challenging political structures in the countryside. Furthermore, the handbook overcomes the traditional division between East and West, North and South, by embracing a transregional approach that allows readers to gain an understanding of similarities and differences across national and ideological borders in twentieth-century Europe.