Shaping Ecology

Sir Arthur Tansley was the leading figure in ecology for the first half of the 20th century, founding the field, and forming its first professional societies. He was the first President of the British Ecological Society and the first chair of the Field Studies Council. His work as a botanist is considered seminal and he is recognized as one of the giants of ecology throughout the world. Ecology underpins the principles and practices of modern conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity. It explains the causes of, and offers solutions to, problems of climate change. Yet ecology is a young science, barely 100 years old. Its origins lie in phytogeography, the naming and mapping of plants. Shaping Ecology is a book about a multi-faceted man whose friends included Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Julian Huxley, GM Trevelyan, and Solly Zuckerman. Historical context is provided by Tansley's family for his parents moved in the Fabian-socialist world of John Ruskin and Octavia Hill, both instrumental in the foundation of the National Trust. While Britain was relatively slow to protect its green spaces and wildlife, it did establish in 1913 the first professional Ecological Society in the world. Tansley was its President. Organising the British Vegetation Committee and initiating a series of International Phytogeographic Excursions, he changed phytogeography into ecology.

Sir Arthur Tansley was the leading figure in ecology for the first half of the 20th century, founding the field, and forming its first professional societies. He was the first President of the British Ecological Society and the first chair of the Field Studies Council. His work as a botanist is considered seminal and he is recognized as one of the giants of ecology throughout the world. Ecology underpins the principles and practices of modern conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity. It explains the causes of, and offers solutions to, problems of climate change. Yet ecology is a young science, barely 100 years old. Its origins lie in phytogeography, the naming and mapping of plants. Shaping Ecology is a book about a multi-faceted man whose friends included Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Julian Huxley, GM Trevelyan, and Solly Zuckerman. Historical context is provided by Tansley's family for his parents moved in the Fabian-socialist world of John Ruskin and Octavia Hill, both instrumental in the foundation of the National Trust. While Britain was relatively slow to protect its green spaces and wildlife, it did establish in 1913 the first professional Ecological Society in the world. Tansley was its President. Organising the British Vegetation Committee and initiating a series of International Phytogeographic Excursions, he changed phytogeography into ecology.

Humans have always been influenced by natural landscapes, and always will be—even as we create ever-larger cities and our developments fundamentally change the nature of the earth around us. In Human Ecology, noted city planner and landscape architect Frederick Steiner encourages us to consider how human cultures have been shaped by natural forces, and how we might use this understanding to contribute to a future where both nature and people thrive. Human ecology is the study of the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on diverse fields from biology and geography to sociology, engineering, and architecture. Steiner admirably synthesizes these perspectives through the lens of landscape architecture, a discipline that requires its practitioners to consciously connect humans and their environments. After laying out eight principles for understanding human ecology, the book’s chapters build from the smallest scale of connection—our homes—and expand to community scales, regions, nations, and, ultimately, examine global relationships between people and nature. In this age of climate change, a new approach to planning and design is required to envision a livable future. Human Ecology provides architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners—and students in those fields— with timeless principles for new, creative thinking about how their work can shape a vibrant, resilient future for ourselves and our planet.

Does going green change the face of design or only its content? The first book to outline principles for the aesthetics of sustainable design, The Shape of Green argues that beauty is inherent to sustainability, for how things look and feel is as important as how they’re made. In addition to examining what makes something attractive or emotionally pleasing, Hosey connects these questions with practical design challenges. Can the shape of a car make it more aerodynamic and more attractive at the same time? Could buildings be constructed of porous materials that simultaneously clean the air and soothe the skin? Can cities become verdant, productive landscapes instead of wastelands of concrete? Drawing from a wealth of scientific research, Hosey demonstrates that form and image can enhance conservation, comfort, and community at every scale of design, from products to buildings to cities. Fully embracing the principles of ecology could revolutionize every aspect of design, in substance and in style. Aesthetic attraction isn’t a superficial concern — it’s an environmental imperative. Beauty could save the planet.

THE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES THAT SHAPE ECOSYSTEMS In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote “I think”, and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin’s tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book refl ects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Companion website This book has a companion website www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies with Figures and Tables from the book for downloading.

Ticks are noticeable by the high diversity of pathogens they can transmit, most of them with implications in human and animal health. Ticks are arachnids, meaning that they do not share the biological and ecological features of the mosquitoes and other parasitic Diptera. The natural foci of tick-borne pathogens may be as large as a continent, or be restricted to small portions of a country, without apparently too many similar features. The life cycle of the ticks involved three developing instars. The precise relationships of ticks and their hosts, the specific seasonal pattern of activity of ticks, and the still poorly known molecular relationships between ticks and the pathogens they can transmit, make these vectors a specially fecund field of research. Importantly, extensive studies on the biological and ecological relationships of ticks and abiotic (climate and vegetation) conditions have revealed the fine-tuning of the ticks and the pathogens they transmit, together with the biological effects of host and the driving features by the climate. The studies on tick-transmitted pathogens have been on the rise in the last years. There is a growing interest in understand the somewhat complex relationships between the landscape, the climate, the vectors and the pathogens, because the concerns of spread, probably driven by subtle changes in climate and man made alterations of the landscape. Studies on Lyme borreliosis are addressing the interesting issue of the relationships between the climate, the tick activity patterns, and the selection of strains according to the reservoir availability. Furthermore, the expanding field of habitat suitability modeling has been applied with different degrees of success to evaluate and quantify the risk of disease transmission. In such exponentially growing field, revisionary books are clearly welcome additions to the bibliographical tools of researchers. It is however necessary the compilation of works devoted to explore the tip of the iceberg in the field of research. In this Research Topic, we wish to summarize and review the studies on ecology, molecular biology, and tick-host-pathogens interactions, provided to resolve the important issues of ticks and pathogens. We want not only the results obtained by newly developed molecular tools, but rigorous reviews of the most recent advances in these issues. This Topic will cover aspects of both human and animal health, with special interest on zoonoses. Aspects of the biology of the ticks, as affecting the transmission of pathogens, are of special interest in this Topic. Studies on ticks of the poorly known family Argasidae, as related to their involvement on pathogen transmission, are especially welcome. We also wish to describe the perspective of the field in the future. Finally, the presentation of ongoing original works is greatly encouraged.

Drawing on an extensive range of political, legal and sociological materials, the author presents and evaluates environmental policy-making in France at a time when environmental problems are growing in complexity and gravity. He highlights the range of inputs to the policy process - including popular movements, green parties, interest group representation, EU legislation and international treaties - and evaluates the diverse nature of the outcomes which lead him to conclude that because new developments involve not only changes in policy content but also adaptation of policy style, environmental demands are progressively changing the shape of politics itself.

An updated and revised discussion of the fundamental conflict in the perception of nature and an expression of the essential need for an environmental view when approaching urban design.

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.