Animals as geomorphic agents have primarily been considered "curiosities" in the literature of geomorphology, whose spatial and quantitative influences have been seen as both limited and minor. Zoogeomorphology: Animals as Geomorphic Agents examines the distinct geomorphic influences of invertebrates, ectothermic vertebrates, birds, and mammals, and demonstrates the importance of animals as landscape sculptors. Specific processes associated with the diversity of animal influences in geomorphology are examined, including burrowing and denning, nesting, lithophagy and geophagy, wallowing and...

Zoogeomorphology is the first and only book of its kind to examine the role animals play in sculpting the Earth's surface, thus integrating the ideas and literature from the fields of geomorphology and wildlife ecology. Dr. Butler describes how animals of all kinds--from small insects to large mammals such as elephants--can act as agents of erosion, transportation, and deposition of sediment. He discusses specific processes associated with the diversity of animal influences in geomorphology: burrowing and denning, nesting, lithophagy and geophagy, wallowing and trampling, food caching,...

The initial employment of tree rings in natural hazard studies was simply as a dating tool and rarely exploited other environmental information and records of damage contained within the tree. However, these unique, annually resolved, tree-ring records preserve valuable archives of past earth-surface processes on timescales of decades to centuries. As many of these processes are significant natural hazards, understanding their distribution, timing and controls provides valuable information that can assist in the prediction, mitigation and defence against these hazards and their effects on...

Dendrogeomorphology Beginnings and Futures: A Personal Reminiscence My early forays into dendrogeomorphology occurred long before I even knew what that word meant. I was working as a young geoscientist in the 1960s and early 1970s on a problem with slope movements and deformed vegetation. At the same time, unknown to me, Jouko Alestalo in Finland was doing something similar. Both of us had seen that trees which produced annual growth rings were reacting to g- morphic processes resulting in changes in their internal and external growth p- terns. Dendroclimatology was an already well...

San Marcos, Texas, permanently settled in 1846, was founded by former members of John C. Hays's company of Texas Rangers. The town was designated the county seat of Hays County by the Texas legislature in 1848 and was formally laid out in 1851. A center for local commerce associated with cattle and cotton production, San Marcos became an educational center with the chartering in 1899 and subsequent opening in 1903 of the Southwest Texas State Normal School. The normal school is now Texas State University, the fourth largest university in Texas with more than 36,000 students. This volume tells...