Kategoria BISAC: Nature >> Ecosystems & Habitats - Oceans & Seas

Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shaped this extraordinary seascape. Showcasing the lives of twenty individuals spanning more than two...

Coastal communities depend on the marine environment for their livelihoods, but the common property nature of marine resources poses major challenges for the governance of such resources. Through detailed cases and consideration of broader global trends, this volume examines how coastal communities are adapting to environmental change, and the attributes of governance that foster deliberate transformations and help to build resilience of social and ecological systems.

Governance here reflects how communities, societies and organizations (e.g., fisher cooperatives, government...

Coastal communities depend on the marine environment for their livelihoods, but the common property nature of marine resources poses major challenges for the governance of such resources. Through detailed cases and consideration of broader global trends, this volume examines how coastal communities are adapting to environmental change, and the attributes of governance that foster deliberate transformations and help to build resilience of social and ecological systems.

Governance here reflects how communities, societies and organizations (e.g., fisher cooperatives, government...

Covering 71 percent of the planet, these saline bodies of water provided the unique conditions necessary for the building blocks of life to form billions of years ago. This book explains how our oceans continue to support and influence life in important ways: by providing the largest global source of protein in the form of fish populations, by creating and influencing weather systems, and by absorbing waste streams such as airborne carbon. It is shown how oceans have an almost magnetic draw--almost half of the world's population lives within a few hours of an ocean. Although oceans are...

Aquatic Functional Biodiversity: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective provides a general conceptual framework by some of the most prominent investigators in the field for how to link eco-evolutionary approaches with functional diversity to understand and conserve the provisioning of ecosystem services in aquatic systems. Rather than producing another methodological book, the editors and authors primarily concentrate on defining common grounds, connecting conceptual frameworks and providing examples by a more detailed discussion of a few empirical studies and projects, which...

Over the last decade the concept of clustering has become a central idea for analyzing the competitiveness of nations, industries and firms. This book shows how the cluster concept can be usefully applied to the study of maritime activities.

Such activities, including shipping, shipbuilding and port and maritime services, are clearly geographically concentrated in a number of maritime clusters. However, as the author shows, these are having to compete with other uses of the coasts and oceans including capture fisheries, marine aquaculture, offshore energy and tourism. Sound...

Offshore energy generation is a rapidly growing sector, competing for space in an already busy seascape. This book brings together the ecological, economic and social implications of the spatial conflict this growth entails. Covering all energy-generation types (wind, wave, tidal, oil, and gas), it explores the direct and indirect impacts the growth of offshore energy generation has on both the marine environment and the existing uses of marine space.

Chapters cover the main issues associated with offshore energy, such as the displacement of existing activities and the negative impacts...

Utilising an adapted pathways of influence framework, it provides insights into the development of marine transboundary conservation initiatives looking at the effectiveness of international rules,...

The Southern Ocean surrounding the Antarctic continent is vast, in particular, its history, its isolation, and climate, making it a unique "laboratory case" for experimental evolution, adaptation and ecology. Its evolutionary history of adaptation provide a wealth of information on the functioning of the biosphere and its potential.

The Southern Ocean is the result of a history of nearly 40 million years marked by the opening of the Straits south of Australia and South America and intense cooling. The violence of its weather, its very low temperatures, the formation of huge...

Deep inside caves, at the bottoms of oceans and lakes, beneath the ground: these concealed habitats are absent of sunlight. This strange and fascinating world of complete darkness is not a solitary place--it is inhabited by millions of life forms. Yet most humans--creatures of daylight--have never seen any of them. Until now.

In this fascinating--sometimes eerie--book, extreme wildlife photographer and scientist Dante Fenolio brings the denizens of these shadowy haunts into focus. Life in the Dark shows us the many ways in which life forms have adapted to lightless...