This open access book features essays written by philosophers, biologists, ecologists and conservation scientists facing the current biodiversity crisis. Despite increasing communication, accelerating policy and management responses, and notwithstanding improving ecosystem assessment and endangered species knowledge, conserving biodiversity continues to be more a concern than an accomplished task. Why is it so?The overexploitation of natural resources by our species is a frequently...

This open access book addresses the epistemological and ontological significance as well as the scope of new mechanism. In particular, this book addresses the issues of what is "new" about new mechanism, the epistemological and ontological reasons underlying the adoption of mechanistic instead of other modelling strategies as well as the possibility of mechanistic explanation to accommodate a non-trivial notion of emergence. Arguably, new mechanism has been particularly successful in makin...