Land degradation in drylands is a multi-faceted problem. Consequently, current management approaches that attempt to mitigate such land degradation often fail to produce significant improvements. The processes associated with land degradation in drylands fall at the interface of ecology and geomorphology. For a better understanding of this degradation, there is a need to uncover the underlying dynamics and characteristic responses to environmental drivers and human-induced disturbances. A ...

The Mediterranean has been subject to changing human settlement and land use patterns for millennia, and has a history of human exploitation in an inherently unstable landscape. Environmental Issues in the Mediterranean reviews both physical and social aspects of this region, in relation to its environment.Ideal for students who are studying a range of environmental issues, but want to see them linked within one regional context. The book begins with an introduction to the ...

Available open access digitally under CC BY-NC-ND licence.‘Desistance’ - understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children, many of whom are yet to fully develop an identity (criminal or otherwise) from which to ‘desist’.Featuring voices fr...

Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they were. We think of them as crude and clumsy and not very bright, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart modern humans that came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago.But was it really as simple as that? Clive Finlayson reminds us that...

Combining breadth of coverage with detail, this logical and cohesive introduction to insect ecology couples concepts with a broad range of examples and practical applications. It explores cutting-edge topics in the field, drawing on and highlighting the links between theory and the latest empirical studies. The sections are structured around a series of key topics, including behavioral ecology; species interactions; population ecology; food webs, communities and ecosystems; and broad patte...

A masterpiece of archaeological and historical writing, 'The Making of the Middle Sea' is extensively illustrated and ranges across disciplines, subject matter and chronology from early humans to the rise of civilizations - Egyptian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Phoenician, Etruscan, early Greek and pan-Mediterranean. It is the only up-to-date, full, interpretive synthesis on the rise of the Mediterranean world from its beginnings to the threshold of Classical times. The author is Professor of Medit...

Coevolution—reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection—is one of the most important ecological and genetic processes organizing the earth's biodiversity: most plants and animals require coevolved interactions with other species to survive and reproduce. The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution analyzes how the biology of species provides the raw material for long-term coevolution, evaluates how local coadaptation forms the basic module of coevolu...

This work provides in-depth analysis of the origins of landscape ecology and its close alignment with the understanding of scale, the causes of landscape pattern, and the interactions of spatial pattern with a variety of ecological processes. The text covers the quantitative approaches that are applied widely in landscape studies, with emphasis on their appropriate use and interpretation.The field of landscape ecology has grown rapidly during this period, its concepts and methods h...

This excellent introductory textbook describes and explains the origins of modern culture– the dawn of agriculture in the Neolithic area.Written in an easy-to-read style, this lively and engaging book familiarises the reader with essential archaeological and genetic terms and concepts, explores the latest evidence from scientific analyses as varied as deep sea coring, pollen identification, radiometric dating and DNA research, condensing them into an up-to-date academic account, sp...

The biological composition and richness of most of the Earth's major ecosystems are being dramatically and irreversibly transformed by anthropogenic activity. Yet, despite the vast areal extent of our oceans, the mainstay of research to-date in the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning arena has been weighted towards ecological observations and experimentation in terrestrial plant and soil systems. This book provides a framework for extending these concepts to a variety of marine systems.

Now that so many ecosystems face rapid and major environmental change, the ability of species to respond to these changes by dispersing or moving between different patches of habitat can be crucial to ensuring their survival. Understanding dispersal has become key to understanding how populations may persist. Dispersal Ecology and Evolution provides a timely and wide-ranging overview of the fast expanding field of dispersal ecology, incorporating the very latest research. The caus...

Understanding how ecosystems are assembled -- how the species that make up a particular biological community arrive in an area, survive, and interact with other species -- is key to successfully restoring degraded ecosystems. Yet little attention has been paid to the idea of assembly rules in ecological restoration,in both the scientific literature and in on-the-ground restoration efforts.Assembly Rules and Restoration Ecology, edited by Vicky M. Temperton, Richard ...