Natural Resources in The Books Store

Geographers Lawrence E. Estaville and Richard A. Earl have compiled a host of data to visually convey vital information on Texas' climate, surface and groundwater, water uses and hazards, water quantity and quality, recreation, future supply projections, and the environmental management of its water resources. In addition to more than 150 color maps, the book includes brief introductions to each chapter and a Texas water timeline that traces the state's water events since European settlement.

The spirit of nineteenth-century naturalistic exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the world-wide success of his previous work, Meetings With Remarkable Trees—a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities—Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe.

Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, volume or age-while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Pakenham's five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30 pound Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham also trekked to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand.

Despite his expert knowledge, the book owes little to conventional botany. Like its predecessor, Remarkable Trees of the World is arranged according to the characters of the trees themselves. There are Giants and Dwarfs, Methuselahs, Shrines, Dreams, Lovers and Dancers, Ghosts and Trees in Peril. The chief Giant is General Sherman in the Sierra Nevada, California. At over 1400 tons, the grizzled old general, a giant-sequoia, is the world's largest tree, measured by volume - indeed the largest single living thing in the world. The height record, however, goes to another commanding Californian, a 368-foot high Coast redwood recently declared the tallest tree in the world. Among the Methuselahs, Pakenham describes the wind-blasted bristlecone pines of the White Mountains of California. One of them, Old Methuselah himself, was found to be 4,600 years old, making him the oldest tree yet measured by scientists. Shrines include some of the holiest trees in the world, like the immense camphor trees preserved in Shinto shrines in Japan and the 2,200 year old Bo-tree in Sri Lanka, a cutting from the actual tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Trees in Peril are the trees under attack by predatory loggers and impoverished farmers, including the exotic baobabs of Madagascar, now threatened by intensive farming, and the Great Spruce and Douglas Fir and Redcedars of Pacific North America in whose defense the conservationists have been fighting the loggers for decades.

Most Atlantans only glimpse Peachtree Creek briefly, as they pass over it on their daily commute, if at all. Looking down on the creek from Piedmont or Peachtree Roads, few contemplate how it courses through the city, where it originates and flows to. Fewer still-many fewer-would ever consider paddling down it, with its pollution and flash floods.

Through his expeditions down Peachtree Creek and its five tributaries--North Fork, South Fork, Clear Creek, Nancy Creek, and Tanyard Creek--Kaufman takes readers through such places as Piedmont and Chastain Parks, which, aside from the polluted water, are beautiful, even bucolic. Other stretches of creek, like those draining Midtown and Atlantic Station, are channeled into massive culverts and choked with discarded waste from the city. One day, floating past the Bobby Jones Golf Course, he surprises a golfer searching for his stray ball along the creek bank; another he spends talking to a homeless man living under a bridge near Buckhead.

*0-8053-4582-5, Nybakken, James and Bertness, Mark, Marine Biology: An Ecological Approach, Sixth Edition//--> Marine Biology: An Ecological Approach, Sixth Edition approaches the subject of marine biology by emphasizing the ecological principles that govern marine life throughout all ocean environments and by acknowledging the differences between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. This unique approach adds real-world relevance by exploring how organisms interact within their individual ecosystems while also focusing on the significance of human impact on the sea. Marine Environments, Plankton Communities, Oceanic Nekton, Deep-Sea Biology, Shallow-Water Subtidal Benthic Associations, Intertidal Ecology, Meiofauna, Estuaries and Salt Marches, Tropical Communities, Symbiotic Relationships, Human Impact on the Sea For all readers interested in marine biology and marine ecology.

Stream Ecology by Allan and Castillo is extensively revised and updated from the successful first edition to include major developments over the past decade. Although the subject matter is relatively advanced, this book has been written with the express goal of being accessible to students with only modest backgrounds in ecology and aquatic sciences. The First Edition was widely praised for its readability, and that emphasis is retained. The second edition opens with a new introductory chapter that sets the stage for what follows. The treatment of geomorphology and hydrology are greatly expanded from the first edition, and have been split into two, more substantial chapters. Basal energy resources, trophic roles and food web interactions are retained but thoroughly updated, particularly to include recent advances in microbial ecology and the synergies between producers and decomposers. The discussion of species interactions has been re-organized so that modern topics receive more emphasis, including trophic cascades, subsidies and food web structure. Chapters on organic matter dynamics and nutrient cycling have been substantially re-written to reflect the enormous growth in knowledge of stream metabolism and nutrient processes, the core of ecosystem functioning. The closing chapter on human impacts summarizes the status of river ecosystems and principal threats, and new material that describes advances in river management including the science of environmental flows, the successes and failures of river restoration, and the potential for ecosystem-based catchment management.