General in The Books Store

Conventional economics is often criticized for failing to reflect adequately the value of clean air and water, species diversity, and social and generational equity. By excluding biophysical and social systems from their analyses, many conventional economists overlook problems of the increasing scale of human impacts and the inequitable distribution of resources.

Ecological Economics is an introductory-level textbook for an emerging paradigm that addresses this flaw in much economic thought. The book defines a revolutionary "transdiscipline" that incorporates insights from the biological, physical, and social sciences, and it offers a pedagogically complete examination of this exciting new field. The book provides students with a foundation in traditional neoclassical economic thought, but places that foundation within a new interdisciplinary framework that embraces the linkages among economic growth, environmental degradation, and social inequity.

Introducing the three core issues that are the focus of the new transdiscipline -- scale, distribution, and efficiency -- the book is guided by the fundamental question, often assumed but rarely spoken in traditional texts: What is really important to us? After explaining the key roles played by the earth's biotic and abiotic resources in sustaining life, the text is then organized around the main fields in traditional economics: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international economics. The book also takes an additional step of considering the policy implications of this line of thinking.

Ecological Economics includes numerous features that make it accessible to a wide range of students:

• more than thirty text boxes that highlight issues of special importance to students
• lists of key terms that help students organize the main points in each chapter
• concise definitions of new terms that are highlighted in the text for easy reference
• study questions that encourage student exploration beyond the text
• glossary and list of further readings

An accompanying workbook presents an innovative, applied problem-based learning approach to teaching economics.

*Serves as a comprehensive well-illustrated introduction for beginners and a valuable reference for the experienced beekeeper.

*Outlines options for each operation within beekeeping, listing advantages and disadvantages of each alternative.

*Provides easy-to-follow directions and diagrams.

Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R is divided into two basic parts, the first presenting R packages, functions, classes and methods for handling spatial data. This part is of interest to users who need to access and visualise spatial data. Data import and export for many file formats for spatial data are covered in detail, as is the interface between R and the open source GRASS GIS. The second part showcases more specialised kinds of spatial data analysis, including spatial point pattern analysis, interpolation and geostatistics, areal data analysis and disease mapping. The coverage of methods of spatial data analysis ranges from standard techniques to new developments, and the examples used are largely taken from the spatial statistics literature. All the examples can be run using R contributed packages available from the CRAN website, with code and additional data sets from the book's own website.

This book will be of interest to researchers who intend to use R to handle, visualise, and analyse spatial data. It will also be of interest to spatial data analysts who do not use R, but who are interested in practical aspects of implementing software for spatial data analysis. It is a suitable companion book for introductory spatial statistics courses and for applied methods courses in a wide range of subjects using spatial data, including human and physical geography, geographical information systems, the environmental sciences, ecology, public health and disease control, economics, public administration and political science.

The book has a website where coloured figures, complete code examples, data sets, and other support material may be found: http://www.asdar-book.org.

The authors have taken part in writing and maintaining software for spatial data handling and analysis with R in concert since 2003. 

This is the first paperback version of the second edition of the popular A Guide to the Birds of Panama. In the second edition, published in 1989, the authors expanded information on the birds of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras: approximately 200 new species were added to the material in the 1976 edition. Over 300 additional species, some of them Panamanian, were illustrated. Sixteen new plates were added, and three of the original plates were replaced by improved versions. Throughout the book changes were made to accommodate the explosion in knowledge of the birds of Panama and nearby areas and of neotropical birds in general. The basic sequence and systematics of the AOU 1983 Check-list were adopted. Also included in the revised edition was expanded and updated information on birdfinding in Panama, prepared with the assistance of two of Panama's best resident birders. The book also contains a special section outlining developments in Panama ornithology and conservation. "A sophisticated treatment of one of the world's richest avifaunas."--The Quarterly Review of Biology

South America, though home to about one-third of the world's bird species and twice as many endemic families of birds as any other continent, has the world's sparsest population of birdwatchers. Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica illustrates and describes all the known species--more than 1,000 of them--in a vast swath of this underexplored birder's paradise, from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, southern Brazil, and Uruguay to parts of Antarctica. Just some of the birds it covers are teals, tinamous, chachalacas, conebills, cuckoos, macaws, parakeets, parrots, penguins, nightjars, hummingbirds, ovenbirds, tyrants, and tanagers. The habitats range from torrid rainforests and cloudforests to grasslands, the world's driest desert, second highest mountain range, and ice caps.

The 97 color plates depict each species' male in breeding plumage, with the female and young often shown as well. On the facing page are concise textual descriptions of each species, highlighting not only salient physical features and behavioral patterns but the calls or songs of each. Casual birders and ornithologists contemplating a journey to the region, or simply interested in a one-volume overview of its bird life, will not want to miss this book.