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McGinnies's book is an excellent review of all aspects of the Sonoran desert and its mountains: geographic, climatic, and geologic.ÑAmerican Scientist "This book provides a fascinating introduction to desert life in the Southwest."ÑTrue West "This true labor of love by an outstanding arid lands authority will broaden horizons, deepen understanding, and heighten awareness of the debt we owe to the founders of the Desert Laboratory."ÑArizona Highways "A great source of revelation. . . . Easy and enjoyable to read and has left me with a great respect for the diversity of ways in which desert plants adapt to extremes."ÑSylvia Martinelli, Journal of Arid Environments
From humble beginnings as a small desert laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has evolved into a thriving international center of plant molecular biology that sits today on the campus of Stanford University. This fourth in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution touches on the tangled beginnings of ecology, the baroque complexities of photosynthesis, the great mid-century evolutionary synthesis and the adventurous start of the plant molecular revolution.
McGinnies's book is an excellent review of all aspects of the Sonoran desert and its mountains: geographic, climatic, and geologic.ÑAmerican Scientist "This book provides a fascinating introduction to desert life in the Southwest."ÑTrue West "This true labor of love by an outstanding arid lands authority will broaden horizons, deepen understanding, and heighten awareness of the debt we owe to the founders of the Desert Laboratory."ÑArizona Highways "A great source of revelation. . . . Easy and enjoyable to read and has left me with a great respect for the diversity of ways in which desert plants adapt to extremes."ÑSylvia Martinelli, Journal of Arid Environments
Ecologists can spend a lifetime researching a small patch of the earth, studying the interactions between organisms and the environment, and exploring the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change. With so few ecologists and so many systems to study, generalizations are essential. But how do you extrapolate knowledge about a well-studied area and apply it elsewhere? Through a range of original essays written by eminent ecologists and naturalists, The Ecology of Place explores how place-focused research yields exportable general knowledge as well as practical local knowledge, and how society can facilitate ecological understanding by investing in field sites, place-centered databases, interdisciplinary collaborations, and field-oriented education programs that emphasize natural history. This unique patchwork of case-study narratives, philosophical musings, and historical analyses is tied together with commentaries from editors Ian Billick and Mary Price that develop and synthesize common threads. The result is a unique volume rich with all-too-rare insights into how science is actually done, as told by scientists themselves.
In the 1890s, several initiatives in American botany converged. The creation of new institutions, such as the New York Botanical Garden, coincided with radical reforms in taxonomic practice and the emergence of an experimental program of research on evolutionary problems. Sharon Kingsland explores how these changes gave impetus to the new field of ecology that was defined at exactly this time. She argues that the creation of institutions and research laboratories, coupled with new intellectual directions in science, were crucial to the development of ecology as a discipline in the United States. The main concern of ecology - the relationship between organisms and environment - was central to scientific studies aimed at understanding and controlling the evolutionary process. Kingsland considers the evolutionary context in which ecology arose, especially neo-Lamarckian ideas and the new mutation theory, and explores the relationship between scientific research and broader theories about social progress and the evolution of human civilization. By midcentury, American ecologists were leading the rapid development of ecosystem ecology. and society in the postwar context, foreshadowing the environmental critiques of the 1960s. As the ecosystem concept evolved, so too did debates about how human ecology should be incorporated into the biological sciences. Kingsland concludes with an examination of ecology in the modern urban environment, reflecting on how scientists are now being challenged to produce innovative responses to pressing problems. The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000 offers an innovative study not only of the scientific landscape in turn-of-the-century America, but of current questions in ecological science.