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This edited volume addresses a rising concern among natural resource scientists and management professionals about decline of the many plant and animal species associated with early-successional habitats, especially within the Central Hardwood Region of the USA. These open habitats, with herbaceous, shrub, or young forest cover, are disappearing as abandoned farmland, pastures, and cleared forest patches return to forest. There are many questions about “why, what, where, and how” to manage for early successional habitats. In this book, expert scientists and experienced land managers synthesize knowledge and original scientific work to address questions on such topics as wildlife, water, carbon sequestration, natural versus managed disturbance, future scenarios, and sustainable creation and management of early successional habitat in a landscape context.
Burgeoning energy in the United States has led to increased natural gas exploration in the Appalachian Basin. Despite increasing natural gas development in the region, data about its impacts to wildlife are lacking. Our objective was to assess past and ongoing natural gas development impacts on reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. We sampled 40 gas well sites and compared amphibian, reptile, and small mammal captures among active producing, plugged (inactive), and storage well types. Total species richness and diversity were greater at storage gas well sites than at plugged wells. Although natural gas development adversely impacts moisture-sensitive woodland salamanders, our results suggest that maintained gas well openings may benefit other herpetofauna and small mammal species that use early successional habitat within predominately forested central Appalachian landscapes.
Agroforestry systems (AFS) are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide as society has come to recognize their multiple roles and services: biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, adaptation and mitigation of climate change, restoration of degraded ecosystems, and tools for rural development. This book summarizes advances in agroforestry research and practice and raises questions as to the effectiveness of AFS to solve the development and environmental challenges the world presents us today. Currently AFS are considered to be a land use that can achieve a compromise among productive and environmental functions. Apparently, AFS can play a significant role in rural development even in the most challenging socioeconomic and ecological conditions, but still there is a lot of work to do to reach these goals. Considerable funding is spent in projects directed to enhancing productivity and sustainability of smallholders forestry and agroforestry practices. These projects and programs face many questions and challenges related to the integration of traditional knowledge to promote the most suitable systems for each situation; access to markets for AFS products, and scaling up of successful AFS. These complex questions need innovative approaches from varying perspectives and knowledge bases. This book gathers fresh and novel contributions from a set of Yale University researchers and associates who intend to provide alternative and sometimes departing insights into these pressing questions. The book focuses on the functions that AFS can provide when well designed and implemented: their role in rural development as they can improve food security and sovereignty and contribute to provision of energy needs to the smallholders; and their environmental functions: contribution to biodiversity conservation, to increased connectivity of fragmented landscapes, and adaptation and mitigation of climate change. The chapters present conceptual aspects and case studies ranging from traditional to more modern approaches, from tropical as well as from temperate regions of the world, with examples of the AFS functions mentioned above.
Documents in comprehensive detail a major environmental crisis: rapidly declining amphibian populations and the disturbing developmental problems that are increasingly prevalent within many amphibian species.
The generation of electricity by wind energy has the potential to reduce environmental impacts caused by the use of fossil fuels. Although the use of wind energy to generate electricity is increasing rapidly in the United States, government guidance to help communities and developers evaluate and plan proposed wind-energy projects is lacking. Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects offers an analysis of the environmental benefits and drawbacks of wind energy, along with an evaluation guide to aid decision-making about projects. It includes a case study of the mid-Atlantic highlands, a mountainous area that spans parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. This book will inform policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels.
Amphibia, the animal group that includes frogs, toads, salamanders, and caecilians, contains more than 4,500 known living species and new ones are being discovered continuously. This book focuses on the natural history of amphibians worldwide, how interaction with their environment over time has affected their evolutionary processes and what factors will determine their destinies. 37 photos. 52 line illus.