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Despite Africa's rich biodiversity and the importance of its ecosystem services, it has relatively few collaborative, network-based studies that examine the ecological impacts of climate change. This book marks the beginning of such a collaboration. It covers ecological information that spans across five countries in the Albertine Rift region, reflects over 50 years of research, and includes contributions from 65 researchers who represent 44 organizations at work in 11 sites. It provides invaluable information about past and current trends in the status of species, ecosystems and associated threats, as well as recommendations for interventions.
Long-term ecological research studies are rare and invaluable resources, particularly when they are as thoroughly documented as the Mahale Mountain Chimpanzee Project in Tanzania. Directed by Toshisada Nishida from 1965 until 2011, the project continues to yield new and fascinating findings about our closest neighbour species. In a fitting tribute to Nishida's contribution to science, this book brings together fifty years of research into one encyclopaedic volume. Alongside previously unpublished data, the editors include new translations of Japanese writings throughout the book to bring previously inaccessible work to non-Japanese speakers. The history and ecology of the site, chimpanzee behaviour and biology, and ecological management are all addressed through firsthand accounts by Mahale researchers. The authors highlight long-term changes in behaviour, where possible, and draw comparisons with other chimpanzee sites across Africa to provide an integrative view of chimpanzee research today.
Some primate field studies have been on-going for decades, covering significant portions of individual life cycles or even multiple generations. In this volume, leading field workers report on the history and infrastructure of their projects in Madagascar, Africa, Asia and South America. More importantly, they provide summaries of their long-term research efforts on primate behaviour, ecology and life history, highlighting insights that were only possible because of the long-term nature of the study. The chapters of this volume collectively outline the many scientific reasons for studying primate behaviour, ecology and demography over multiple generations. This kind of research is typically necessitated by the relatively slow life histories of primates. Moreover, a complete understanding of social organization and behaviour, factors often influenced by rare but important events, requires long-term data collection. Finally, long-term field projects are also becoming increasingly important foci of local conservation activities.
The question of whether men are predisposed to war runs hot in contemporary scholarship and online discussion. Within this debate, chimpanzee behavior is often cited to explain humans' propensity for violence; the claim is that male chimpanzees kill outsiders because they are evolutionarily inclined, suggesting to some that people are too. The longstanding critique that killing is instead due to human disturbance has been pronounced dead and buried. In Chimpanzees, War, and History, R. Brian Ferguson challenges this consensus. By historically contextualizing every reported chimpanzee killing, Ferguson offers and empirically substantiates two hypotheses. Primarily, he provides detailed demonstration of the connection between human impact and intergroup killing of adult chimpanzees. Secondarily, he argues that killings within social groups reflect status conflicts, display violence against defenseless individuals, and payback killings of fallen status bullies. Ferguson also explains broad chimpanzee-bonobo differences in violence through constructed and transmitted social organizations consistent with new perspectives in evolutionary theory. He deconstructs efforts to illuminate human warfare via chimpanzee analogy, and provides an alternative anthropological theory grounded in Pan-human contrasts that is applicable to different types of warfare. Bringing readers on a journey through theoretical struggle and clashing ideas about chimpanzees, bonobos, and evolution, Ferguson opens new ground on the age-old question--are men born to kill?
This study deals with three interrelated problems. First, it pursues the quest for local knowledge to understand climate variability and change at local levels. Due to controversies, uncertainties, skepticism and embedded economic and political interests in the climate change discourse, effective world collective action is more likely to delay for quite some time to come. Moreover, as climate change discourse remains very weak at engaging local knowledge, policies that emanate from the discourse might be less responsive to local climate problems both in terms of policy ingredients and time frame. So, having highlighting the paramount importance of local knowledge, this study documents and critically analyzes this knowledge system among subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. Secondly, it analyzes the economic impacts of climate variability and change and adaptation through quantitative methods with a special focus on crop production. Finally, it analyzes the factors that influence adaptive behavior. In so doing, it challenges the traditional approach of adaptation research and brings in a conceptual framework borrowed from psychosocial theory and empirically tests the approach in explaining adaptive behavior of farmers.
The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic-and often extreme-shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less. The causes of abrupt climate changes have not been clearly established, but the triggering of events is likely to be the result of multiple natural processes. Abrupt climate changes of the magnitude seen in the past would have far-reaching implications for human society and ecosystems, including major impacts on energy consumption and water supply demands. Could such a change happen again? Are human activities exacerbating the likelihood of abrupt climate change? What are the potential societal consequences of such a change? Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises looks at the current scientific evidence and theoretical understanding to describe what is currently known about abrupt climate change, including patterns and magnitudes, mechanisms, and probability of occurrence. It identifies critical knowledge gaps concerning the potential for future abrupt changes, including those aspects of change most important to society and economies, and outlines a research strategy to close those gaps. Based on the best and most current research available, this book surveys the history of climate change and makes a series of specific recommendations for the future.
This book assesses the causes and consequences of environmental change in East Africa, asking whether local African communities are sufficiently resilient to cope with the ecological and social challenges that confront them. It focuses on the savannahs of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, and the surrounding highlands of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley that form the social-ecological system of the specialised cattle pastoralists and niche agricultural farmers who occupy these semi-arid lands. Historical studies of resilience spanning the past two centuries are linked with analysis of current environmental challenges, and the ecological, social, economic and political responses mounted by local communities. The authors question whether the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of eastern Africa’s savannahs – intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species – might soon led to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle pastoralism that dominates the region, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
Presents new research and analysis along with case studies to examine the interface between ape conservation and industrial agriculture. This title is available as Open Access.
Africa is one continent severely affected by the ravaging effects of global environment change yet it is least responsible for this. The continent's rural and urban poor are particularly vulnerable to reduced agricultural production, worsening food security, increased incidence of both flooding and drought, spreading of disease and heightening risk of conflict over scarce land and water resources. As such this timely book consisting of chapters authored by scholars from multidisciplinary backgrounds provides the reader a variety of contexts from which to understand the impacts of global environmental change and how affected African communities are adapting an mitigating the scourge. In addition it discusses different models for mitigation and adaptation applicable to local contexts.
As our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees offer tantalizing clues about the behavior of early human ancestors. This book provides a rich and detailed portrait of chimpanzee social life in the wild, synthesizing hundreds of thousands of hours of research at seven long-term field sites. Why are the social lives of males and females so different? Why do groups of males sometimes seek out and kill neighboring individuals? Do chimpanzees cooperate when they hunt monkeys? Is their vocal behaviour like human speech? Are there different chimpanzee 'cultures'? Addressing these questions and more, Adam Arcadi presents a fascinating introduction to the chimpanzee social universe and the challenges we face in trying to save this species from extinction. With extensive notes organized by field site and an appendix describing field methods, this book is indispensable for students, researchers, and anyone else interested in the remarkable and complex world of these intelligent apes.