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Geoecology is an interdisciplinary endeavor that involves geology, soils, and plant communities. All of these features were observed and studied in representative ultramafic landscapes from the ancient continental platform and accreted terranes along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to the Caribbean area. Understanding the geology and soils is very important for understanding the distributions of plant communities. Plant communities in ultramafic landscapes are of special interest to botanists, because they have unique "serpentine" vegetation, commonly with many endemic plant species. Descriptions of the plant communities are presented along with the soils of cold to hot and arid to humid climates in all kinds of ultramafic terranes. The plant communities are represented by the dominant species of trees, shrubs, and forbs. Also, bryophytes and lichens are mentioned as important ground cover in some subarctic and boreal landscapes. The plant communities range from barrens to dense forests and include alpine tundra and fell-fields, chaparral, savanna, open canopy forests, sagebrush, desert, and fens. Hundreds of plant species are mentioned in the characterization of these plant communities.
A book about the geology, soils, and plant communities in ultramafic (serpentine etc.) landscapes from arctic and boreal areas in Alaska and Canada to Central America and the Caribbean area.
This book is about geology, soils, and plant communities in serpentine landscapes of western North America. Aspects of the interaction of geology and soils reveal a fascinating symbiosis relating the structure, composition, and distribution of plant communities. The plants that survive are a unique group. There are some entire genera or even families of plants that are common throughout California that are poorly represented on serpentine, while other genera are more diverse on serpentine than on other soils. Serpentine rocks have dramatic effects on the vegetation that grows on them. Many common plants cannot grow on serpentine soils, leaving distinctive suites of plants to occupy serpentine habitats. The floristic diversity associated with serpentine soils formed above ultramafic rocks is surprising considering that these soils are toxic to many plants. Serpentine barrens of California often look like moonscapes but here we find numerous species of plants of low biomass that produce a richness of species rarely found in the world.
This commemorative volume of invited papers in vegetation science covers a full range of topics, objectives, methods and applications, including conservation and management tasks. These require study at different temporal and spatial scales, often simultaneously. Methodology is important in science, since it responds to particular questions and raises others. It is also closely related to the scale of investigation. Chapters in this book illustrate this interdependence, even in basic tasks such as vegetation sampling and description, measurements and mapping. Individual chapters present globally applicable systems, regional syntheses and local analyses and applications, plus conceptual methodologies, including currently debated hot topics. Vegetation types treated include tropical rainforests, temperate forests, dry steppes and scrub and local turf, sedge and moss communities. There are also chapters on re-vegetation, woodlot management, ecology of an invasive species, and trajectory planning in conservation. This book will be useful to both students and practitioners, for its reviews and examples and as a potential textbook suitable for graduate-level courses and seminars.
Since 1980, our understanding of the factors and processes governing the distribution of soils on the Earth’s surface has increased dramatically, as have the techniques for studying soil patterns. The approach used in this book relies on the National Resources Conservation Service databases to delineate the distribution of each of the eight diagnostic epipedons and 19 subsurface horizons, to identify the taxonomic level at which each of these horizons is used, to develop an understanding of the role of the factors and processes in their formation and to summarize our latest understanding of their genesis. A chapter is devoted to each diagnostic horizon (or combined horizons). This book is intended to serve as a textbook in soil geography, a reference book for geographers, ecologists and geologists and a tool for soil instructors, landlookers, mappers, classifiers and information technologists.
Physiological and Biotechnological Aspects of Extremophiles highlights the current and topical areas of research in this rapidly growing field. Expert authors from around the world provide the latest insights into the mechanisms of these fascinating organisms use to survive.The vast majority of extremophiles are microbes which include archaea, bacteria and some eukaryotes. These microbes live under chemical and physical extremes that are usually lethal to cellular molecules, yet they manage to survive and even thrive. Extremophiles have important practical uses. They are a valuable source of industrially important enzymes and recent research has revealed novel mechanisms and biomolecular structures with a broad range of potential applications in biotechnology, biomining, and bioremediation.Aimed at research scientists, students, microbiologists, and biotechnologists, this book is an essential reading for scientists working with extremophiles and a recommended reference text for anyone interested in the microbiology, bioprospecting, biomining, biofuels, and extremozymes of these organisms. - Shows the implications of the physiological adaptations of microbes from extreme habitats that are largely contributed by their biomolecules from basic to applied research - Provides in-depth knowledge of genomic plasticity and proteome of different extremophiles - Gives detailed and comprehensive insight about use of genetic engineering as well as genome editing for industrial applications
Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes is a unique, five volume reference that provides a global synthesis of biomes, including the latest science. All of the book's chapters follow a common thematic order that spans biodiversity importance, principal anthropogenic stressors and trends, changing climatic conditions, and conservation strategies for maintaining biomes in an increasingly human-dominated world. This work is a one-stop shop that gives users access to up-to-date, informative articles that go deeper in content than any currently available publication. Offers students and researchers a one-stop shop for information currently only available in scattered or non-technical sources Authored and edited by top scientists in the field Concisely written to guide the reader though the topic Includes meaningful illustrations and suggests further reading for those needing more specific information
"This outstanding volume brings together leading experts across a broad range of disciplines to bring serpentine into focus, as never before, as a window to understanding major natural processes and patterns in nature. By doing so, the authors illuminate exciting questions and challenges that will serve to inspire and direct much future study of these fascinating systems."—Bruce G. Baldwin, University of California, Berkeley
This book provides an identification system permitting recognition of plant families in all seasons by means of morphological and macroanatomical features which are easily observable, such as bark, exudates, stems and leaves characters. Studies of forest vegetation may differ in their underlying objectives, but they all require taxonomic knowledge. The process of taxonomy begins with an inventory of the flora, which has been based to a large extent on reproduction-related organs, such as flowers and fruits. But, those are often difficult to observe and may not exist in the field at a given time. Unlike most such guides or keys, this book can be used anywhere in the tropics and provides, in a straightforward two or three-step process, identification to the level of families, which are now circumscribed according to molecular as well as morphological characters in the universally accepted scheme of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group. Plant architecture is not a prerequisite theme for plant identification; however, we think that an introduction to this subject is not out of place in this book (architectural traits are taxonomically sound): it is now time for botanists working in the tropics to have an idea on how the whole organism keeps growing. Within the family accounts, there is information concerning important economic plants with notes on the larger genera and, particularly helpfully, discussion of families readily confused and how to separate them. Descriptions of the families rely on short diagnosis bolstered by many photographic pictures, lines drawings and extracts from the author’s field books, all showing features of plants as they are found in the forest.