Examining Forest Habitats

Your curious readers will learn about the compelling pines, plants, and animals in Earth’s rich forest habitat.

Forests cover 30 percent of Earth’s land surface and provide homes for countless animal and plant species. This beautifully illustrated book explores the plant life found within each of the six principal types of forest, using this framework to examine the ways that animals and humans interact with the resources that surround them. Colorful and easy-to-understand charts describe the scientific processes that sustain life in a forest ecosystem, while meticulously-rendered sidebars will excite students’ interest in the fascinating variety of animals and plants found in forests across the planet.

From spiders and frogs to deer and bears, temperate forest habitats provide just the right kinds of shelter and weather for a large variety of plants and animals. Learn about the geography and resources of temperate forest habitats as well as how animals and people have adapted to and changed forest environments. Explore this habitat's future and what people can do to help keep it safe.

Stunning Photography Draws The Reader In While Teaching The Concept Of A Food Web In A Forest Habitat.

While most efforts at biodiversity conservation have focused primarily on protected areas and reserves, the unprotected lands surrounding those area—the "matrix"—are equally important to preserving global biodiversity and maintaining forest health. In Conserving Forest Biodiversity, leading forest scientists David B. Lindenmayer and Jerry F. Franklin argue that the conservation of forest biodiversity requires a comprehensive and multiscaled approach that includes both reserve and nonreserve areas. They lay the foundations for such a strategy, bringing together the latest scientific information on landscape ecology, forestry, conservation biology, and related disciplines as they examine: the importance of the matrix in key areas of ecology such as metapopulation dynamics, habitat fragmentation, and landscape connectivity general principles for matrix management using natural disturbance regimes to guide human disturbance landscape-level and stand-level elements of matrix management the role of adaptive management and monitoring social dimensions and tensions in implementing matrix-based forest management In addition, they present five case studies that illustrate aspects and elements of applied matrix management in forests. The case studies cover a wide variety of conservation planning and management issues from North America, South America, and Australia, ranging from relatively intact forest ecosystems to an intensively managed plantation. Conserving Forest Biodiversity presents strategies for enhancing matrix management that can play a vital role in the development of more effective approaches to maintaining forest biodiversity. It examines the key issues and gives practical guidelines for sustained forest management, highlighting the critical role of the matrix for scientists, managers, decisionmakers, and other stakeholders involved in efforts to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem processes in forest landscapes.

Classical silviculture has often emphasized timber models, fundamentally based in production agriculture. This books presents silvicultural methods based in natural forest models—models that emulate natural disturbances and development processes, sustain biological legacies, and allow time to take its course in shaping stands. These methods, dubbed “ecological forestry,” have been successfully implemented by foresters for decades managing a wide variety of forestlands. Ecological silvicultural strategies protect threatened and rare species, sustain biological diversity, and provide habitat for game and non-game species, all while providing timber in profitable ways.