Observation And Ecology

The need to understand and address large-scale environmental problems that are difficult to study in controlled environments—issues ranging from climate change to overfishing to invasive species—is driving the field of ecology in new and important directions. Observation and Ecology documents that transformation, exploring how scientists and researchers are expanding their methodological toolbox to incorporate an array of new and reexamined observational approaches—from traditional ecological knowledge to animal-borne sensors to genomic and remote-sensing technologies—to track, study, and understand current environmental problems and their implications. The authors paint a clear picture of what observational approaches to ecology are and where they fit in the context of ecological science. They consider the full range of observational abilities we have available to us and explore the challenges and practical difficulties of using a primarily observational approach to achieve scientific understanding. They also show how observations can be a bridge from ecological science to education, environmental policy, and resource management. Observations in ecology can play a key role in understanding our changing planet and the consequences of human activities on ecological processes. This book will serve as an important resource for future scientists and conservation leaders who are seeking a more holistic and applicable approach to ecological science.

A balanced review of differing approaches based on remote sensing tools and methods to assess and monitor biodiversity, carbon and water cycles, and the energy balance of terrestrial ecosystem. Earth Observation of Ecosystem Services highlights the advantages Earth observation technologies offer for quantifying and monitoring multiple ecosystem functions and services. It provides a multidisciplinary reference that expressly covers the use of remote sensing for quantifying and monitoring multiple ecosystem services. Rather than exhaustively cover all possible ecosystem services, this book takes a global look at the most relevant remote sensing approaches to estimate key ecosystem services from satellite data. Structured in four main sections, it covers carbon cycle, biodiversity, water cycle, and energy balance. Each section contains a review of conceptual and empirical methods, techniques, and case studies linking remotely sensed data to the biophysical variables and ecosystem functions associated with key ecosystem services. The book identifies relevant issues and challenges of assessment, presents cutting-edge sensing techniques, uses globally implemented tools to quantify ecosystem functions, and presents examples of successful monitoring programs. Covering recent developments undertaken on the global and national stage from Earth observation satellite data, it includes valuable lessons and recommendations and novel ways to improve current global monitoring systems. The book delineates the use of Earth observation data so that it can be used to quantify, map, value, and manage the valuable goods and services that ecosystems provide to societies around the world.

This book presents relevant and contemporary research on the remote sensing of landscapes, agriculture & forestry, geomorphology, coasts & oceans, natural hazards and wild habitats. It highlights the application of remote sensing in understanding natural processes and oceanic features, as well as in creating mapping inventories of water resources across different spatial and temporal scales. Recent advances in hyperspectral imaging and high spatial resolution offer promising techniques for exploring various aspects related to the fruitful and cost-effective monitoring of large-scale environments. In the field of forestry and agriculture, the book addresses topics such as terrain analysis, forest management, updating current forest inventories, and vegetation cover type discrimination. It also elaborates delineation of various geo-morphological features of the earth’s surface and natural disasters, and includes a special section on the remote sensing of wild habitats. Readers working in interdisciplinary sectors engaged in remote-sensing-based research benefit from the techniques presented.

A balanced review of differing approaches based on remote sensing tools and methods to assess and monitor biodiversity, carbon and water cycles, and the energy balance of terrestrial ecosystem. Earth Observation of Ecosystem Services highlights the advantages Earth observation technologies offer for quantifying and monitoring multiple ecosystem fun

Introduction and background; Exploratory data analysis and graphics; Deterministic functions for ecological modeling; Probability and stochastic distributions for ecological modeling; Stochatsic simulation and power analysis; Likelihood and all that; Optimization and all that; Likelihood examples; Standar statistics revisited; Modeling variance; Dynamic models.

Biodiversity observation systems are almost everywhere inadequate to meet local, national and international (treaty) obligations. As a result of alarmingly rapid declines in biodiversity in the modern era, there is a strong, worldwide desire to upgrade our monitoring systems, but little clarity on what is actually needed and how it can be assembled from the elements which are already present. This book intends to provide practical guidance to broadly-defined biodiversity observation networks at all scales, but predominantly the national scale and higher. This is a practical how-to book with substantial policy relevance. It will mostly be used by technical specialists with a responsibility for biodiversity monitoring to establish and refine their systems. It is written at a technical level, but one that is not discipline-bound: it should be intelligible to anyone in the broad field with a tertiary education.

Biological diversity is important for ecosystem function and services, which in turn is essential for human well-being. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, international efforts have been made to achieve a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss. The loss continues, however. The Asia-Pacific region includes both developing countries with high biodiversity and developed countries with sophisticated data collection and analyses, but only limited information about the status quo of biodiversity in this region has been available. Many Asia-Pacific countries have rapidly grown their economies and social infrastructures, causing a loss of biodiversity and requiring an urgent mandate to achieve a balance between development and conservation in the region. In December 2009, scientists successfully organized the Asia-Pacific Biodiversity Observation Network in the region, to establish a network for research and monitoring of ecosystems and biodiversity and to build a cooperative framework. The present volume is the first collection of information on biodiversity in the Asia-Pacific and represents a quantum step forward in science that optimizes the synergy between development and biodiversity conservation.

"This volume provides a series of essays on open questions in ecology with the overarching goal being to outline to the most important, most interesting or most fundamental problems in ecology that need to be addressed. The contributions span ecological subfields, from behavioral ecology and population ecology to disease ecology and conservation and range in tone from the technical to more personal meditations on the state of the field. Many of the chapters start or end in moments of genuine curiosity, like one which takes up the question of why the world is green or another which asks what might come of a thought experiment in which we "turn-off" evolution entirely"--