Science Ecology

In this joyous journey around the wild edges of Britain, Christopher Hart takes us through the life, ecology and history of the humble British hedge, showing us how this much-loved (but somewhat overlooked) feature is inextricably woven into our language, history and culture. Hedges – or hedgerows – have long been an integral part of the British landscape; a bastion of privacy for our gardens, a protective presence on winding country lanes and a vital hiding place for birds and beasts on farmland.

There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. A warmer world is a sicker world for humans and wild biota. Marine epidemics have caused mass die-offs of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chains, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Fueled by a warming ocean and accelerated by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic, ocean outbreaks are sentinels of impending global environmental disaster.

Conquer the GED Science Exam: Your Essential Guide to Mastering Science Concepts offers a comprehensive and accessible resource for preparing for the GED Science section. This guide covers key scientific topics, including life science, physical science, and Earth and space science, with detailed explanations and practical examples. Each chapter is designed to strengthen your understanding of essential science concepts, from cellular biology and genetics to energy, chemical reactions, and ecosystems. Real-world applications are integrated throughout, helping learners relate scientific ...

In Still Waters, Curt Stager introduces us to the secret worlds hidden within lakes as he travels from the Adirondack wilderness to the wilds of Siberia, from Massachusetts to the Middle East. For him, lakes are both mirrors and windows into history, culture, and our primal connections to all life. Stager fills his narrative with strange and enchanting details about these submerged worlds - diving insects chirping underwater like crickets, African crater lakes that explode, the growing threats to Thoreau's cherished pond - while emphasizing how beautiful and precious our lakes are.

With science now recognizing animal consciousness, intelligence, emotion and even morality, there must come an awareness of our own moral responsibilities towards other beings. But there's another reason to consider animals' well-being—because it is intertwined with our own.

Rusty Wilson’s the kind of guy that if he sees you in town, he’ll buy you lunch. But since Rusty’s rarely in town, instead of buying you lunch, he’d like to give you a huge bargain price on a few of his stories so you can sample the crazy and mysterious world of Bigfoot. These great stories were collected by Rusty from his flyfishing clients around the campfire - and they’re stories you’ll never forget - even if you’d like to!

Owls have existed for over sixty million years, and in the relatively short time we have shared the planet with these majestic birds they have ignited the human imagination. But even as owls continue to captivate our collective consciousness, celebrated British nature writer Miriam Darlington finds herself struck by all she doesn't know about the true nature of these enigmatic creatures.

The remarkable story of the heroic effort to save and preserve Afghanistan's wildlife - and a culture that derives immense pride and a sense of national identity from its natural landscape.

In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan's extended essay also called "The Nature of Desert Nature" reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads.

Otros mundos devuelve a la vida dieciséis ecosistemas de un pasado inimaginablemente remoto y nos muestra continentes en movimiento, arrecifes de cristal, hongos de tres metros de altura, pingüinos gigantes, reptiles emplumados y muchas otras criaturas asombrosas de un atractivo casi mitológico. A medida que viajamos hacia atrás en el tiempo, redescubrimos nuestro propio hogar de formas irreconocibles, y nos sobrecogen los ecosistemas que se transforman y los devastadores escenarios que han causado el fin de incontables especies.

Several years ago, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes set out from California for Alaska's old-growth forests to hunt for a dying tree: the yellow-cedar. With climate change as the culprit, the death of this species meant loss for many Alaskans. Oakes and her research team wanted to chronicle how plants and people could cope with their rapidly changing world. Amidst the standing dead, she discovered the resiliency of forgotten forests, flourishing again in the wake of destruction, and a diverse community of people who persevered to create new relationships with the emerging environment.

Matthew Hart embarks on a journey into the largely hidden and fascinating world that is the diamond trade. The geology of diamonds explains how hard it is to find them. They are accidents of nature, carbon crystals compressed underground for eons. Weaving science and history, Hart follows the diamond trail from the basement where Gabi Tolkowsky, the world's greatest cutter, faced the 599-carat Centenary diamond, to Africa's Diamond Coast, to the sales rooms of De Beers.

In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field - from her native Scottish "byways and hills" to the frigid Arctic in 14 enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon - vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes "nature", and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the listener: "Keep looking, even when there's nothing much to see."

Locked in ice for more than twenty thousand years, the lands that now make up Britain and Ireland were some of the last settled by humans. The earliest people, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers like Cheddar Man, arrived around eleven thousand years ago to find dense forests. While they lived lightly, they did introduce fire, which they used to create clearings, and this was the beginning of the reshaping of Britain’s forests.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins - dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes.

What is the difference between a savanna and a prairie? How do bison, zebras, and other grazers avoid hungry grassland predators? Trek across the plant-covered landscape of this book, and find out what makes grasslands one of Earth's treasures.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of An African Love Story, Daphne Sheldrick's touching memoir about romance, life and elephants from Africa's greatest living conservationist. Read by Virginia McKenna, the star of Born Free and the Founder Trustee of the Born Free Foundation. An African Love Story is the incredible memoir of the life of Africa's greatest living conservationist. It tells two stories.

The first book to tackle this subject in detail, based on more than 50 interviews from seven countries, Living with Lynx will be of relevance to anyone with an interest in the future of nature, farming and the countryside. Personal, detailed, unflinching and engaging, it adds a great deal to this rapidly evolving debate.

In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists—including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive—Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, intertwining at the site of the golden toad's last emergence deep in Monteverde's Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.

Even if we've never had direct contact with one, we will have seen one, or at the very least, heard one. For those of us who live in the Western world, it is more than likely that one sleeps in our house, possibly even on our bed. I'm talking, of course, of the dog. Yet, this animal, which lives alongside 500 million of us all over the world - as an invaluable partner and a trusted confidant - presents us with one great unsolved mystery: how did this relationship - the most complex and enduring of any between human and animal - start in the first place?