Viikki Campus Library's general collections are shelved in accordance with UDC classification code.
Cull of the Wild
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Cull of the Wild delves into the challenges conservationists face - practical and ethical - as they try to counter one of the greatest threats to biodiversity: invasive species. Culling animals for the sake of conservation is a thorny, sometimes crucial and often controversial issue. For naturalist Hugh Warwick, it is far from a comfortable subject. He loathes the idea of killing (or even eating) animals. Yet, as an ecologist, he is acutely aware of the need, in some instances, to kill and remove invasive species whose presence harms the wider environment. In Cull of the Wild, Hugh tells the stories of how various 'invasive' species came to be where they shouldn't and reveals the impacts of their presence. He talks to experts and meets the people whose job it is to set the traps and pull the trigger. From rats eliminated from important British seabird islands where they were eating their eggs, to control programmes targeting species such as the American mink, grey squirrel, and in Australia, the cane toad, these systems are complex and challenging but often essential to help other species survive. As we all know, sometimes programmes involving the 'legal killing' of animals are hugely emotive, such as when tourists pay to 'cull' species such as elephants or other 'big game'. Join Hugh as he hears from all sides in the debate in this moving and thought-provoking book.
Microbial Physiology: Unity and Diversity
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MICROBIAL PHYSIOLOGY UNITY AND DIVERSITY Explore the fascinating world of microbes in Microbial Physiology: Unity and Diversity. This comprehensive, advanced undergraduate-level textbook takes readers on a captivating journey through the intricate and often underappreciated world of microbial physiology, emphasizing both the common features that unify microbes and the diversity that makes them unique. In Part I: Unity, the book lays a strong foundation in the basics of microbial physiology. Delve into the three domains of life, get an intimate look at the metabolic pathways that fuel the microbial world, and take a deep dive into the cellular components that constitute a microbe. Further, explore the principles of cellular growth, bioenergetics, and the mechanics of respiration and fermentation. The Unity section concludes with a comprehensive discussion of regulation at posttranslational and gene levels, paving the way for a rich understanding of microbial function. Part II: Diversity, takes the reader into the broad and versatile world of microbial metabolism, exploring the range of energy sources and metabolic pathways microbes employ. This section leads readers through topics such as autotrophy, phototrophy, chemotrophy, and microbial contributions to the carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen cycles. The complexity of microbial cell envelope structures, transport processes, and protein transport are explored, along with bacterial motility, chemotaxis, and the phenomenon of quorum sensing. The section concludes with an exploration of stress responses and the diverse lifestyles that bacteria can adopt. Microbial Physiology: Unity and Diversity will engage readers with its accessible yet thorough treatment of this critical field of microbiology. Each chapter contains detailed illustrations that concisely explain complex topics and concludes with robust end-of-chapter questions that not only test understanding but also provide an opportunity for readers to dig deeper into the content. This book is a must-have for students studying microbiology, as well as researchers and professionals keen to brush up their knowledge or explore new facets of microbial physiology.
Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives
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This volume explores the experiences of those with little or no power--usually, although not exclusively, animals. The theme of animals as experiencing entities is what links the chapters and characterises the volume. Broadly each author in this volume contributes in one of two ways. The first group, in Section 1, theoretically engages animal subjectivity, animal experiences, and ways in which these are to some extent accessible and knowable to humans. The second group of authors, in Section 2, offer narrative accounts about specific animals or groups of animals and explore to some extent their subjective historical experiences. In summary, the first section diversely theorises about animal experiences, while the second section's authors assume animals' subjective experiences and construct narratives that take into account how animals might have subjectively experienced historical phenomena.
Plant Cell Walls: Research Milestones and Conceptual Insights
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Plant cell walls have been relevant for human survival throughout evolution, from cell walls recognised as an essential ingredient in human and livestock nutrition, to their use in energy generation, construction, tool making, paper and clothing. This plant-generated material is at the centre of a myriad of human activities, and it represents the world's most abundant natural resource for fuel, fibre, food and fodder. Plant Cell Walls: Research Milestones and Conceptual Insights provides an overview of the key discoveries of hundreds of years of plant cell wall research. With chapter contributions from prominent scientists in the cell wall field, this book provides a comprehensive treatment of plant cell wall research, accompanied by a historical overview to illustrate how concepts have evolved, and how progress has been enabled by emerging technological advances. Plant Cell Walls: Research Milestones and Conceptual Insights elaborates on the translation of research to application in biotechnology and agriculture, and highlights its relevance for climate change mitigation and adaptation. It will be a key resource for plant cell biologists, biochemists and geneticists.
Plant Strategies: the Demographic Consequences of Functional Traits in Changing Environments
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How do plants make a living? Some plants are gamblers, others are swindlers. Some plants are habitual spenders while others are strugglers and miserly savers. Plants have evolved a spectacular array of solutions to the existential problems of survival and reproduction in a world where resources are scarce, disturbances can be deadly, and competition is cut-throat. Few topics have both captured the imagination and furrowed the brows of plant ecologists, yet no topic is more important for understanding the assembly of plant communities, predicting plant responses to global change, and enhancing the restoration of our rapidly degrading biosphere. The vast array of plant strategy models that characterize the discipline now require synthesis. These models tend to emphasize either life history strategies based on demography, or functional strategies based on ecophysiology. Indeed, this disciplinary divide between demography and physiology runs deep and continues to this today. The goal of this accessible book is to articulate a coherent framework that unifies life history theory with comparative functional ecology to advance prediction in plant ecology. Armed with a deeper understanding of the dimensionality of life history and functional traits, we are now equipped to quantitively link phenotypes to population growth rates across gradients of resource availability and disturbance regimes. Predicting how species respond to global change is perhaps the most important challenge of our time. A robust framework for plant strategy theory will advance this research agenda by testing the generality of traits for predicting population dynamics.
Jervis's Insects As Natural Enemies: Practical Perspectives
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There has been a dramatic increase in theoretical and practical studies on insect natural enemies over the last decades. The appeal of insect predators and, in particular, parasitoids, as research animals derives from the relative ease with which many species may be cultured and experimented on in the laboratory, the simple life-cycles of most parasitoid species, and the increasing demand for biological pest control as a key component of the integrated pest management approach. There is now a very substantial literature on insect natural enemies and thus a great need for a general text that enquiring students or research workers can use in deciding on approaches and techniques that are appropriate to the study and evaluation of such insects. This book fulfils that demand. It is a considerably updated and expanded version of a previous best-seller and provides an account of major aspects of the biology of predators and parasitoids, punctuated with information and advice on which experiments or observations to conduct and, importantly, how to carry them out. Guidance is provided, where necessary, on the most recent further literature that may need to be consulted on given topics.While researchers can now refer to several books on parasitoids and predators, Jervis's Insects as Natural Enemies is unique in emphasising practicalities. It is aimed at students and professionals working in universities and both government and commercial institutes in the fields of integrated pest management, agriculture, horticulture and forestry, as well as those interested in fundamentals of behavioural, population, community and evolutionary ecology.
A Framework for Community Ecology
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This book addresses an important problem in ecology: how are communities assembled from species pools? This pressing question underlies a broad array of practical problems in ecology and environmental science, including restoration of damaged landscapes, management of protected areas, and protection of threatened species. This book presents a simple logical structure for ecological assembly and addresses key areas including species pools, traits, environmental filters, and functional groups. It demonstrates the use of two predictive models (CATS and Traitspace) and consists of many wide-ranging examples including plants in deserts, wetlands, and forests, and communities of fish, amphibians, birds, mammals, and fungi. Global in scope, this volume ranges from the arid lands of North Africa, to forests in the Himalayas, to Amazonian floodplains. There is a strong focus on applications, particularly the twin challenges of conserving biodiversity and understanding community responses to climate change.
Law, Ecology, and the Management of Complex Systems
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This book addresses the role of law in the adaptive management of socio-ecological systems. Recent years have witnessed a rise in discussion over the relation between adaptivity and law, as if after decades of insouciance, legal scholars have finally started to understand the impacts of the scientific paradigm called 'adaptive management' on the legal sphere. Even though the complicated relations between law and the adaptive management of socio-ecological systems have become more debated, a thorough examination of the scientific and theoretical fundamentals of such endeavours has yet to be presented. Using the illustrative example of European Union water governance and its path toward embracing adaptive management, this book emphasises the legal significance of properly understanding the manner in which scientific knowledge of the environment is produced. Though always pivotal, rigorously apprehending science is especially crucial when dealing with the management of complex ecosystems as the 'normative' is created gradually before law begins to examine the 'facts' of the matter. After examining the roots of adaptive management, this book argues that the legal needs to understand itself as an integral part of the process of the socio-ecological management of complex systems and not merely an external umpire resolving disputes. As a whole, the book offers new insights into the EU regulator's approaches to scientific realities, making it an interesting read not only to academics and legal scholars but also to regulators striving to deepen their understanding or pondering which approach to adopt in the face of new regulatory challenges, and to scientists interested in the science and law aspects of their work.
The energy of Russia. Hydrocarbon culture and climate change
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This timely book analyses the status of hydrocarbon energy in Russia as both a saleable commodity and as a source of societal and political power. Through empirical studies in domestic and foreign policy contexts, Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen explores the development of a hydrocarbon culture in Russia and the impact this has on its politics, identity and approach to climate change and renewable energy.
Cogent and compelling, this book demonstrates how the Russian state leverages its oil and gas reserves in order to create and maintain power both domestically and internationally. Tynkkynen uses empirical studies of key topics such as the national gas programme Gazprom, the Arctic, climate discourse and anthropogenic climate change denial, and the Russia-Finland energy trade to critically examine the situation. The book concludes with a convincing argument for the potential of renewable energy to build a more resilient and sustainable future for Russia and how this might be achieved.
This will prove crucial reading for scholars and students of Russian and Eastern European studies and energy and environmental studies, as well as geographers, anthropologists and political scientists. Those working in governments, international organizations and corporations with an interest in Russian energy will also find its insights useful.
Recoding Life: Information and the Biopolitical
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This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault's biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book's approach is captured in the title, which refers to 'the biopolitical'. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the 'metacode of life', which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the 'metacodes' of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences.
Society, Environment and Human Security in the Arctic Barents Region
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The Arctic-Barents Region is facing numerous pressures from a variety of sources, including the effect of environmental changes and extractive industrial developments. The threats arising out of these pressures result in human security challenges. This book analyses the formation, and promotion, of societal security within the context of the Arctic-Barents Region. It applies the human security framework, which has increasingly gained currency at the UN level since 1994 (UNDP), as a tool to provide answers to many questions that face the Barents population today. The study explores human security dimensions such as environmental security, economic security, health, food, water, energy, communities, political security and digital security in order to assess the current challenges that the Barents population experiences today or may encounter in the future. In doing so, the book develops a comprehensive analysis of vulnerabilities, challenges and needs in the Barents Region and provides recommendations for new strategies to tackle insecurity and improve the wellbeing of both indigenous and local communities. This book will be a valuable tool for academics, policy-makers and students interested in environmental and human security, sustainable development, environmental studies and the Arctic and Barents Region in particular.
Fysiikka, kemia ja ympäristöongelmat
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Harvat ympäristöongelmat ovat yksittäisiä, useimmiten ne ovat kytkeytyneet toisiinsa. Ymmärtääksemme ongelmat ja niiden mahdolliset ratkaisut ongelmien keskinäiset kytkennät on syytä selvittää. Tämä teos on "Ympäristöongelmat, fysiikka ja kemia" -kurssin luentojen pohjalta tehty oppikirja. Nimensä mukaisesti kurssi sisältää asioita, joissa monipuolisiin ympäristöongelmiin on pyritty paneutumaan fysiikan ja kemian pohjalta. Samalla on kuitenkin muistettu se poikkitieteellinen näkökulma, joka on tarpeen, kun pyritään ymmärtämään erilaisia laajoihin ympäristöongelmiin liittyviä kokonaisuuksia. Laajojen kokonaisuuksien lisäksi kurssilla perehdytään myös jokapäiväisiin ympäristöongelmiin, kuten sisäilmaan ja sen laatuun.
The Book Citation Index in Web of Science Core Collection is a bibliographic database that includes the published scholarly literature of book chapters and books.
