The Laws Protecting Animals and Ecosystems

“We do not know where Silicon Valley is really located”, Feldman writes, because these types of organization, when they are dynamic, are moving and fluid. Innovation and production ecosystems or clusters are proliferating today because they seem to be adapted to the demands of innovation, growth and employment. The process leading to their institutionalization escapes a summary analysis of the behavior triggered by monetary incentives or, at the very least, makes it richer. The relational aspect becomes predominant, the interactions between the participants testify to the difficulty of separating the geographical and social dimensions. In the most prominent American clusters, public/private linkages and the building of social links express the centrality of networks in the innovation process. The European vision seeks to articulate entrepreneurial discoveries with vertical public interventions. The competitiveness poles in France suffer from the fact that public choices seem to be torn between two contradictory objectives: efficiency and equity.

During the nineteenth century, ivory hunting caused a substantial decrease of elephant numbers in southern Africa. Soon after that, populations of many other large and medium-sized herbivores went into steep decline due to the rinderpest pandemic in the 1890s. These two events provided an opportunity for woodland establishment in areas previously intensively utilized by elephants and other herbivores. The return of elephants to currently protected areas of their former range has greatly influenced vegetation locally and the resulting potential negative effects on biodiversity are causing concern among stakeholders, managers, and scientists. This book focuses on the ecological effects of the increasing elephant population in northern Botswana, presenting the importance of the elephants for the heterogeneity of the system, and showing that elephant ecology involves much wider spatiotemporal scales than was previously thought. Drawing on the results of their research, the authors discuss elephant-caused effects on vegetation in nutrient-rich and nutrient-poor savannas, and the potential competition between elephants on the one hand and browsers and mixed feeders on the other. Ultimately this text provides a comprehensive review of ecological processes in African savannas, covering long-term ecosystem changes and human-wildlife conflicts. It summarises new knowledge on the ecology of the sub-humid African savanna ecosystems to advance the general functional understanding of savanna ecosystems across moisture and nutrient gradients.

The vulnerability of socio -ecosystem combines the probability of exposure to natural or anthropogenic pressure, sensitivity and resilience. This book presents a systemic view of the diversity of pressures and impacts produced by climate change and human actions. Erosion of biodiversity by changing ocean chemistry, the intensification of global change raises the problem of the adaptation of living resources.

In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote «I think» and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin's tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book reflects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Visit www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies to access the artwork from the book.

Land conversion, climate change and species invasions are contributing to the widespread emergence of novel ecosystems, which demand a shift in how we think about traditional approaches to conservation, restoration and environmental management. They are novel because they exist without historical precedents and are self-sustaining. Traditional approaches emphasizing native species and historical continuity are challenged by novel ecosystems that deliver critical ecosystems services or are simply immune to practical restorative efforts. Some fear that, by raising the issue of novel ecosystems, we are simply paving the way for a more laissez-faire attitude to conservation and restoration. Regardless of the range of views and perceptions about novel ecosystems, their existence is becoming ever more obvious and prevalent in today’s rapidly changing world. In this first comprehensive volume to look at the ecological, social, cultural, ethical and policy dimensions of novel ecosystems, the authors argue these altered systems are overdue for careful analysis and that we need to figure out how to intervene in them responsibly. This book brings together researchers from a range of disciplines together with practitioners and policy makers to explore the questions surrounding novel ecosystems. It includes chapters on key concepts and methodologies for deciding when and how to intervene in systems, as well as a rich collection of case studies and perspective pieces. It will be a valuable resource for researchers, managers and policy makers interested in the question of how humanity manages and restores ecosystems in a rapidly changing world. A companion website with additional resources is available at www.wiley.com/go/hobbs/ecosystems

In a perspective of sustainable management, the balance between ecological dynamics, social and economic are now at the heart of ecological modeling and environmental strategies screenwriting. Diversity and marine ecosystems function illustrates biodiversity, habitat diversity, structures and food webs in various oceans of the world and systems: pelagic and benthic ecosystems, coral reefs and seagrass beds, oasis of hydrothermal vents ridges or areas rich upwelling. Appropriate observation methods, long-term monitoring and modeling reveal the complexity of systems, trophic interactions and spatiotemporal dynamics. The ecosystem approach is a prerequisite to assess the state of these systems, their living resources and ecological services involved in local and global environmental changes.

Since its discovery Antarctica has held a deep fascination for biologists. Extreme environmental conditions, seasonality and isolation have lead to some of the most striking examples of natural selection and adaptation on Earth. Paradoxically, some of these adaptations may pose constraints on the ability of the Antarctic biota to respond to climate change. Parts of Antarctica are showing some of the largest changes in temperature and other environmental conditions in the world. In this volume, published in association with the Royal Society, leading polar scientists present a synthesis of the latest research on the biological systems in Antarctica, covering organisms from microbes to vertebrate higher predators. This book comes at a time when new technologies and approaches allow the implications of climate change and other direct human impacts on Antarctica to be viewed at a range of scales; across entire regions, whole ecosystems and down to the level of species and variation within their genomes. Chapters address both Antarctic terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and the scientific and management challenges of the future are explored.

Aquaculture Ecosystems contains a thorough and exciting synthesis of current information on aquaculture practices and substantial discussion of the way forward in transforming the aquaculture industry by improving its sustainability. This important book includes discussion of all the current major issues relating to aquaculture practices in relation to the ecology of their situations, environmental concerns, and details of how sustainability can be improved. Efforts have been made to include chapters that go beyond the stage of debate on old topics, providing conclusions to provide leads for action plans and practices addressing modern challenges such as global climate change. Commencing with a chapter covering concerns and solutions centred around seafood security, the following chapters cover the biology and behavior of aquatic animals and their selection for use in aquaculture systems, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, nutrient inputs and pollution, biofouling, blue carbon stocks in coastal aquaculture, climate change adaptations and knowledge management in aquaculture. Written by internationally-recognized experts in aquaculture and ecology, and edited by Saleem Mustafa, well known for his work in aquatic sciences, the book provides a great deal of use and interest to all those involved in aquaculture planning and development, environmental sciences and aquatic ecology. All libraries in universities and research establishments where biological sciences and aquaculture are studied and taught should have copies of this vital reference on their shelves.

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, entrepreneurship is growing and actively promoted by policy makers. Several reports explore the influence of entrepreneurship on the economy and put some emphasis on its positive influence GDP per capita, unemployment and exports. However, entrepreneurship does not go per se and it is now broadly admitted that the decision of the entrepreneur is narrowly connected with its environment, the so-called entrepreneurial ecosystem. This book show why policymakers, entrepreneurship supporters, and entrepreneurs themselves should keep in mind the locally structured nature of entrepreneurial networks. Even if the notion of Entrepreneurial Ecosystem has become quite popular, among the international organization, development agencies and public administrations, this concept is often considered as a new one having its origins in very recent publications. This books aims at showing that entrepreneurial ecosystems have their roots in the history of economic thought and that scholars have long been conscious of their importance. Instead of insisting upon the diversity of agents involved in these organizations, it also put some emphasis on the importance of the linkages and sharing between them and suggests some orientations in view of a performing evaluation system.