Read e-book online Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United PDF

Environmental Studies

By Bruce A. Stein, Lynn S. Kutner, Visit Amazon's Jonathan S. Adams Page, search results, Learn about Author Central, Jonathan S. Adams,

ISBN-10: 0195125193

ISBN-13: 9780195125191

From the plush forests of Appalachia to the frozen tundra of Alaska, and from the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest to the subtropical rainforests of Hawaii, the USA harbors a notable array of ecosystems. those ecosystems in flip maintain a superb number of plant and animal lifestyles. For species reminiscent of salamanders and freshwater turtles, the USA ranks because the worldwide middle of variety. one of the nation's different distinct organic good points are California's coast redwoods, the world's tallest bushes, and Nevada's Devils gap pupfish, which survives in one ten-by-seventy-foot barren region pool, the smallest diversity of any vertebrate animal. worthy historical past attracts jointly for the 1st time 1 / 4 century of data on U.S. biodiversity constructed via average background courses from around the kingdom. This richly illustrated quantity not just files these features of U.S. biodiversity which are rather noteworthy, but additionally considers how our species and ecosystems are faring, what's threatening them, and what's had to defend the nation's ultimate usual inheritance. exceptionally, important history is a party of the extreme organic variety of the U.S..

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Read e-book online Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United PDF

From the plush forests of Appalachia to the frozen tundra of Alaska, and from the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest to the subtropical rainforests of Hawaii, the USA harbors a impressive array of ecosystems. those ecosystems in flip maintain a good number of plant and animal lifestyles. For species comparable to salamanders and freshwater turtles, the U.S. ranks because the worldwide heart of range.

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Additional info for Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United States

Sample text

The absence of consistent and accessible information made cross-site comparisons difficult or impossible. " Preserving all biotic diversity was a tall order, though. To help focus their activities, therefore, Jenkins and his colleagues developed a coarse filter/fine filter strategy for biodiversity protection (Jenkins 1996). The philosophy behind this approach is that protecting representative examples of different ecological systems would have the effect of preserving the majority of species found in those systems.

Focusing on protecting the best examples of different ecological communities would therefore provide an efficient way to protect most species. On the other hand, such a strategy would tend to overlook those species that are rare or otherwise highly localized. They could simply slip through the sieve of this ecological coarse filter. Unfortunately, the very species that the coarse filter would tend to miss are also the organisms that, precisely because of their rarity, may be at greatest risk of extinction.

The invention of the optical microscope some four centuries ago was the first advance to dramatically extend our ability to observe and measure scales of biodiversity beyond the range of our senses. Today an increasingly wide set of tools is at our disposal, from molecular techniques for studying genes to satellite-borne sensors for monitoring the planetary ecosystem. But while we are now armed with an impressive array of sophisticated tools and technologies, discovering life in America is still fundamentally a human drama.

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Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United States by Bruce A. Stein, Lynn S. Kutner, Visit Amazon's Jonathan S. Adams Page, search results, Learn about Author Central, Jonathan S. Adams,


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