BiblioVault - Books about Coastal ecology

Atlas of Coastal Ecosystems in the Western Gulf of California

Tracking Limestone Deposits on the Margin of a Young Sea

Edited by Markes E. Johnson and Jorge Ledesma-Vásquez

University of Arizona Press, 2009

The Gulf of California is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it is also important to earth and marine scientists who work far beyond the area. In text and an accompanying CD-ROM with stunning satellite images, this atlas captures the dynamics of natural cycles in the fertility of the Gulf of California that have been in near-continuous operation for more than five million years. The book is designed to answer key questions that link the health of coastal ecosystems with the region’s evolutionary history: What was the richness of “fossil” ecosystems in the Gulf of California? How has it changed over time? Which ecosystems are most amenable to conservation?

With an emphasis on the intricate workings of the Gulf, a team of scientists led by Markes E. Johnson and Jorge Ledesma-Vázquez explores how marine invertebrates such as corals and bivalves, as well as certain algae, contribute to the operation of a vast “organic engine” that acts as a significant carbon trap. The Atlas reveals that the role of these organisms in the ecology of the Gulf was greatly underestimated in the past. The organisms that live in these environments (or provide the sediments for beaches and dunes) are mass producers of calcium carbonate. Until now, no book has considered the centrality of calcium carbonate production as it functions today across multiple ecosystems and how it has evolved over time.

An important work of scholarship that also evokes the region’s natural splendor, the Atlas will be of interest to a wide range of scientists, including geologists, paleontologists, marine biologists, ecologists, and conservation biologists.

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The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans

Ecosystems, Threatened Resources, Marine Conservation

Don Hinrichsen

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Oceans drive the world’s climate, nurture marine ecosystems full of aquatic life, and provide shipping lanes that have defined the global economy for centuries. And few realize that half of the world’s population lives in a coastal region within easy reach of one. Yet human activities such as commercial fishing, coastal real estate development, and industrial pollution have taken their toll on the seas. The first book of its kind, The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans documents the fraught relationship between humans and the earth’s largest bodies of water—and outlines the conservation steps needed to protect the marine environment for generations to come.

The Atlas offers a fascinating and often sobering account of how urbanization, climate change, offshore oil drilling, shipping routes, global tourism, and maritime conflict have had a profound impact on the world’s oceans and coasts. Combining text and images in visually engaging, thematically organized map spreads, this volume addresses the ecological, environmental, and economic importance of marine phenomena such as coral reefs, eroding shorelines, hurricanes, and fish populations—and how development threatens to destroy the ultimate source of all life on the “blue planet.” Lavishly illustrated with global and regional maps, from the Arabian Gulf to the Great Barrier Reef, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and all the other major global waterways, The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans will be the definitive companion to any study of its subject for years to come.

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Beaches, Bays, and Barrens

A Natural History of the Jersey Shore

Eric G. Bolen

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Jersey Shore attracts millions of visitors each year, drawn to its sandy beaches. Yet New Jersey’s coastline contains a richer array of biodiverse habitats than most tourists realize, from seagrass meadows to salt marshes to cranberry bogs.

Beaches, Bays, and Barrens introduces readers to the natural wonders of the Jersey Shore, revealing its unique ecology and fascinating history. The journey begins with the contributions and discoveries of early naturalists who visited the region and an overview of endangered species and natural history, followed by chapters that explore different facets of the shore’s environments. These start with sandy beaches and dunes and culminate in the engaging Pine Barrens, the vital watershed for much of the state’s varied coastline. Along the way, readers will also learn about whaling, decoy carvers, an extinct duck, and the cultivation of wild blueberries.
Including over seventy color photographs, the book also features twenty-three infoboxes that go deep into areas of ecological or historical interest, such as the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge or the Jaws-like shark attacks of 1916. From Cape May to Sandy Hook, biologist Eric G. Bolen takes you on a guided tour of the Jersey Shore’s rich ecological heritage.

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Between the Sea and the Lagoon

An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times

Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

Ohio University Press, 2002

This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition. As a fishing community the Anlo have a strong attachment to their land. In the twentieth century coastal erosion has brought about a collapse of the balance between nature and culture. The Anlo have sought spiritual explanations but at the same time have responded politically by developing broader ties with Ewe-speaking peoples along the coast.

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Black Tides

By Miles O. Hayes

University of Texas Press, 2000

Black tides of spilled oil pollute the world's coasts with depressing regularity, giving scientists ample opportunity to observe their environmental impacts and learn how to clean up and restore the affected shorelines. Miles O. Hayes has been a leader in this work for over twenty years. In this highly readable autobiography, he describes his evolution as a scientist, his work in coastal oil spill contingency planning and clean up, and his personal philosophy of one's relationship with nature.

A skilled raconteur, Hayes tells engrossing stories of responding to most of the recent, headline-grabbing oil spills, including the Gulf War spills, the Exxon Valdez, the Amoco Cadiz spill in France, and the Ixtoc I blowout in Mexico. Interspersed among them are personal events and adventures, such as his survival of a plane crash while mapping a remote part of Alaska. From this life story emerges a compelling statement of the ongoing conflict between environmental preservation and the exploitation of natural resources to sustain our modern society.

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Challenging Coasts

Transdisciplinary Excursions into Integrated Coastal Zone Development

Edited by Leontine E. Visser

Amsterdam University Press, 2004

Coastal zones are places where environments, cultures, and economies all collide and interact, and Challenging Coasts examines the important issues involved in managing coastal zones. Contributors to the volume argue that coastal zones pose a developmental rather than a management challenge and require a multidisciplinary response from the social and natural sciences. Thus papers collected here examine international case studies and address a variety of issues such as biodiversity protection and the legal concerns of habitat protection. Challenging Coasts is an important and invaluable resource for marine scientists and those interested in coastal zone development.

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Clearing the Coastline

The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformations of Cape Cod

Matthew McKenzie

University Press of New England, 2011

In just over a century Cape Cod was transformed from barren agricultural wasteland to bountiful fishery to pastoral postcard wilderness suitable for the tourist trade. This complex social, ecological, and scientific transformation fundamentally altered how Cape Codders used and managed their local marine resources, and determined how they eventually lost them. The Cape Cod story takes the usual land-use progression—from pristine wilderness to exploitation of resources to barren wasteland—and turns it on its head. Clearing the Coastline shows how fishermen abandoned colonial traditions of small-scale fisheries management, and how ecological, cultural, and scientific changes, as well as commercial pressures, eroded established, local conservation regimes. Without these protections, small fish and small fishermen alike were cleared from Cape Cod’s coastal margins to make room for new people, whose reinvention of the Cape as a pastoral “wilderness” allowed them to overlook the social and ecological dislocation that came before.

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Coastal Ecosystems and Economic Strategies at Cerro Azul, Peru

The Study of a Late Intermediate Kingdom

Edited by Joyce Marcus

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Cerro Azul, a pre-Inca fishing community in the Kingdom of Huarco, Peru, stood at the interface between a rich marine ecosystem and an irrigated coastal plain. Under the direction of its noble families, Cerro Azul dried millions of fish for shipment to inland communities, from which it received agricultural products and dried llama meat.

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Discovering the Geology of Baja California

Six Hikes on the Southern Gulf Coast

Markes E. Johnson

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Baja California: wild, desolate, and a treasure-house of geological wonders. Along its ancient shorelines, careful observers can learn much about how the Gulf of California came into existence and what the future of the Baja California peninsula might be.

For those who wish to unlock the mysteries of Baja California, geologist Markes Johnson offers the key. He has taken a body of technical research on the geology and paleontology of the region and made it accessible in plain language for anyone who visits the peninsula, whether for study or recreation. His book teaches general concepts in coastal geomorphology and tectonics, as well as the basic geological and natural history of the Gulf of California, in a conversive, intellectually stimulating fashion.

Johnson's guide takes the form of six day-long hikes in the area of Punta Chivato on the east coast of the southern Baja California peninsula. Punta Chivato is presented as a microcosm of the entire region; it can enable visitors to better understand major themes in the natural history of the Gulf of California and its geological past. All of the hikes begin at the southeast corner of the Punta Chivato promontory and loop out in different directions. Each circuit is designed to minimize overlap with adjacent hikes and to maximize the visitor's exposure to instructive variations in the landscape. Each chapter features additional reflections on a geologist of another time and place who has advanced the field in a way that elucidates the material covered in that chapter. Through these asides, readers will learn the basic lessons about how geologists read the secrets hidden in landscapes.

Discovering the Geology of Baja California invites visitors to these shores to explore not only rocks and fossils but also the continuum of past ecosystems with the ecology of the present. It offers both an unparalleled guide to a remote area and a new understanding of life caught in an endless cycle of change.

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Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management

Concepts And Practices

Biliana Cicin-Sain and Robert W. Knecht; Foreword by Gunnar Kullenberg

Island Press, 1998

Biliana Cicin-Sain and Robert W. Knecht are co-directors of the Center for the Study of Marine Policy at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware and co-authors of The Future of U.S. Ocean Policy (Island Press, 1998).

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The Unequal Ocean

Living with Environmental Change along the Peruvian Coast

Maximilian Viatori

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Based on a decade of ethnographic and archival research in Peru, this volume reveals how prevailing representations of the ocean obscure racialized disparities and the ways that different people experience the impacts of the climate crisis.

Tackling important subjects of global concern, the author presents a complex image of Peru’s global seascapes as historical spaces comprising precarious worlds that expose people, nonhuman species, and places to unequal levels of harm. He traces how powerful actors in Peru represent the ocean in ways that erase the systemic inequalities, histories of uneven development, and extractive violence that have shaped ocean life. These erasures underscore the need for alternative representations of the ocean that highlight the engagements and commitments that make oceanic ecologies possible, as well as the material relationships and unequal positions of different people and species within them.

The author analyzes a multitude of timely topics, including waves and coastal development, the circulation of ocean waste, El Niño warming events, and the extraction of jumbo squid. This book also addresses expanding scholarly interest in the world’s oceans as sites for thinking about social inequities, environmental politics, and multispecies relationships.

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Watersheds, Bays, and Bounded Seas

The Science and Management of Semi-Enclosed Marine Systems

Edited by Edward R. Urban, Jr., Bjørn Sundby, Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli, and Jerry M. Melilllo

Island Press, 2009

Some of the world’s most important bodies of water, from the Black Sea to the Bay of Bengal, are classified as “semi-enclosed marine systems” (SEMS). Separated from the open seas by a strait, island archipelago, or physical process, SEMS are particularly vulnerable to environmental damage and particularly difficult to fully understand and manage.

Watersheds, Bays, and Bounded Seas provides state-of-the-science information about these complex systems and identifies best management practices to preserve them. With contributions by natural and social scientists, the book examines both the political and biophysical forces affecting semi-enclosed marine systems.

SEMS comprise a substantial portion of the coasts—areas with high population density—and we rely on them for often-competing services such as navigation and transport, disposal of waste, provision of food, extraction of minerals, and leisure. The book describes how human activities could irrevocably alter these fragile ecosystems, exploring threats from runoff to climate change. It also addresses the unique challenges of managing SEMS, including cooperation between multiple nations.

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Wild Sea

Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias

Serge Dedina

University of Arizona Press, 2011

Many people have lamented the pollution and outright loss of beaches along the coasts of California and Mexico, but very few people have fought on behalf of beaches as hard—or as successfully—as Serge Dedina. Whether taking on an international conglomerate or tackling a state transportation agency, Dedina is truly an eco-warrior. In this sparkling collection of articles, many written for popular magazines, Dedina tells the stories as only an insider could. He writes with a firm grasp of facts along with an advocate’s passion and outrage. Sprinkled with just the right mix of humor and surf lingo, Dedina’s writing is “weapons grade”—surfer speak for totally awesome.

Dedina grew up in Imperial Beach, California, just north of the Mexican border, and he feels equally at home in Mexico and the States. An expert on gray whales, he eloquently describes the fight he helped to lead against the Mitsubishi Corporation, whose plan to build a salt-processing plant in the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California would have destroyed the world’s last undeveloped gray whale lagoon. With similar fervor, Dedina describes helping to construct the unlikely coalition that succeeded in defeating a proposed toll road that would have decimated a legendary California surf spot.

In between, he writes about the first surfers in Baja, the Great Baja Land Rush of the 1990s, Tijuana’s punk music scene, the pop-culture wrestling phenomenon lucha libre, the reasons why ocean pollution must be stopped, and the way HBO took over his hometown. Anyone interested in what’s happening to our natural places or just yearning to read about someone really making a difference in the world will find this a book worth sinking their teeth into.

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