BiblioVault - Books about Natural History

La Selva

Ecology and Natural History of a Neotropical Rain Forest

Edited by Lucinda A. McDade, Kamaljit S. Bawa, Henry A. Hespenheide, and Gary S.

University of Chicago Press, 1994

La Selva, a nature reserve and field station in Costa Rica, is one of
the most intensively studied and best-understood tropical field sites
in the world. For over thirty years, La Selva has been a major focus
of research on rainforest ecology, flora, and fauna. This volume
provides the first comprehensive review of this research, covering La
Selva's geographical history and physical setting, its plant and
animal life, and agricultural development and land use.

Drawing together a wealth of information never before available in a
single volume, La Selva offers a substantive treatment of the
ecology of a rainforest. Part 1 summarizes research on the physical
setting and environment of the rainforest, as well as the history of
the research station. Some chapters in this part focus on climate,
geomorphology, and aquatic systems, while others look at soils,
nutrient acquisition, and cycles of energy.

Part 2 synthesizes what is known about the plant community. It begins
with chapters on vegetation types and plant diversity, and also
explores plant demography, spatial patterns of trees, and the impact
of treefall gaps on forest structure and dynamics. Other chapters
address plant physiological ecology, as well as plant reproductive
systems.

Part 3 covers the animal community, summarizing information on the six
best-known animal taxa of the region: fishes, amphibians, reptiles,
birds, mammals, and butterflies. This part includes an overview of
faunal studies at La Selva and a chapter on animal population biology,
which examines animal demography and abundance, and interactions
between predators and prey. Part 4 addresses interactions between
plants and animals and the effects of these interactions on species
diversity.

Part 5 considers the impact of land use and agricultural development
on La Selva and other areas of Costa Rica. One chapter examines land
colonization and conservation in Sarapiqui, another covers subsistence
and commercial agricultural development in the Atlantic lowlands
region, and a third looks at the forest industry in northeastern Costa
Rica. This part also assesses the role and research priorities of La
Selva.

La Selva provides an introduction to tropical ecology for
students and researchers at La Selva, a major source of comparative
information for biologists working in other tropical areas, and a
valuable resource for conservationists.

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Land of Extremes

A Natural History of the Arctic North Slope of Alaska

Alex Huryn and John Hobbie

University of Alaska Press, 2012

This book is a comprehensive guide to the natural history of the North Slope, the only arctic tundra in the United States. The first section provides detailed information on climate, geology, landforms, and ecology. The second provides a guide to the identification and natural history of the common animals and plants and a primer on the human prehistory of the region from the Pleistocene through the mid-twentieth century. The appendix provides the framework for a tour of the natural history features along the Dalton Highway, a road connecting the crest of the Brooks Range with Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean, and includes mile markers where travelers may safely pull off to view geologic formations, plants, birds, mammals, and fish. Featuring hundreds of illustrations that support the clear, authoritative text, Land of Extremes reveals the arctic tundra as an ecosystem teeming with life.

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Last Water on the Devil's Highway

A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas

Bill Broyles, Gayle Harrison Hartmann, Thomas E. Sheridan, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Mary Charlotte Thurtle

University of Arizona Press, 2013

The Devil’s Highway—El Camino del Diablo—crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows, and searing summer heat. The most famous waterhole along the way is Tinajas Altas, or High Tanks, a series of natural rock basins that are among the few reliable sources of water in this notoriously parched region.

Now an expert cast of authors describes, narrates, and explains the human and natural history of this special place in a thorough and readable account. Addressing the latest archaeological and historical findings, they reveal why Tinajas Altas was so important and how it related to other waterholes in the arid borderlands. Readers can feel like pioneers, following in the footsteps of early Native Americans, Spanish priests and soldiers, gold seekers and borderland explorers, tourists, and scholars.

Combining authoritative writing with a rich array of more than 180 illustrations and maps as well as detailed appendixes providing up-to-date information on the wildlife and plants that live in the area, Last Water on the Devil’s Highway allows readers to uncover the secrets of this fascinating place, revealing why it still attracts intrepid tourists and campers today.

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Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Essays on Natural History

Stephen Jay Gould

Harvard University Press, 2011

With his customary brilliance, Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature’s and humanity’s diversity and order.

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Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar

leur histoire, description et biota, tome 1: Introduction

Edited by Steven M. Goodman, Marie Jeanne Raherilalao, and Sébastien Wohlhauser

Association Vahatra, 2020

In 1989, a book written by Martin E. Nicoll and Olivier Langrand was published on the protected areas of Madagascar, which heralded in a new era of conservation for this island nation. In the subsequent three decades, there was an important increase in inventories and studies on Madagascar’s terrestrial biota. This work led to significant changes in the systematics of Malagasy plants and animals, a large percentage unique to the island, and a notable augmentation in knowledge on Malagasy biodiversity. In addition, the considerable expansion of the protected area network, reinforcement of legal tools, and the development of new management modes and tools have contributed to a modernization of the protected area network.

The purpose of the French-language Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar is to present a large-scale update of information available from 98 terrestrial protected areas, various analyses to understand general trends in the conservation of these sites, and a synthesis to assess the needs for future scientific programs. Beautifully illustrated throughout with color maps, graphs, and photos, these three volumes will be an important reference for students, researchers, protected area managers, conservationists, and visiting ecotourists. Volume one provides a comprehensive introduction.

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Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar

leur histoire, description et biota, tome 2: Le Nord et l'Est de Madagascar

Edited by Steven M. Goodman, Marie Jeanne Raherilalao, and Sébastien Wohlhauser

Association Vahatra, 2020

In 1989, a book written by Martin E. Nicoll and Olivier Langrand was published on the protected areas of Madagascar, which heralded in a new era of conservation for this island nation. In the subsequent three decades, there was an important increase in inventories and studies on Madagascar’s terrestrial biota. This work led to significant changes in the systematics of Malagasy plants and animals, a large percentage unique to the island, and a notable augmentation in knowledge on Malagasy biodiversity. In addition, the considerable expansion of the protected area network, reinforcement of legal tools, and the development of new management modes and tools have contributed to a modernization of the protected area network.

The purpose of the French-language Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar is to present a large-scale update of information available from 98 terrestrial protected areas, various analyses to understand general trends in the conservation of these sites, and a synthesis to assess the needs for future scientific programs. Beautifully illustrated throughout with color maps, graphs, and photos, these three volumes will be an important reference for students, researchers, protected area managers, conservationists, and visiting ecotourists. Volume two covers northern and eastern Madagascar.

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Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar

leur histoire, description et biota, tome 3: L'Ouest et le Sud de Madagascar - Synthèse

Edited by Steven M. Goodman, Marie Jeanne Raherilalao, and Sébastien Wohlhauser

Association Vahatra, 2020

In 1989, a book written by Martin E. Nicoll and Olivier Langrand was published on the protected areas of Madagascar, which heralded in a new era of conservation for this island nation. In the subsequent three decades, there was an important increase in inventories and studies on Madagascar’s terrestrial biota. This work led to significant changes in the systematics of Malagasy plants and animals, a large percentage unique to the island, and a notable augmentation in knowledge on Malagasy biodiversity. In addition, the considerable expansion of the protected area network, reinforcement of legal tools, and the development of new management modes and tools have contributed to a modernization of the protected area network.

The purpose of the French-language Les aires protégées terrestres de Madagascar is to present a large-scale update of information available from 98 terrestrial protected areas, various analyses to understand general trends in the conservation of these sites, and a synthesis to assess the needs for future scientific programs. Beautifully illustrated throughout with color maps, graphs, and photos, these three volumes will be an important reference for students, researchers, protected area managers, conservationists, and visiting ecotourists. Volume three covers western and southwestern Madagascar, as well as provides a valuable synthesis.

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Letters from Alabama

Chiefly Relating to Natural History

Philip Henry Gosse, Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton

University of Alabama Press, 2013

This new and improved edition of Letters from Alabama offers a valuable window into pioneer Alabama and the landscape and life-forms encountered by early settlers of the state.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a British naturalist, left home at age seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse’s perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this “hilly region of the State of Alabama.” Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse’s scientific publications and fine illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the 1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one of the plates from Gosse’s Entomologia Alabamensis.

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Life and Times of a Big River

An Uncommon Natural History of Alaska's Upper Yukon

Peter J. Marchand

University of Alaska Press, 2015

When Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, eighty million acres were flagged as possible national park land. Field expeditions were tasked with recording what was contained in these vast acres. Under this decree, five men were sent into the sprawling, roadless interior of Alaska, unsure of what they’d encounter and ultimately responsible for the fate of four thousand pristine acres.
Life and Times of a Big River follows Peter J. Marchand and his team of biologists as they set out to explore the land that would ultimately become the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Their encounters with strange plants, rare insects, and little-known mammals bring to life a land once thought to be static and monotonous. And their struggles to navigate and adapt to an unforgiving environment capture the rigorous demands of remote field work. Weaving in and out of Marchand's narrative is an account of the natural and cultural history of the area as it relates to the expedition and the region’s Native peoples. Life and Times of a Big River chorincles this riveting, one-of-a-kind journey of uncertainty and discovery from a disparate (and at one point desperate) group of biologists.

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Life at the Edge of Sight

A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World

Scott Chimileski and Roberto KolterForeword by Moselio Schaechter

Harvard University Press, 2017

Microbes create medicines, filter waste water, and clean pollution. They give cheese funky flavors, wines complex aromas, and bread a nutty crumb. Life at the Edge of Sight is a stunning visual exploration of the inhabitants of an invisible world, from the pioneering findings of a seventeenth-century visionary to magnificent close-ups of the inner workings and cooperative communities of Earth’s most prolific organisms.

Using cutting-edge imaging technologies, Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter lead readers through breakthroughs and unresolved questions scientists hope microbes will answer soon. They explain how microbial studies have clarified the origins of life on Earth, guided thinking about possible life on other planets, unlocked evolutionary mechanisms, and helped explain the functioning of complex ecosystems. Microbes have been harnessed to increase crop yields and promote human health.

But equally impressive, Life at the Edge of Sight opens a beautiful new frontier for readers to explore through words and images. We learn that there is more microbial biodiversity on a single frond of duckweed floating in a Delft canal than the diversity of plants and animals that biologists find in tropical rainforests. Colonies with millions of microbes can produce an array of pigments that put an artist’s palette to shame. The microbial world is ancient and ever-changing, buried in fossils and driven by cellular reactions operating in quadrillionths of a second. All other organisms have evolved within this universe of microbes, yielding intricate beneficial symbioses. With two experts as guides, the invisible microbial world awaits in plain sight.

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Life on Display

Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century

Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education.

Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades.

A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.

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Life Sculpted

Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi That Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth

Anthony J. Martin

University of Chicago Press, 2023

"There is much to love between this book’s covers. . . . There are many eureka moments in Life Sculpted—and some truly beautiful ones."—Eugenia Bone, Wall Street Journal

Meet the menagerie of lifeforms that dig, crunch, bore, and otherwise reshape our planet.

Did you know elephants dig ballroom-sized caves alongside volcanoes? Or that parrotfish chew coral reefs and poop sandy beaches? Or that our planet once hosted a five-ton dinosaur-crunching alligator cousin? In fact, almost since its fascinating start, life was boring. Billions of years ago bacteria, algae, and fungi began breaking down rocks in oceans, a role they still perform today. About a half-billion years ago, animal ancestors began drilling, scraping, gnawing, or breaking rocky seascapes. In turn, their descendants crunched through the materials of life itself—shells, wood, and bones. Today, such “bioeroders” continue to shape our planet—from the bacteria that devour our teeth to the mighty moon snail, always hunting for food, as evidenced by tiny snail-made boreholes in clams and other moon snails.

There is no better guide to these lifeforms than Anthony J. Martin, a popular science author, paleontologist, and co-discoverer of the first known burrowing dinosaur. Following the crumbs of lichens, sponges, worms, clams, snails, octopi, barnacles, sea urchins, termites, beetles, fishes, dinosaurs, crocodilians, birds, elephants, and (of course) humans, Life Sculpted reveals how bioerosion expanded with the tree of life, becoming an essential part of how ecosystems function while reshaping the face of our planet. With vast knowledge and no small amount of whimsy, Martin uses paleontology, biology, and geology to reveal the awesome power of life’s chewing force. He provokes us to think deeply about the past and present of bioerosion, while also considering how knowledge of this history might aid us in mitigating and adapting to climate change in the future. Yes, Martin concedes, sometimes life can be hard—but life also makes everything less hard every day.

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Lightning

Nature and Culture

Derek M. Elsom

Reaktion Books, 2015

Few phenomena inspire more awe than lightning. Streaking across the sky, it daunts us with its power and amazes us with its beauty. In Lightning, Derek M. Elsom explores this natural phenomenon and traces the long history of our study of it. From early civilizations’ assumptions that it was the work of gods, through eighteenth-century scientific analyses (and, yes, Ben Franklin’s kite), Elsom tells about our efforts to understand and explain lightning. He explores the many surprising folklore beliefs about lightning protection and contrasts these with today's scientific approaches. Alongside scientific explorations, he also tracks the path of lightning through our culture, from myths and legends to art and design. In addition, Elsom offers handy tips for avoiding getting struck by lightning.

Beautifully illustrated with stunning photographs and artistic renderings, this striking book will appeal equally to weather buffs and folklorists, scientists and artists.

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The Lives of Dillon Ripley

Natural Scientist, Wartime Spy, and Pioneering Leader of the Smithsonian Institution

Roger D. Stone

University Press of New England, 2017

A Yale-educated Renaissance man, S. Dillon Ripley was a “courtly, determined, hugely ambitious, energetic, funny, and colorful ornithologist, conservationist, and cultural standard-bearer” who led the Smithsonian Institution for twenty years, during its greatest period of growth. During his watch, from 1964 to 1984, the SI added eight new museums and seven new research centers and began publication of the Smithsonian magazine. It was Ripley’s vision that transformed “the nation’s attic” from a dusty archive to a vibrant educational and cultural institution, just as he had transformed Yale’s Peabody museum before it. Prior to his career at the SI, and running parallel with it for the rest of his life, was Ripley’s work as an ornithologist, begun in New Guinea in the 1930s, continued through his PhD from Harvard in 1943, and culminating in his landmark thirty-year project documenting the bird life of India. His lifelong passion for ornithology led him to positions of leadership in worldwide nature conservation. In the midst of these endeavors he was recruited in 1944 to the Office of Strategic Services, a Yalie club at the outset that became the forerunner of the modern CIA. Posted to Ceylon, he recruited and ran agents who reported from and infiltrated Japanese-held Southeast Asia. Roger D. Stone worked with Ripley on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. He has access to the Ripley family’s archives and photos, as well as to the voluminous archives at the Smithsonian and the National Archives, and to over forty hours of transcribed interviews, conducted with Ripley at the Smithsonian.

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The Lying Stones of Marrakech

Penultimate Reflections in Natural History

Stephen Jay Gould

Harvard University Press, 2011

Gould covers topics as diverse as episodes in the birth of paleontology to lessons from Britain’s four greatest Victorian naturalists. This collection presents the richness and fascination of the various lives that have fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.

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