Monitoring Ecological Change

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Aug 18, 2005 - Nature
The state of ecosystems, biological communities and species are continuously changing as a result of both natural processes and the activities of humans. In order to detect and understand these changes, effective ecological monitoring programmes are required. This book offers an introduction to the topic and provides both a rationale for monitoring and a practical guide to the techniques available. Written in a nontechnical style, the book covers the relevance and growth of ecological monitoring, the organizations and programmes involved, the science of ecological monitoring and an assessment of methods in practice, including many examples from monitoring programmes around the world. Building on the success of the first edition, this edition has been fully revised and updated with two additional chapters covering the relevance of monitoring to the reporting of the state of the environment, and the growth of community based ecological monitoring.
 

Contents

Ecological monitoring
1
Environmental monitoring programmes and organizations
29
State of the environment reporting and ecological monitoring
76
Biological spatial scales in ecological monitoring
114
Biological indicators and indices
152
Diversity and similarity indices
191
Planning and designing ecological monitoring
220
Communitybased ecological monitoring
249
Ecological monitoring of species and biological communities
274
Ecological monitoring and environmental impact assessments
320
The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity
346
References
366
Index
388
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Ian Spellerberg is Professor of Nature Conservation at Lincoln University, New Zealand and Director of the University's Isaac Centre for Nature Conservation.

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