Restoring Nature
Restoring Nature

Author: Lary M. Dilsaver

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1496234022

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Off the coast of California, running from Santa Barbara to La Jolla, lies an archipelago of eight islands known as the California Channel Islands. The northern five were designated as Channel Islands National Park in 1980 to protect and restore the rich habitat of the islands and surrounding waters. In the years since, that mission intensified as scientists discovered the extent of damage to the delicate habitats of these small fragments of land and to the surprisingly threatened sea around them. In Restoring Nature Lary M. Dilsaver and Timothy J. Babalis examine how the National Park Service has attempted to reestablish native wildlife and vegetation to the five islands through restorative ecology and public land management. The Channel Islands staff were innovators of the inventory and monitoring program whereby the resource problems were exposed. This program became a blueprint for management throughout the U.S. park system. Dilsaver and Babalis present an innovative regional and environmental history of a little-known corner of the Pacific West, as well as a larger national narrative about how the Park Service developed its approach to restoration ecology, which became a template for broader Park Service policies that shaped the next generation of environmental conservation.

Place Matters
Place Matters

Author: Dawn J. Wright

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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Although the ocean provides living space for about 97 percent of life on Earth, less than 5 percent of the ocean below the surface has actually been seen, let alone explored. Now, using the geogrpahic information system (GIS), marine scientists are gaining new insights into a once-mysterious world. A technologically sophisticated database, information-management, and display system, GIS holds tremendous potential for mapping, interpreting, and managing ocean environments--"from the seafloor to the seafloor to the shoreline. "Place Matters explores how marine GIS is contributing to the understanding, management, and conservation of the shores and ocean of the Pacific Northwest, which is becoming a hotbed of marine GIS development and applications as scientists expand the use of this cutting-edge technology to a variety of ocean science, policy, and management issues. Using these geospatial databases and tools, scientists, resource managers, and conservationists--"often in collaboration--"are making advances in the way that data are collected, documented, used, shared, and saved. The contributors to "Place Matters show how together they are using GIS to hadle and exploit present and future data streams from observatories, experiments, numerical models, simulations, and other sources, yielding fresh insights into oceanographic, ecological, and socioeconomic conditions of the marine environment. The book begins with a conceptual framework, laying out selected methods and models for conservation-based marine GIS. Chapters in the second section describe working examples of marine GIS tools and large-scale implementations. The final section focuses onthe use of GIS by environmntal advocacy andlocal citizens' organizations. A companion Web site includes GIS maps and databases, as well as extensive Web-based resources. with its unique focus on the use of GIS to solve marine conservation problems, "Place Matters offers an important new resources for all who study and work to protect the world's oceans.