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Extinction A Very Short Introduction
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Download or read book Extinction written by Paul B. Wignall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extinction has occurred throughout the history of life, and nearly all the species that have ever existed have now disappeared. In this 'Very Short Introduction', Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinction events, what makes a species vulnerable, and the debates in modern science of the role of climate and humans.
Book Synopsis Modeling Extinction by : Mark E. J. Newman
Download or read book Modeling Extinction written by Mark E. J. Newman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade or so, scientists have started to examine a new approach to the patterns of evolution and extinction in the fossil record. This approach may be called "statistical paleontology," since it looks at large-scale patterns in the record and attempts to understand and model their average statistical features, rather than their detailed structure. This book, developed after a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute on extinction modeling, comments critically on the various modeling approaches.
Book Synopsis Extinction: A Very Short Introduction by : Paul B. Wignall
Download or read book Extinction: A Very Short Introduction written by Paul B. Wignall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people are familiar with the dodo and the dinosaur, but extinction has occurred throughout the history of life, with the result that nearly all the species that have ever existed are now extinct. Today, species are disappearing at an ever increasing rate, whilst past losses have occurred during several great crises. Issues such as habitat destruction, conservation, climate change, and, during major crises, volacanism and meteorite impact, can all contribute towards the demise of a group. In this Very Short Introduction, Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinctions, past and present, and the factors that can make a species vulnerable. Summarising what we know about all of the major and minor exctinction events, he examines some of the greatest debates in modern science, such as the relative role of climate and humans in the death of the Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, and the roles that global warming, ocean acidification, and deforestation are playing in present-day extinctions ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Book Synopsis Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction by : Erle C. Ellis
Download or read book Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction written by Erle C. Ellis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposal that the impact of humanity on the planet has left a distinct footprint, even on the scale of geological time, has recently gained much ground. Global climate change, shifting global cycles of the weather, widespread pollution, radioactive fallout, plastic accumulation, species invasions, the mass extinction of species - these are just some of the many indicators that we will leave a lasting record in rock, the scientific basis for recognizing new time intervals in Earth's history. The Anthropocene, as the proposed new epoch has been named, is regularly in the news. Even with such robust evidence, the proposal to formally recognize our current time as the Anthropocene remains controversial both inside and outside the scholarly world, kindling intense debates. The reason is clear. The Anthropocene represents far more than just another interval of geologic time. Instead, the Anthropocene has emerged as a powerful new narrative, a concept through which age-old questions about the meaning of nature and even the nature of humanity are being revisited and radically revised. This Very Short Introduction explains the science behind the Anthropocene and the many proposals about when to mark its beginning: the nuclear tests of the 1950s? The beginnings of agriculture? The origins of humans as a species? Erle Ellis considers the many ways that the Anthropocene's "evolving paradigm" is reshaping the sciences, stimulating the humanities, and foregrounding the politics of life on a planet transformed by humans. The Anthropocene remains a work in progress. Is this the story of an unprecedented planetary disaster? Or of newfound wisdom and redemption? Ellis offers an insightful discussion of our role in shaping the planet, and how this will influence our future on many fronts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Book Synopsis The History of Life: A Very Short Introduction by : Michael J. Benton
Download or read book The History of Life: A Very Short Introduction written by Michael J. Benton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-27 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Very Short Introduction presents a succinct and accessible guide to the key episodes in the story of life on earth - from the very origins of life four million years ago to the extraordinary diversity of species around the globe today.
Book Synopsis Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction by : Mark Maslin
Download or read book Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction written by Mark Maslin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is still, arguably, the most critical and controversial issue facing the world in the twenty-first century. Previously published as Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction, the new edition is now Climate Change: A Very Short introduction, reflecting an important change in the terminology of the last decade. In the third edition, Mark Maslin includes crucial updates from the last few years, including the results of the 2013 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the effects of ocean acidification, and the impact of changes to global population and health. Exploring all of the key topics in the debate, Maslin makes sense of the complexities climate change involves, from political and social issues to environmental and scientific. Looking at its predicated impacts, he explores all of the controversies, and also explains the various proposed solutions. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Book Synopsis Invasive Species: a Very Short Introduction by : Julie Lockwood
Download or read book Invasive Species: a Very Short Introduction written by Julie Lockwood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-22 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today there is no place on Earth that does not harbour invasive exotic species. Invasive plants and animals can be found on every continent, including Antarctica, and within all waterbodies, including all oceans. In our increasingly connected world, with speedy commercial and recreational travel and the global movement of biological matter for food, invasive species are showing up at such a fast rate that there is no way to accurately count how many currently exist or how many are likely to emerge in the coming decades. Monitoring these species and controlling their spread is essential, as we increasingly understand the negative impacts they pose: their threat to our health; the toll they take on our commercial production; and the threat they pose to native ecosystems. This Very Short Introduction provides a clear definition of an invasive species, and considers the myriad ways they are moved around the globe, and the ecological, social, and economic impacts they often impose. Exploring the way Earth's biodiversity is being affected by global change, Julie Lockwood also discusses policy and management approaches to combating the ill-effects of invasive species, and how invasive species fit within the broader context of environmental change. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Book Synopsis The Extinction Market by : Vanda Felbab Brown
Download or read book The Extinction Market written by Vanda Felbab Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The planet is currently experiencing alarming levels of species loss caused in large part by intensified poaching and wildlife trafficking driven by expanding demand, for medicines, for food, and for trophies. Affecting many more species than just the iconic elephants, rhinos, and tigers, the rate of extinction is now as much as 1000 times the historical average and the worst since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. In addition to causing irretrievable biodiversity loss, wildlife trafficking also poses serious threats to public health, potentially triggering a global pandemic. The Extinction Market explores the causes, means, and consequences of poaching and wildlife trafficking, with a view to finding ways of suppressing them. Vanda Felbab-Brown travelled to the markets of Latin America, South and South East Asia, and eastern and southern Africa, to evaluate the effectiveness of various tools, including bans on legal trade, law enforcement, and interdiction; allowing legal supply from hunting or farming; alternative livelihoods; anti- money-laundering efforts; and demand reduction strategies. This is an urgent book offering meaningful solutions to one of the world's most pressing crises.
Book Synopsis Holocene Extinctions by : Samuel T. Turvey
Download or read book Holocene Extinctions written by Samuel T. Turvey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extent to which human activity has influenced species extinctions during the recent prehistoric past remains controversial due to other factors such as climatic fluctuations and a general lack of data. However, the Holocene (the geological interval spanning the last 11,500 years from the end of the last glaciation) has witnessed massive levels of extinctions that have continued into the modern historical era, but in a context of only relatively minor climatic fluctuations. This makes a detailed consideration of these extinctions a useful system for investigating the impacts of human activity over time. Holocene Extinctions describes and analyses the range of global extinction events which have occurred during this key time period, as well as their relationship to both earlier and ongoing species losses. By integrating information from fields as diverse as zoology, ecology, palaeontology, archaeology and geography, and by incorporating data from a broad range of taxonomic groups and ecosystems, this novel text provides a fascinating insight into human impacts on global extinction rates, both past and present. This truly interdisciplinary book is suitable for both graduate students and researchers in these varied fields. It will also be of value and use to policy-makers and conservation professionals since it provides valuable guidance on how to apply lessons from the past to prevent future biodiversity loss and inform modern conservation planning.
Download or read book Extinction written by Douglas H. Erwin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out—a global catastrophe far greater than the dinosaurs' demise 185 million years later. How this happened remains a mystery. But there are many competing theories. Some blame huge volcanic eruptions that covered an area as large as the continental United States; others argue for sudden changes in ocean levels and chemistry, including burps of methane gas; and still others cite the impact of an extraterrestrial object, similar to what caused the dinosaurs' extinction. Extinction is a paleontological mystery story. Here, the world's foremost authority on the subject provides a fascinating overview of the evidence for and against a whole host of hypotheses concerning this cataclysmic event that unfolded at the end of the Permian. After setting the scene, Erwin introduces the suite of possible perpetrators and the types of evidence paleontologists seek. He then unveils the actual evidence--moving from China, where much of the best evidence is found; to a look at extinction in the oceans; to the extraordinary fossil animals of the Karoo Desert of South Africa. Erwin reviews the evidence for each of the hypotheses before presenting his own view of what happened. Although full recovery took tens of millions of years, this most massive of mass extinctions was a powerful creative force, setting the stage for the development of the world as we know it today. In a new preface, Douglas Erwin assesses developments in the field since the book's initial publication.
Book Synopsis Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction by : Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek
Download or read book Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction written by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilitarianism may well be the most influential secular ethical theory in the world today. It is also one of the most controversial. It clashes, or is widely thought to clash, with many conventional moral views, and with human rights when they are seen as inviolable. Would it, for example, be right to torture a suspected terrorist in order to prevent an attack that could kill and injure a large number of innocent people? In this Very Short Introduction Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek provide an authoritative account of the nature of utilitarianism, from its nineteenth-century origins, to its justification and its varieties. Considering how utilitarians can respond to objections that are often regarded as devastating, they explore the utilitarian answer to the question of whether torture can ever be justified. They also discuss what it is that utilitarians should seek to maximize, paying special attention to the classical utilitarian view that only pleasure or happiness is of intrinsic value. Singer and de Lazari-Radek conclude by analysing the continuing importance of utilitarianism in the world, indicating how it is a force for new thinking on contemporary moral challenges like global poverty, the treatment of animals, climate change, reducing the risk of human extinction, end-of-life decisions for terminally-ill patients, and the shift towards assessing the success of government policies in terms of their impact on happiness. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Book Synopsis Saving a Million Species by : Lee Hannah
Download or read book Saving a Million Species written by Lee Hannah and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research paper "Extinction Risk from Climate Change" published in the journal Nature in January 2004 created front-page headlines around the world. The notion that climate change could drive more than a million species to extinction captured both the popular imagination and the attention of policy-makers, and provoked an unprecedented round of scientific critique. Saving a Million Species reconsiders the central question of that paper: How many species may perish as a result of climate change and associated threats? Leaders from a range of disciplines synthesize the literature, refine the original estimates, and elaborate the conservation and policy implications. The book: examines the initial extinction risk estimates of the original paper, subsequent critiques, and the media and policy impact of this unique study presents evidence of extinctions from climate change from different time frames in the past explores extinctions documented in the contemporary record sets forth new risk estimates for future climate change considers the conservation and policy implications of the estimates. Saving a Million Species offers a clear explanation of the science behind the headline-grabbing estimates for conservationists, researchers, teachers, students, and policy-makers. It is a critical resource for helping those working to conserve biodiversity take on the rapidly advancing and evolving global stressor of climate change-the most important issue in conservation biology today, and the one for which we are least prepared.
Download or read book Extinction Rates written by J. H. Lawton and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a wide-ranging study of current and likely future species extinction rates, aimed at students and researchers in the environmental sciences. It highlights apparent differences in extinction rates among taxonomic groups and places, aiming to identify unresolved issues.
Book Synopsis Mass Extinction by : Ashraf M.T. Elewa
Download or read book Mass Extinction written by Ashraf M.T. Elewa and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-12-03 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book combines three main aspects: five major mass extinctions; contributions on some other minor extinctions; and more importantly contributions on the current mass extinction. All three aspects are introduced through interesting studies of mass extinctions in diverse organisms ranging from small invertebrates to mammals and take account of the most accepted subjects discussing mass extinctions in insects, mammals, fishes, ostracods and molluscs.
Book Synopsis The Sixth Extinction by : Elizabeth Kolbert
Download or read book The Sixth Extinction written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Book Synopsis Fossils: A Very Short Introduction by : Keith Thomson
Download or read book Fossils: A Very Short Introduction written by Keith Thomson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fossils have been vital to our understanding of the formation of the Earth and the origins of life on it. Keith Thomson presents an explanation of fossils as a phenomenon, highlighting their impact on mythology, philosophy and popular culture.
Book Synopsis Networks: A Very Short Introduction by : Guido Caldarelli
Download or read book Networks: A Very Short Introduction written by Guido Caldarelli and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ecosystems to Facebook, from the Internet to the global financial market, some of the most important and familiar natural systems and social phenomena are based on a networked structure. It is impossible to understand the spread of an epidemic, a computer virus, large-scale blackouts, or massive extinctions without taking into account the network structure that underlies all these phenomena. In this Very Short Introduction, Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro discuss the nature and variety of networks, using everyday examples from society, technology, nature, and history to explain and understand the science of network theory. They show the ubiquitous role of networks; how networks self-organize; why the rich get richer; and how networks can spontaneously collapse. They conclude by highlighting how the findings of complex network theory have very wide and important applications in genetics, ecology, communications, economics, and sociology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
