Robert L. France

A wetland center in London, parks in downtown San Francisco, a wildlife sanctuary in Arcata, and a wetlands park on the outskirts of Las Vegas—what do these urban and suburban locations have in common? They are leading examples of a new restoration design approach that is squarely placed at the interface of nature and culture. This multidisciplinary paradigm bridges the gap between an ecological approach preoccupied with returning damaged landscapes to an imagined original state and a landscape design approach concerned with creating a place for people to reinhabit. Environmental Restoration and Design for Recreation and Ecotourism is the first book to provide a detailed examination of the entire process of restoring damaged or abandoned landscapes to benefit both nature and people, specifically for the purposes of recreation and ecotourism. With a focus on history, planning, methodology, design, and construction, it explores five case studies of successful regenerative landscape design projects and gives readers an inside look at the evolution of design projects. Two of the cases offer a particularly comprehensive review of award-winning projects: the reparation of the degraded Las Vegas Wash into Clark County Wetlands Park and the transformation of the abandoned Barn Elms Reservoirs into the London Wetland Centre. Supported by extensive photographs, tables, maps, sketches, and schematics, these case studies trace how ideas are first conceived and then adopted, transformed, or even abandoned along the way. Each case study also includes a questions-and-answers discussion with designers and managers. Emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary cooperation, the book presents lessons learned from some of the most innovative projects in regenerative landscape design.

Environmental Restoration and Design for Recreation and Ecotourism

Facilitating Watershed Management brings together myriad distinctive voices to create an experiential learning process drawn from the most important innovators in the field. Presenting an introduction to the diversity of tools (sociological, pedagogical, phenomenological) needed to implement watershed management in the real world trenches, the book helps move students and practitioners from being knowledgeable stewards of watersheds to becoming wise managers of watersheds.

Fostering Awareness and Stewardship

Facilitating Watershed Management

Design options and planning procedures must be critically examined to ensure that landscapes are created with sensitivity to water quality and management issues as well as overall ecological integrity. Handbook of Water Sensitive Planning and Design presents the history of water as a design and planning element in landscape architecture and describes new interpretations of water management. This text pushes the frontiers of standard water management in new directions, challenging readers into abandoning the comfortable safety of conducting business-as-usual within narrow disciplinary confines, and instead directing views outward to the exciting and incompletely mapped regions of true interdisciplinary water sensitive planning and design. With contributions from renowned practitioners, Part I provides seventeen chapters addressing the subject of site-specific water sensitive design and Part II presents another seventeen chapters focusing on issues relating to the water sensitive planning of riparian buffers and watersheds. In addition, Professor France has provided a "Response" to accompany each chapter, which succinctly underscores the salient features in more detail and emphasizes cross-linking to other chapters in the book. The "Overview" provides a brief road-map to navigate through the section. Finally, the discussion summaries at the end of each section elaborate on past problems, current challenges, and future directions. Handbook of Water Sensitive Planning and Design puts forward the very best of modern water sensitive planning and design and should be required reading for everyone involved in this dynamic and crucial field.

Handbook of Water Sensitive Planning and Design

The Definitive Study and Solution to the Centuries-old Mystery of the World's Most Sighted Sea Serpent There is a long history of conflating sightings of unidentified marine objects (UMOs) as purported sea serpents. Most sightings are either of an extremely brief duration or made by a single observer, and thus often easy to dismiss. This is not the case, however, with respect to the so-called Gloucester Sea Serpent which frequented the Massachusetts and New York coasts during the early nineteenth century. Witnessed by hundreds of people for extended periods repeatedly over many days, the Gloucester UMO is the most sighted 'sea serpent' in history. As well, due to being the object of study at the time and shortly thereafter by naturalists, the mysterious creature remains the most thoroughly investigated of all putative sea serpents. For these reasons, it has achieved an exalted status among cryptozoologists who maintain it represents the best evidence for the existence of sea serpents. For the first time, an eminently qualified aquatic biologist and ethnozoologist presents the definitive history of the phenomena and carefully examines the evidence. It is concluded that the most parsimonious explanation behind the Gloucester Sea Serpent is as early evidence for what is today recognized as being one of the most serious threats to marine biodiversity: entanglement in fishing gear and other maritime debris. Therefore, although widely considered to be restricted to the advent and widespread use of non-degradable plastic in the middle of the twentieth century, this new interpretation of the Gloucester UMO suggests that entanglement has a much longer environmental history than is commonly believed. Robert L. France is a world-renowned scientist at Dalhousie University and the author or editor of twenty books and two hundred papers on a wide range of environmental subjects. He has undertaken conservation biology research from the High Arctic to the tropics, on organisms from bacteria to whales, which has been cited many thousands of times in the literature. Dr. France is a leading authority on many aspects of aquatic zoology, including marine ecology and ethnozoology, and may be the most qualified person to have recently undertaken research and published peer-reviewed articles on the beguiling and befuddling topic of aquatic mystery animals, known as 'cryptids'.

Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent

DISENTANGLED

Daniel Sperling

Anthony P. Clevenger

Richard T.T. Forman

John A. Bissonette

Carol D. Cutshall

Virginia H. Dale

Lenore Fahrig

Charles R. Goldman

Kevin Heanue

Julia Jones

Frederick Swanson

Thomas Turrentine

Thomas C. Winter

Road Ecology links ecological theories and concepts with transportation planning, engineering, and travel behavior. With more than 100 illustrations and examples from around the world, it is an indispensable and pioneering work for anyone involved with transportation.

Science and Solutions

Road Ecology

Robert L. France

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