MACDONALD-KELCE LIBRARY
Monitoring Biodiversity: Combining Environmental and Social Data
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This book is an exciting reappraisal of the role and practice of biodiversity monitoring, showing how new technologies and software applications are rapidly maturing and can both complement and maintain continuity with the best practice in traditional field skills. Environmental monitoring is a key component in a large number of national programmes and constitutes an important aspect of understanding environmental change and supporting policy development. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Monitoring Biodiversity begins by discussing monitoring as an established field and examines the various budgetary and technological challenges. It examines different methodologies, the variation between countries, and the design features relevant to understanding monitoring systems created for new policy goals or different funding situations. The huge variety of methods revealed across 18 chapters, which vary from statistical designs to remote sensing, interviews, surveys, and new ways of stacking and combining data and thematic information for visualization and modelling, underlines just how mature and multifaceted the modern practice of monitoring can be. It concludes with several problem-based chapters that discuss the design and implementation of environmental monitoring in specific scenarios such as urban and aquatic areas. All chapters include key messages, study questions, and further reading. With a focus on Europe but with international relevance, Monitoring Biodiversity will be an essential resource for students at all levels of environmental monitoring, assessment, and management.
The Nature of Data: infrastructures, environments, politics
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When we look at some of the most pressing issues in environmental politics today, it is hard to avoid data technologies. Big data, artificial intelligence, and data dashboards all promise "revolutionary" advances in the speed and scale at which governments, corporations, conservationists, and even individuals can respond to environmental challenges. By bringing together scholars from geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ecology, The Nature of Data explores how the digital realm is a significant site in which environmental politics are waged. This collection as a whole makes the argument that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in critical, global environmental politics without understanding the role of data platforms, devices, standards, and institutions. In particular, The Nature of Data addresses the contested practices of making and maintaining data infrastructure, the imaginaries produced by data infrastructures, the relations between state and civil society that data infrastructure reworks, and the conditions under which technology can further socio-ecological justice instead of re-entrenching state and capitalist power. This innovative volume presents some of the first research in this new but rapidly growing subfield that addresses the role of data infrastructures in critical environmental politics.
Think, Do, and Communicate Environmental Science
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Many students find it daunting to move from studying environmental science, to designing and implementing their own research proposals. This book provides a practical introduction to help develop scientific thinking, aimed at undergraduate and new graduate students in the earth and environmental sciences. Students are guided through the steps of scientific thinking using published scientific literature and real environmental data. The book starts with advice on how to effectively read scientific papers, before outlining how to articulate testable questions and answer them using basic data analysis. The Mauna Loa CO2 dataset is used to demonstrate how to read metadata, prepare data, generate effective graphs and identify dominant cycles on various timescales. Practical, question-driven examples are explored to explain running averages, anomalies, correlations and simple linear models. The final chapter provides a framework for writing persuasive research proposals, making this an essential guide for students embarking on their first research project.
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