Chemistry Lab Report: Getting Started

Of the 7,000 estimated non-native species present in North America, approximately 1,000 are invasive. Clearly, invasive species are in the minority, but their small numbers don't keep them from causing billions of dollars in economic and ecological harm each year. Policymakers and ecologists continue to try to figure out which species might be harmful, which invasive species are doing the most damage, and which of these might respond best to eradication efforts. Invasive species reports and case studies are prevalent in political, environmental, and scientific news cycles, and a significant portion of the public is concerned about the issue.In Invasive Species: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Simberloff will first cover basic topics such as how non-native species are introduced, which areas have incurred the most biological invasions, and how the rates of biological invasions have shifted in recent years. He then moves on to the direct and indirect impacts of the impacts of invasive species on various ecosystems, such as habitat and resource competition, how invasive species transmit pathogens, and how introduced plants and animals can modify a habitat to favor other non-native species. Simberloff's final chapters will discuss the evolution of invasive species, the policies we currently have in place to manage them, and future prospects for controlling their spread. The book will also contain a section dedicated to the more controversial topics surrounding invasive species: invasive natives, useful non-native species, animal rights versus species rights, and non-native species' impacts on the biodiversity of an ecosystem.What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

Over the past several decades, the field of invasion biology has rapidly expanded as global trade and the spread of human populations have increasingly carried animal and plant species across natural barriers that have kept them ecologically separated for millions of years. Because some of these nonnative species thrive in their new homes and harm environments, economies, and human health, the prevention and management of invasive species has become a major policy goal from local to international levels. Yet even though ecological research has led to public conversation and policy recommendations, those recommendations have frequently been ignored, and the efforts to counter invasive species have been largely unsuccessful. Recognizing the need to engage experts across the life, social, and legal sciences as well as the humanities, the editors of this volume have drawn together a wide variety of ecologists, historians, economists, legal scholars, policy makers, and communications scholars, to facilitate a dialogue among these disciplines and understand fully the invasive species phenomenon. Aided by case studies of well-known invasives such as the cane toad of Australia and the emerald ash borer, Asian carp, and sea lampreys that threaten US ecosystems, Invasive Species in a Globalized World offers strategies for developing and implementing anti-invasive policies designed to stop their introduction and spread, and to limit their effects.

The human love of novelty and desire to make one place look like another, coupled with massive increases in global trade and transport, are creating a growing economic and ecological threat. The same forces that are rapidly "McDonaldizing" the world's diverse cultures are also driving us toward an era of monotonous, weedy, and uniformly impoverished landscapes. Unique plant and animal communities are slowly succumbing to the world's "rats and rubbervines" -- animals like zebra mussels and feral pigs, and plants like kudzu and water hyacinth -- that, once moved into new territory, can disrupt human enterprise and well-being as well as native habitats and biodiversity. From songbird-eating snakes in Guam to cheatgrass in the Great Plains, "invasives" are wreaking havoc around the world. In A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines, widely published science writer Yvonne Baskin draws on extensive research to provide an engaging and authoritative overview of the problem of harmful invasive alien species. She takes the reader on a worldwide tour of grasslands, gardens, waterways, and forests, describing the troubles caused by exotic organisms that run amok in new settings and examining how commerce and travel on an increasingly connected planet are exacerbating this oldest of human-created problems. She offers examples of potential solutions and profiles dedicated individuals worldwide who are working tirelessly to protect the places and creatures they love. While our attention is quick to focus on purposeful attempts to disrupt our lives and economies by releasing harmful biological agents, we often ignore equally serious but much more insidious threats, those that we inadvertently cause by our own seemingly harmless actions. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines takes a compelling look at this underappreciated problem and sets forth positive suggestions for what we as consumers, gardeners, travelers, nurserymen, fishermen, pet owners, business people -- indeed all of us who by our very local choices drive global commerce -- can do to help. "