ECOLANDSCAPES
Category: Gray Merriam’s Ecology Blog
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Petrodollars, Tar and the Athabasca-Mackenzie Watershed
In a Nutshell: Extracting and refining oil from the tar sands has the potential for significant damages: environmental, social, economic and national. But the reserves in the tar sands can’t solve the global petroleum shortage that is developing. The tar sands reserve could ease a transition to the future mixed energy lifeblood that must be
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Conservation and Landscape Ecology
In a Nutshell: Most ecosystems are a mosaic of interacting patches of various habitats linked together by organisms moving among the patches. Such mosaic systems are the landscapes of landscape ecology. Just as conservation of a species does not work in isolation from its ecological system, neither can a patch of habitat be conserved in
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Conversations about Environment
In a Nutshell: Ecology is best understood as processes by which a complex of variables interact. Species distributions result from those processes but must be interpreted in terms of natural process of self-maintenance if they are to give rise to effective conservation or management. In western cultures, we have accumulated a lot of cultural, social