This popular undergraduate textbook offers students a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biological oceanography. As well as a clear and accessible text, learning is enhanced with numerous illustrations including a colour section, thorough chapter summaries, and questions with answers and comments at the back of the book. The comprehensive coverage of this book encompasses the properties of seawater which affect life in the ocean, classification of marine environments and organisms, phytoplankton and zooplankton, marine food webs, larger marine animals (marine mammals, seabirds and fish), life on the seafloor, and the way in which humans affect marine ecosystems. The second edition has been thoroughly updated, including much data available for the first time in a book at this level. There is also a new chapter on human impacts - from harvesting vast amounts of fish, pollution, and deliberately or accidentally transferring marine organisms to new environments. This book complements the Open University Oceanography Series, also published by Butterworth-Heinemann, and is a set text for the Open University third level course, S330. - A leading undergraduate text - New chapter on human impacts - a highly topical subject - Expanded colour plate section

First published in 1989, Eric L. Mills’s comprehensive history of biological oceanography has been praised as ‘superb’ (BioScience) and ‘proof that history need not be dull’ (The Northern Mariner). This first history of the field, which chronicles the scientific work and creativity of its chief contributors, tells a riveting story that is far from narrowly scientific and thoroughly accessible to general readers. Mills shows how the work and ideas of the main actors are inseparable from some seemingly unrelated factors, including Prussian imperialism, agricultural chemistry, microbiology, and the problems of German universities. Mills also illustrates the significant roles played in the field’s development by the failures of commercial fisheries, the development of analytical chemistry, the establishment of international scientific organizations, and sheer scientific curiosity. This new edition of Biological Oceanography includes a fresh introduction by the author, as well as an original foreword by noted oceanographer John Cullen. It makes an excellent companion to Mills’s recent history of mathematical and physical oceanography, the multi-award-winning and widely acclaimed The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet.

Provides a quantitative, accessible approach to the fundamental physics and biology of the coastal ocean, for undergraduate and graduate students.

This revised edition of a popular textbook is written for students, physical oceanographers, engineers, hydrologists, fisheries experts and a number of other professionals who require quantitative expressions of biological oceanographic phenomena. It is designed to lead the reader, step by step, through a progression from the distribution of marine organisms, to discussions on trophic relations, to a final chapter on some practical applications of biological oceanography to fisheries and pollution problems. The book covers subject matter in the pelagic and benthic environments, and is intended to bridge the gap between entirely descriptive oceanography texts and works on the mathematical modelling of marine ecosystems.

This is the first comprehensive science-based textbook on the biology and ecology of the Baltic Sea, one of the world’s largest brackish water bodies. The aim of this book is to provide students and other readers with knowledge about the conditions for life in brackish water, the functioning of the Baltic Sea ecosystem and its environmental problems and management. It highlights biological variation along the unique environmental gradients of the brackish Baltic Sea Area (the Baltic Sea, Belt Sea and Kattegat), especially those in salinity and climate. pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; color:#262626">The first part of the book presents the challenges for life processes and ecosystem dynamics that result from the Baltic Sea’s highly variable recent geological history and geographical isolation. The second part explains interactions between organisms and their environment, including biogeochemical cycles, patterns of biodiversity, genetic diversity and evolution, biological invasions and physiological adaptations. In the third part, the subsystems of the Baltic Sea ecosystem – the pelagic zone, the sea ice, the deep soft sea beds, the phytobenthic zone, the sandy coasts, and estuaries and coastal lagoons – are treated in detail with respect to the structure and function of communities and habitats and consequences of natural and anthropogenic constraints, such as climate change, discharges of nutrients and hazardous substances. Finally, the fourth part of the book discusses monitoring and ecosystem-based management to deal with contemporary and emerging threats to the ecosystem’s health.

Considers H.R. 4276, the Oceanographic Act of 1961, to establish the National Oceanographic Council, the National Oceanographic Data Center, and the National Instrumentation Test and Calibration Center, and to authorize grants by the Smithsonian Institution to organize and conduct oceanographic research.

Oceanography is a component of Encyclopedia of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. These volumes deal with the oceans as an integrated dynamic system, characterized by a delicate, complex system of interactions among the biota, the ocean boundaries with the solid earth and the atmosphere. This set of volumes is designed to be a very authoritative reference for state-of-the-art knowledge on the various aspects such as: Physical Oceanography, Chemistry of the oceans, Biological Oceanography, Geological oceanography, Coral Reefs as a Life Supporting System, Human Uses of the Oceans, Ocean Engineering, and Modeling the Ocean System from a Sustainable Development perspective. These volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.

Historians of the postwar transformation of science have focused largely on the physical sciences, especially the relation of science to the military funding agencies. In Shaping Biology, Toby A. Appel brings attention to the National Science Foundation and federal patronage of the biological sciences. Scientists by training, NSF biologists hoped in the 1950s that the new agency would become the federal government's chief patron for basic research in biology, the only agency to fund the entire range of biology—from molecules to natural history museums—for its own sake. Appel traces how this vision emerged and developed over the next two and a half decades, from the activities of NSF's Division of Biological and Medical Sciences, founded in 1952, through the cold war expansion of the 1950s and 1960s and the constraints of the Vietnam War era, to its reorganization out of existence in 1975. This history of NSF highlights fundamental tensions in science policy that remain relevant today: the pull between basic and applied science; funding individuals versus funding departments or institutions; elitism versus distributive policies of funding; issues of red tape and accountability. In this NSF-funded study, Appel explores how the agency developed, how it worked, and what difference it made in shaping modern biology in the United States. Based on formerly untapped archival sources as well as on interviews of participants, and building upon prior historical literature, Shaping Biology covers new ground and raises significant issues for further research on postwar biology and on federal funding of science in general.