A Practitioner's Guide to Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation brings together knowledge and experience from conservation practitioners and experts around the world to help readers understand the global challenge of conserving biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems. More importantly, it offers specific strategies and suggestions for managers to use in establishing new conservation initiatives or improving the effectiveness of existing initiatives. The book: offers an understanding of fundamental issues by explaining how ecosystems are structured and how they support biodiversity; provides specific information and approaches for identifying areas most in need of protection; examines promising strategies that can help reduce biodiversity loss; and describes design considerations and methods for measuring success within an adaptive management framework. The book draws on experience and knowledge gained during a five-year project of The Nature Conservancy known as the Freshwater Initiative, which brought together a range of practitioners to create a learning laboratory for testing ideas, approaches, tools, strategies, and methods. For professionals involved with land or water management-including state and federal agency staff, scientists and researchers working with conservation organizations, students and faculty involved with freshwater issues or biodiversity conservation, and policymakers concerned with environmental issues-the book represents an important new source of information, ideas, and approaches.

Biodiversity observation systems are almost everywhere inadequate to meet local, national and international (treaty) obligations. As a result of alarmingly rapid declines in biodiversity in the modern era, there is a strong, worldwide desire to upgrade our monitoring systems, but little clarity on what is actually needed and how it can be assembled from the elements which are already present. This book intends to provide practical guidance to broadly-defined biodiversity observation networks at all scales, but predominantly the national scale and higher. This is a practical how-to book with substantial policy relevance. It will mostly be used by technical specialists with a responsibility for biodiversity monitoring to establish and refine their systems. It is written at a technical level, but one that is not discipline-bound: it should be intelligible to anyone in the broad field with a tertiary education.

This practical manual of freshwater ecology and conservation provides a state-of-the-art review of the approaches and techniques used to measure, monitor, and conserve freshwater ecosystems. It offers a single, comprehensive, and accessible synthesis of the vast amount of literature for freshwater ecology and conservation that is currently dispersed in manuals, toolkits, journals, handbooks, 'grey' literature, and websites. Successful conservation outcomes are ultimately built on a sound ecological framework in which every species must be assessed and understood at the individual, community, catchment and landscape level of interaction. For example, freshwater ecologists need to understand hydrochemical storages and fluxes, the physical systems influencing freshwaters at the catchment and landscape scale, and the spatial and temporal processes that maintain species assemblages and their dynamics. A thorough understanding of all these varied processes, and the techniques for studying them, is essential for the effective conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems.

This book describes the huge efforts by the Chinese Government concerning the restoration and future sustainable management of Chinese water systems. It presents the results of a Sino-European joint project concerning the Songhuajiang-Liaohe River Basin (SLRB) in Northeast China conducted by the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Germany, and the Natural Environment Research Council as represented by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), UK. The book explains in great detail the development of risk assessment and corresponding management methods for (i) controlling water pollution, (ii) assessing river health and ecological restoration options, (iii) characterizing persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and (iv) protecting fragile groundwater resources. It also describes the implemented demonstration sites of SLRB during the project course as well as lessons learnt on efficient project management and the dissemination of knowledge and technologies.

Using first-person stories and approachable scientific reviews, this volume explores how zoos conduct and support science around the world.

This book provides an understanding of the many biological and sociopolitical considerations involved in the conservation of biological resources. It is intended to provide practical advice on procedures that can be used by professional resource managers who work at local and regional levels.